Lyonel Feininger, painter, printmaker, cartoonist, illustrator and teacher, was born in New York City on 17 July 1871. His father, Karl, was a violinist and composer, and his mother, Elizabeth, was a pianist and singer.

In 1887, Feininger sailed to Hamburg to study music but decided instead to study art at the Kunstgewerbeschule. The following year he was in Berlin where he studied at the Academy. Further studies were in Paris at Atelier Colarossi. Feininger produced his first prints in 1906 and the following year he gave up cartooning and illustrating to focus all his energy toward painting. In 1910, Feininger produced eight lithographs and sixteen etchings and drypoints.

At the invitation of Franz Marc, Feininger exhibited with the Blue Rider group at the First German Autumn Salon held in Berlin in 1913. This same year he met Herwarth Walden and artists of the Sturm group. In 1914, Feininger held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin.

Between 1919 and 1924, Feininger taught painting and graphic arts at the Bauhaus in Weimar where he became artistic director in the Printing Shop. The first year, he produced seventy-six woodcuts. He exhibited with Marc Chagall in 1924 at the Graphisches Kabinett J. B. Neumann in Munich and helped to form the Blue Four with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexei von Jawlensky.

In honor of Feininger’s sixtieth birthday, a retrospective exhibition of his work was mounted at the National Gallery, Berlin in 1931. Five years later he was invited to teach summer courses at Mills College in Oakland, California. The summer of 1937 he returned to Mills to teach and by then had decided to leave Germany and move to New York City. The following year he executed mural commissions for the Marine Transport Building and Masterpieces of Art Building, New York World’s Fair, 1939. In 1944, Feininger and Marsden Hartley had a large exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Feininger taught the summer session at Black Mountain College, North Carolina in 1945. He was elected President of the Federation of American Painters and Sculptors in 1947. An exhibition of the work of Feininger and Jacques Villon was mounted in 1949 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. A retrospective exhibition of his work at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1951 resulted in his executing a commission for the Print Club of Cleveland. Feininger produced the lithograph, Off the Coast, Stone 3 for the Print Club. In 1955, Feininger was elected member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Lyonel Feininger died in his native city on 13 January 1956.