Born in New York to a German father and an American mother, in 1871, Lyonel Feininger was 16 when he went to Germany to study art. After a short period in Hamburg, he settled in Berlin, where he began creating his distinctively architectural and colorful work. Feininger was a key figure of German Expressionism and the Bauhaus; Walter Gropius appointed him the Bauhaus school’s first Master and he was also the head of its print workshop. In 1937, when the Third Reich declared avant-garde art to be “degenerate,” Feininger returned to the U.S. This retrospective showcases 160 of his works, including drawings, paintings, caricatures, watercolors, woodcuts, and recently discovered photographs. “While it is often serious, constructed, and monumental at first glance,” explains Dr. Ingrid Pfeiffer, the exhibition’s curator, “it is also an oeuvre full of surprises, profound melancholy, and playful lightness.” —Jeanne Malle