Julia Feininger

Julia Feininger (née Lilienfeld; November 23, 1880 – August 7, 1970) was a German-American artist and art patron. While an art student, she met her husband Lyonel Feininger and influenced him to start an independent art career, with the two starting a creative partnership, before she reduced her output while raising her children. She was involved in the Bauhaus alongside her husband, creating several ceramics and puppets.

With the rise of the Nazi regime, the Jewish Feininger fled alongside her husband to the United States, where she worked as an essayist and exhibition organizer. Following her husband's death in 1956, she worked to preserve his legacy.

Biography Julia Lilienfeld was born on November 23, 1880 in Berlin, In October 1908, they moved to Germany, where magazines Das Schnauferl and Sporthumor published drawings she made; their home was located in Zehlendorf, Berlin. She also had two pencil portraits from her husband, dated to 1913.

In 1919, her husband became the first master at the Bauhaus, At the Bauhaus stage workshop, Feininger created puppets, with her work including seven puppets for a 1925 production of Märchen aus dem Morgenland, though the play was never performed. In 1927, Feininger herself became an American citizen.

Due to Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Feininger suffered persecution as a Jew, and her husband were forced to emigrate from Nazi Germany on June 11, 1937. They traveled to New York on the ocean liner SS Manhattan. Before their escape, the Feiningers entrusted (a friend from their time in Dessau ) with a large portion of Lyonel's paintings. Julia helped move the paintings from their storage in Moritzburg to Quedlinburg on 21 October 1935, allowing them to survive the Nazi regime's denunciation of Feininger's works as "degenerate art".

In January 1938, the Feininger couple moved to an apartment at 235 East 22nd Street in Manhattan's Gramercy Park, where she lived for more than thirty years. and helped Leona E. Prasse finish her 1972 catalogue Lyonel Feininger: A Definitive Catalogue of His Graphic Work.

Following her husband's death in 1956, she served as custodian of his estate, In July 1963, two Paul Klee paintings she owned went missing en route from a Denver Art Museum exhibition. By 1969, she was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Feininger died on August 7, 1970, age 89, after a long illness at Syosset Hospital. She was buried with her husband in Mount Hope Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

Feininger has a few surviving works hosted in places such as the Bauhaus Museum Weimar, as well as private collections. and her puppets became part of the newly designed permanent exhibition of the Bauhaus Museum Weimar.