Caricature, comics, engraving, drawing, painting, and photography... : Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956) explored multiple genres with equal talent and an irrepressible sense of freedom. Born in New York to a family of German musicians, the artist arrived in Hamburg with his parents at the age of 16. He then studied at the fine arts schools of Berlin, Liège, and Paris, achieving his first successes as a caricaturist and comic artist for German and American newspapers. An eternal nomad and a lover of the sea, he painted it tirelessly—from the Baltic in Pomerania to the English Channel. Influenced by the European avant-gardes with which he came into contact - Cubism and Fauvism in Paris, Expressionism in Germany, etc. - Lyonel Feininger especially worked with Walter Gropius in Weimar during the founding of the Bauhaus - whose manifesto he illustrated with an engraving - and directed the school's graphics workshop, before distancing himself. This lonely outsider with a romantic spirit, who translated the political and social upheavals of his time into his paintings, was declared a ‘degenerate’ artist by the Nazis. Returning to the United States fifty years after leaving, he documented New York in a series devoted to its skyscrapers.

Eternal exile
Following in the footsteps of this artist who is strangely unknown in France, where he lived and worked with passion - Lyonel Feininger was a regular visitor to the Dôme in Paris - this documentary explores his abundant work between two worlds, America and Europe, which also nourished him. With insights from art historians, his biographer and his grandson, himself an artist, this is a portrait of an endearingly poetic creator, an eternal exile who never stopped reinventing himself.