"One of the world's most prolific photographers, Feininger was a pioneer both visually and technically. Born in Paris, son of the painter Lyonel Feininger, Andreas was educated in German public schools and at the Weimar Bauhaus. His interest in photography developed while he was studying architecture, and he worked as both architect and photographer in Germany for four years, until political circumstances made it impossible. He moved to Paris, where he worked in Le Corbusier's studio, and then to Stockholm. There he established his own photographic firm specializing in architectural and industrial photography. With the outbreak of war in 1939, Feininger moved to New York, where he was a freelance photographer for the Black Star Agency and then for the U.S. Office of War Information. After working on a retainer basis, he was a staff photographer at LIFE from 1943 to 1962, and there established his reputation. He subsequently concentrated on his personal work, exhibiting and publishing extensively. Feininger was renowned as a teacher via his publications that combine practical experience with clarity of presentation.

Feininger's purpose in photography was documentation of the unity of natural things, their interdependence, and their similarity to constructed forms. His images emphasize design, deploying the principles of simplicity, clarity, and organization. In addition to natural forms, Feininger's subject matter included the city, machines, and sculpture. He built four customized telephoto lenses and three close-up cameras, which allowed him to represent landscapes and city scenes in a distortion-free monumental perspective, and to show small subjects in startling sizes, thereby revealing unknown aspects. He preferred black-and-white photography for the graphic control it allowed. Feininger received numerous awards."

By Lisa Soccio, International Center of Photography, New York

"T. Lux Feininger was born in Berlin and spent his early years in Germany. He studied art at the Bauhaus School in Berlin under, among others, László Moholy Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer, yet he was unable to study photography there because it was not taught until 1929. Feininger learned it nevertheless, and in 1927 he went to work for the Berlin photo agency DEPHOT. Two years later he participated in the groundbreaking Film und Foto Stuttgart 1929 exhibition.  

Feininger began to paint in the early 1930s; after three years of living in Paris, he relocated to New York in 1937, leaving behind the majority of his negatives, which he never recovered. He did not make photographs again until after World War II and then only for his own use and enjoyment. After 1953 Feininger stopped making photographs altogether. He turned his full energies to painting and teaching, first in New York and later in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He retired from teaching in 1975, but he continues to paint and exhibit his work."

By J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

"When he first began experimenting with photography, the painter and graphic artist Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) was 58 years old and had been a professor at the Bauhaus for almost a decade. Inspired by the works of his sons, Lux and Andreas, as well as the experimental photography of his Dessau neighbor László Moholy-Nagy, Feininger took up the camera in 1928 and began to explore a variety of avant-garde techniques. The painter of crystalline architecture and landscapes left a legacy of fascinating nighttime photographs, double exposures, negative prints, and unsettling images of shop window mannequins and reflections."

By Laura Muir, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA