Initially a musician, the German-American Lyonel Feininger (New York 1871– New York 1956) achieved fame as a cartoonist and press illustrator in the USA and Germany in the early twentieth century, then became a highly-regarded painter and printmaker associated with the cubist and expressionist avant-gardes. He taught at the Bauhaus from its creation in Weimar in 1919. Feininger lived in Germany for 50 years before being labelled a degenerate artist by the Nazis in 1933, and ending his days in New York. Although he is a major figure in twentieth-century modern art and has been the subject of many retrospectives all over the world, he remains little-known in France, absent from national public collections except for those of the Centre Georges Pompidou.
 
Thanks to the generosity of a devoted art-lover who has amassed one of the largest collections of Feininger's work in existence, MuMa now has the opportunity to invite visitors to discover this unique body of work. The collection naturally reflects the collector's tastes. There is a deliberate focus on Feininger's graphic art and the dazzling series of woodcuts he produced in just over two years at the Bauhaus. Although the collection spans almost the whole of Feininger's career (covering the years between 1907 and 1949), this personal slant means that the exhibition is not a true retrospective, but an invitation to make the acquaintance of Lyonel Feininger's attractive, lyrical oeuvre and step inside his highly individual world.