Why doesn’t Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956) loom larger when we think about twentieth-century painting in Germany? Innovators such as Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee immediately come to mind and, with a little reflection, so do many other dedicated modernists—Franz Marc, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Alexej von Jawlensky, among the more obvious names. Then, if we concentrate a little, we begin to consider artists such as Georg Grosz and Otto Dix, angry expressionists whose modernism manifested itself less in terms of radical formal language than discomfiting subject matter and kinky realism, but who were nonetheless allied with the progressives. Feininger’s name seems to come as an afterthought. It can’t be because he was born in the United States; Kandinsky, Klee, and Jawlensky were also born outside of Germany.

Perhaps Feininger’s failure to appear as a central figure in our mental capsule history of German avant garde art is because we think of him in terms of his American years, a period exemplified by serene landscapes and city views conjured up with loose associations of sharp lines and subtle tonal shifts. But the time Feininger spent in the United States was but a very small fraction of his life as an artist. Born to German and German-American parents—both musicians—and raised in New York until the age of sixteen, he moved