Andreas Feininger miscellaneous acquisitions collection

Andreas Feininger was born on December 27, 1906 in Paris, France to German mother Julia Berg and American father Lyonel Feininger. The Feininger family moved to Berlin in 1908 and later Weimar in 1919, where Feininger apprenticed as a cabinetmaker at the Bauhaus from 1922 to 1925. Feininger studied architecture at Staatliche Bauschule Weimar and then at Anhaltische Bauschule in Zerbst, Germany, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1928. While studying architecture, Feininger developed an interest in photography, installing a darkroom to experiment in in his family’s cellar in 1927. Feininger worked as an architect in Dessau and Hamburg from 1929 to 1931; he also practiced his photography during those years, selling his first photographs through the Dephot agency to German newspapers and magazines. Feininger moved to Paris in 1931 to work as an architect for Le Corbusier, but lost his work permit soon after and moved to Stockholm in 1933. Feininger married Gertrud Hägg in 1934 and they welcomed their first son, Tomas, in 1935.

Due to political interferences at the time, the family immigrated to the United States in 1939, where they settled in New York. Feininger worked as a freelance photographer for Black Star agency in 1940 and 1941, and then worked for a short time at the United States Office of War Information from 1941 to 1942; Feininger was offered a full-time photographer position with Life magazine in 1943, where he worked until 1962. He had his first one-man exhibition called The Anatomy of Nature at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1957, continuously featured in one-man and group exhibitions throughout his career and beyond. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Feininger traveled both nationally and internationally to compile photographs for multiple publications, including the books Man and Stone and Trees.

During his lifetime, Feininger produced over fifty books, wrote columns for Popular Photography and Modern Photography, and completed 346 assignments for Life. Feininger had a number of exhibitions throughout the United States and Germany and won several awards, including the Robert Leavitt Award from the American Society of Media Photographers in 1966 and the Infinity Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Center of Photography in 1991. Feininger retired due to health issues in 1988, and died at the age of 92 in New York City in February 1999.