Lyonel Feininger
American, active Germany, 1871–1956
Village Street
INV-8258
Lyonel Feininger
American, active Germany, 1871–19561927/29
Village Street
Lyonel Feininger American, active Germany, 1871–1956 →paintingmodern and contemporary art
Date
1927/29
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
80.6 × 101 cm (31 3/4 × 39 3/4 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sigmund Kunstadter
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 Village Street, overlapping planes of transparent, crystalline shapes form a simultaneously hard-edged and ethereal vision of modern urban life.
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