Feininger’s Functional Elegance

When I first walked into the “Andreas Feininger: New York” exhibition at the Alan Klotz Gallery, my initial reaction was, “This man came to America to make love to New York with his camera.” Of course, Feininger (1906–1999) arrived here in 1939, a fugitive from the war in Europe, and so he saw New York as a city of refuge. But he also saw it with the eyes of a trained architect. Unlike the contemporaneous photographers referred to collectively as the New York School, Feininger rarely shot the people of the city. But few have taken pictures that make its skyline and buildings and impressive infrastructure look so glorious.“42nd Street, NY as viewed from Weehawken, NJ” (1946) is a classic Feininger image. Why would someone cross the Hudson River to photograph a street that runs through the heart of Midtown Manhattan? Feininger did so in order to be able to use one of the super telephoto lenses of which he was a master and that he sometimes custom built. A telephoto lens compresses spatial planes so that structures that are actually quite far apart seem jumbled up on top of each other and appear as flat as layers of a collage. As a result, the skyscrapers that give Midtown its distinctive profile take on a greater density: Dramatically backlit here, they look like serried rows of building blocks in delicately varied shades of gray.Shooting from New Jersey let Feininger include a rank of docked boats in the foreground of his picture, a reminder that New York was still a major seaport in 1946, and that the waterfront extended north from the Battery almost to Riverside Park. And throughout the image are rising clouds of steam and smoke, backlit like the buildings, but ephemeral in contrast to their solidity. At this period, steam and smoke were emblems of progress, energy, and dynamism, not carcinogenic hazards to be guarded against. The picture as a whole is a triumph of Feininger’s considerable technical skills and his appreciation of the built environment.Andreas Feininger was an American, the son of Lyonel Feininger, a distinguished cubist and expressionist painter who spent much of his career in Europe. Andreas was born in Paris, but grew up mostly in Germany, and studied architecture at the Bauhaus, where his father taught. There he absorbed its aesthetic of Die Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity; it embraced technology and industrialism, and valued clear-eyed realism over romantic haze, and utilitarian straight lines over fussy ornamentation. The rise of Hitlerian anti-Semitism prompted his move to France, where he worked for Le Corbusier, the futuristic architect. When it became impossible for foreigners to work as architects in France, he followed his friend (later wife) Wysse Hägg back to her native Sweden. When Sweden also disallowed foreign architects, he took up photography, which he had studied and practiced in Germany.Scandinavia House is currently displaying “Andreas Feininger: Stockholm 1933-39,” an exhibition based on a book of his photographs Bonnier published in the 1930s. The striking pictures show his studied use of light to bring his images to life, his fastidious choice of angles to make even simple subjects interesting, and his insistence on clarity. The book’s controversial modernity was praised and condemned at the time, but “Stockholm” is now recognized as in important turning point in 20th-century Swedish photography.With German troops on the move across Europe, Feininger came for the first time to live in America. He was a celebrated Life magazine photographer between 1943 and 1962, specializing in articles, many on scientific subjects, which required great technical sophistication. He wrote on photography for magazines and in many books, besides publishing books of his own photographs, most of them studies of cities or of nature. In 1991, he was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Center of Photography. But the pictures at the Klotz Gallery record the thrill of his first arrival, when New York was still a new world for him.Several, such as “Queen Elizabeth and Chrysler Building in New York Harbor” (1958), are variations of the themes of the “42nd Street” image. Here the telephoto lens is more selective, so the enormous Queen Elizabeth takes up the bottom third of the image. The ocean liner is the only structure in direct sunlight, and its white decks stand out against a skyline in shadow. The special properties of the telephoto lens bring the Chrysler Building from distant Lexington Avenue into close propinquity with the traffic on the river.Ships figure in many of Feininger’s pictures, both from New York and Stockholm. In those days, sleek ocean liners were the major means of intercontinental transportation, and I expect Feininger admired their advanced engineering. Besides, their hydrodynamic shapes followed the dictates of Bauhaus design: simple, functional, elegant.“New York City, (54th St. Tavern sign in foreground)” (1948) contrasts two of the modern skyscrapers of Rockefeller Center with the older four-story buildings on Sixth Avenue. (A coal truck is making a delivery to one.) The sides of the skyscrapers we see are in shadow, but the whole image is animated by the glaring reflection of the sun off the windows halfway up the tallest. It is typical of Feininger to have had the patience to wait for that precise moment. “George Washington Bridge” (1950) is a study in geometry — parabolas, triangles, rectangles — and like the pictures of bridges at Scandinavia House, sees sensuous beauty in bold engineering.Andreas Feininger wrote in “Total Photography” that, “A technically perfect photograph can be the world’s most boring picture.” But not if he took it.wmeyers@nysun.com“Andreas Feininger: New York” at the Alan Klotz Gallery through November 3 (511 W. 25th St., suite 701, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-741-4764);“Andreas Feininger: Stockholm 1933–39” at Scandinavia House through November 7 (58 Park Ave., between 37th and 38th streets, 212-879-9779).

Feininger’s Functional Elegance

Feininger’s Functional Elegance

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