Lyonel Feininger and the Harvard Art Museums. Part 1

Alright, let’s get started. I have a couple of questions to get us going and to learn a little bit about the Busch-Reisinger Museum from you, Lynette. What is your focus here? How does the Feininger collection fit into it?

Lynette Roth: “The Busch-Reisinger Museum is unique in the United States because it focuses on the art of German-speaking countries and especially on Germany. It was founded in 1903 as the Germanic Museum and I often think about Feininger’s relationship to the museum: He's a German American artist, who spends pretty much his entire career until he no longer can in Germany and is often only considered in that context. But for me it's that transnational relationship that is the whole reason for the existence of the museum. And because we are a teaching and research institution, we're the ideal place for this kind of archive, and it really is the Feininger archive.”

So, you have students come here to do research?

Lynette Roth: “Oh, yeah. So, we see this (gestures around) in many ways as the heart of the museum. When we opened this building in 2014, the idea was to give a lot of space to what we call the art study room to make the collection accessible for teaching and research, we hold a lot of classes here constantly.”

Laura Muir: “Harvard faculty, as well as other local universities and colleges bring their students here all the time. And it's not just art history students, there are students across disciplines from economics to sociology and more. It's important for us that our collections are seen as a tool for students across the university. There's only a very small fraction of our collection on view in the public galleries, about 2%, but we have vast collections in storage that are only accessible through this space. It's a place where you can take a closer look at art works without glazing in front of them, a kind of slow looking that we really value here at the museums. We also do public programs; we call them arts study center seminars. There was one this morning where they were looking at the backs of paintings at all the stickers and labels that one can use to trace the history of a work of art. I pulled this out (opens a book and starts to flip through pages until she finds an old black and white photograph): This is in the Adolphus Bush Hall, which was one of the earlier homes of the Busch-Reisinger Museum.”

Lynette Roth: “It's a fascinating space because it was built for the then Germanic Museum and still houses our plaster cast collection. The museum actually started as a museum for reproductions rather than original works of art. It was sort of a teaching laboratory: If you couldn't go to Germany to see the originals like cathedrals and churches you could see architectural elements of them in form of plaster casts right here in Cambridge. This picture shows how far back the relationship with the Feiningers goes and how what we do today is already in our DNA.”

Feininger visited Harvard and the Busch-Reisinger Museum regularly starting in the early 1950s when his son T. Lux worked at Harvard and his former colleague Walter Gropius taught at the university.

Laura Muir: “As Lynette was saying, the early collection was all reproductions. It was around 1930 when the Busch-Reisinger Museum started collecting originals. Feininger’s work was some of the earliest original works to be collected by the museum. This picture was taken in the 1950s, it's a photograph by Feininger and shows his wife Julia and the curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum at the time, Charles Kuhn. There are some Bauhaus related objects on the table but also the earliest acquisitions of Lyonel Feininger: illustrations from a ghost story, which unfortunately are at our Somerville site right now, but that beautiful seascape over there the “Freight Steamer” from 1932 (points to one of the watercolors propped up against the outer wall of the study space) was acquired in Berlin by Charles Kuhn as maybe the first original art work of our Feininger collection.”

Lynette Roth: “Charles Kuhn was going to Germany in 1934 and buying works by artists who were already considered degenerated art - they didn't necessarily use the term specifically at the time, but that was the path things were already on in Germany for a while. The entire history of the museum is connected to the history of Germany, the transnational relationship between Germany and the United States, how the cultural and political events affected art and artists alike. I always say this art collection doesn't exist without thinking through those historical events and what happened, not just exiles and emigres after the war, but already before the war. For example, what motivated the focus on modern art the beginning in 1930? That was a very important shift for the museum as well and Feininger is there through it all, well Feininger’s work.”

Laura Muir: “The Feininger family knew early on that Harvard and this curator, Charles Kuhn, were establishing a collection focused on German art. So, when Feininger had to return to the US and he miraculously was able to bring so much of his work back to the United States with him, they were really looking for a place where this could live and where students could learn from it. At the same time Gropius was arriving in the US and connected to Harvard which then started the whole Bauhaus initiative in the US. So, it really made sense to the Feininger family, to Lyonel and after he died to Julia, and especially to their sons to continue to make gifts and really create this research center focused on his work.”