Lyonel Charles Adrian Feininger (July 17, 1871 – January 13, 1956) was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism.

His work, characterized above all by prismatically broken, overlapping forms in translucent colors, with many references to architecture and the sea, made him one of the most important artists of classical modernism.

He continued his studies at art schools in Berlin with Adolf Schlabitz, and in Paris with sculptor Filippo Colarossi.

He recruited Feininger to illustrate two comic strips "The Kin-der-Kids" and "Wee Willie Winkie's World" for the Chicago Tribune.

Later, Art Spiegelman wrote in The New York Times Book Review, that Feininger's comics have "achieved a breathtaking formal grace unsurpassed in the history of the medium.

[7] When Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Germany in 1919, Feininger was his first faculty appointment, and became the master artist in charge of the printmaking workshop.

He continued to create paintings and drawings of Benz for the rest of his life, even after returning to live in the United States.

Among the students who attended his workshops were Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack (German/Australian (1893–1965), Hans Friedrich Grohs (German 1892 – 1981), and Margarete Koehler-Bittkow (German/American, 1898–1964).

He gave some prints away to his colleagues Walter Gropius and Alfred H. Barr Jr.[7] Feininger also had intermittent activity as a pianist and composer, with several piano compositions and fugues for organ extant.

In tandem with the Whitney retrospective, the American Symphony Orchestra under Leon Botstein, at Carnegie Hall on 21 October 2011, performed three orchestral fugues written by Feininger.

Barbara Haskell, curator of the Whitney exhibit, wrote that for his entire life, Feininger credited Bach with having been his "master in painting.

[17] In Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) the narrator finds a print of Feininger's "Church of the Minorites" hanging in the office that used to be his in his earlier life as Phaedrus.