The American painter and illustrator Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) was one of the leading artists of the German Bauhaus.

Lyonel Feininger was born on July 17, 1871, in New York, the son of German musicians who had emigrated to the United States. In 1887 he went to Germany to study music, but he decided on the visual arts and attended the Hamburg School of Arts and Crafts and the Berlin Academy of Arts until 1891. He then went to Paris and studied at the Académie Colarossi until 1893.

Feininger showed an outspoken talent for caricature and became a contributor to the German humorous periodicals Ulk and Fliegende Blätter in Berlin, where he lived from 1894 to 1906. He then returned to Paris and produced drawings for the Chicago Sunday Tribune and the Parisian paper Le Témoin. His caricatures, which were capricious and fantastic, had much in common with Paul Klee's...