Description:
abstracted row of houses in brownish red, orange, brick and yellow with two figures in street and one in doorway; architecture; town
Label Text:
Lionel Feininger's career was divided between the United States, where he was born, and Europe, where he received his artistic training and later taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Feininger fled Nazism in 1937, returning to New York, his place of birth. Feininger was fascinated with the Gothic architecture of towns in northern Germany. This painting and others show the façade of the brick Gothic buildings of Lüneburg.
"War-weary and exhausted, he felt stimulated by the architectural array...by the rhythmical partitioning of beautiful façades on old gabled houses...For days he went around taking in and trying to hold, in sketches, what impressed him so deeply." Julia Feininger
Feininger uses light, color and abstract form to translate the stone architecture into something ethereal. The walls, light-filled planes of color, extend skyward and gradually dissolve. The doors and windows, some translucent and others shadowed, overlap and move out of alignment as if floating free from architectural function. Feininger described his stylistic use of these delicate, overlapping planes of color as "prism-ism" for their resemblance to the light reflecting and refracting properties of glass prisms.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1985.20 |
