FEININGER

Feiningers self portrait - 1915

This Sunday I went to the Folkwang museum in Essen. I'm a  bit embarrased to say we live 3 blocks from the museum, but had yet to venture through its collections. The building was on the RIBA's 2011 Sterling Prize Shortlist and is a great space. The courtyard modular organization manipulates both site and light well (I took a few pictures, which I posted here.).

Gelmeroda IX - 1926

While I was walking through the exibit I came across a few  paintings by cubist Lyonel Feininger. I fell in love with the above and went home to google him. I learned about his ties to the Bauhaus and several expressionist movements going on in Germany during the first third of the century. Although he was born and died in NYC, he studied and taught (under Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus) in Germany until the break out of WWII. In an effort by the Nazi Party to censor abstraction, Feininger's paintings were determined to be 'Entartete Kunst' or degenerate. 

Jesuits III - 1915                                    Lady in Mauve - 1922

I love the way his paintings manipulate space, light and shape. Turning images into geometric relationships makes me think about the dynamics of dimension and the unseen influence of spacial organization on our sight. All his paintings, landscape and portrait, are very architectural and mechanistic. I could get lost in these.

Zirchow vii - 1918