Fiene initiated his pursuit of a career in art with study of the works of the early German masters and Chinese painting in the museums of his homeland. In 1912, after serving in the German army, he came to the United States, and began working for the decorator, Paul Arndt. His formal training began at the Academy school where he studied with Leon Kroll and George Maynard from 1914 to 1918); he also attended the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, New York, 1916-18, and the Art Students League, 1924-25.
As early as 1919 Fiene had a small showing of his work at the MacDowell Club, but his first major show was in 1924 at the Whitney Studio Club. Later that year, the proceeds from a very successful exhibit at the New Gallery, New York, enabled him to build a house in Woodstock, New York, and turn concentrated attention to landscape painting. During the 1920s Fiene knew and painted with Pop O'Hare, Jules Pascin, Yasuo Kunioshi, Emil Ganso and Berhardt Crystal, who ran the Washington Irving Gallery in New York.
In 1928 he went to Paris where he worked in Pascin's studio in Montmartre, studied at the Acad‚mie de la Grande Chaumiere. At this time he became especially interested in the work of the French painters, Georges Braque and Andr‚ Derain; he also spent some time in Brittany. Fiene went to Florence in 1932, studying fresco painting, and the work of the Italian primitives. From the time of his return from this trip in 1933, he made his home in Southbury, Connecticut.
Fiene's subject interests were broad, as was his command of media. In the 1930s the theme of his paintings was often old buildings in the process of being demolished, and it was one of these, Razing of the Old New York Post Office, which secured him an honorable mention award in the 1939 Carnegie Institute International exhibition. In the later 1930s he executed a number of murals under the federal arts projects of the period:
Paul Revere as an Industrialist, Canton, Massachusetts, post office, 1937; Placer Mining, Fighting Forest Fires, and Winter Round-Up, United Stated Department of the Interior Building, Washington, D. C., 1938; History of the Needle Trades, Central High School of Needle Trades, New York, 1940; and work in the Abraham Lincoln High School, Brooklyn, New York. In a one-man show at the Associated American Artists, New York, in 1943, he showed snow scenes, rural scenes from Connecticut and the Pennsylvania Dutch country, and street scenes from Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. In 1950 at Knoedler Galleries, New York, he exhibited a series on a wreck at Turbot's Creek, Maine, painted that year. The following year, again at Knoedler's, he exhibited watercolors of fishing scenes in Jamaica. His 1959 exhibition at Midtown Gallery, New York, featured paintings of urban subjects done in a geometric and coldly angular style. At the time of his death, he was in Paris completing a suite of lithographs.
Fiene taught at the Colorado Springs (Colorado) Fine Arts Center in 1935; in New York at the Cooper Union, 1938-39, and at the Art Students League, 1939-42 and 1948-65); at the Ogonquit School of Painting and Sculpture (1950-51) and with the Famous Artists School of Westport, Connecticut. He was part of the greatly expanded faculty of the Academy school, when it was revitalized by the opening of its present building in 1959, teaching there that year, and again appointed to the faculty in 1965, the year of his death.
Fiene was otherwise active with the Academy, having served on its Council as corresponding secretary, 1955-59; his service as first vice president to which he was elected in 1965, was also cut short by his death.
He received the Academy's Palmer Prize for portraiture in the annual exhibition of 1961. A film of Fiene at work painting The Passing Scene was produced by Rembrandt Films, Inc.
