Village Street

Lyonel FeiningerWW-1927-108473

1927·Oil on canvas·80.6 × 101 cm (31 3/4 × 39 3/4 in.)

<p>Lyonel Feininger—a cartoonist-turned-Expressionist painter—was the first instructor Walter Gropius hired to teach at the famed Bauhaus, a German art and design school that operated from 1919 to 1933. Buildings served as an apt visual metaphor for both the Bauhaus’s aesthetic and its goals of dissolving boundaries and uniting “everything in one structure.” Feininger was recognized as the leading exponent of this ideal, and he turned his attention to the architectural landscape during his time at the school. In <em>Village Street</em>, overlapping planes of transparent, crystalline shapes form a simultaneously hard-edged and ethereal vision of modern urban life.</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1927
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 80.6 × 101 cm (31 3/4 × 39 3/4 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Lyonel Feininger

Artist

Lyonel Feininger

Painting

Lyonel Charles Adrian Feininger was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He also worked as a caricaturist and comic strip artist. He was born and grew up in New York City. In 1887 he traveled to Europe and studied art in Hamburg, Berlin and Paris. He started his career as a cartoonist in 1894 and met with much success in this area. He also worked as a commercial caricaturist for 20 years. At the age of 36, he began to work as a fine artist. 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. Furthermore he produced a large body of photographic works and created several piano compositions and fugues for organ.

Germany and New York, NY, USA

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