'Die Architektur' (Architecture) — Bauhaus Modernism, Signed Woodcut
By Lyonel Feininger
Located in Myrtle Beach, SC
Lyonel Feininger, 'Die Architektur' (Architecture), also 'Stadtbild' (Cityscape), woodcut, edition – proofs only in 1920; 50 in 1921. Prasse W 232. Signed in pencil. A fine, richly-inked impression, on off-white Japan paper, with full margins (1 1/4 to 2 1/8 inches), in excellent condition. Matted to museum standards, unframed. Image size 6 x 8 7/8 inches (152 x 229 mm); sheet size 9 1/2 x 11 7/8 inches (241 x 302 mm). No. 11 of the portfolio 'Zwolf Holzschnitte von Lyonel Feininger', 1921. Provenance: Peter Deitsch collection; exhibited Weimar Museum, 1968. Impressions of this work are in the permanent collections of: the Busch-Reisinger Museum (Cambridge, Mass.), Bauhaus-Archiv (Germany), Hamburger Kunsthalie (Germany), Pfaizische Landesgewerbeanstalt (Germany), Kaiser Wilhelm Museum (Germany), Staatliche Graphische Sammlung (Germany), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. ABOUT THE ARTIST Lyonel Feininger was born in New York City into a musical family—his father was a violinist and composer, his mother was a singer and pianist. He studied violin with his father, and by the age of 12, he was performing in public, but he also drew incessantly, most notably the steamboats and sailing ships on the Hudson and East Rivers, and the landscape around Sharon, Conn., where he spent time on a farm owned by a family friend. At the age of 16 he left New York to study music and art in Germany, from where his parents emigrated. Drawn more to the visual arts, he attended schools in Hamburg, Berlin, and Paris from 1887 to 1892. After completing his studies, Feininger began his artistic career as a cartoonist and illustrator, his originality leading him to great success. In 1906, after working for a dozen years in Germany, he was offered a job as a cartoonist at the Chicago Tribune, the largest circulation newspaper in the Midwest. He worked there for a year, inventing what became the standard design for the comic strip: in the words of John Carlin, “an overall pattern. . . that allowed the page to be read both as a series of elements one after the other, like language and as a group of juxtaposed images, like visual art.” His originality did not end there: he went on to become one of the great abstract painters. Like Kandinsky, music was his model, but Kandinsky only knew music from the outside—as a listener (inspired initially by Wagner, then by Schoenberg)—while Feininger knew it from the inside. He lived in Paris from 1906 to 1908, during which time he met and was influenced by the work of progressive painters Robert Delaunay and Jules Pascin, as well as that of Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh. He began painting full-time, developing his distinctive Iyrical style based on Cubist and Expressionist idioms and a concern for the emotive qualities of light and color. He exhibited with the Der Blaue Reiter group in 1913, and in 1917, he had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin. One year after his solo exhibition, in 1918, Feininger began making woodcuts. He became enamored with the medium, producing an impressive 117 in his first year of exploring the printmaking medium. In 1919 at the invitation of the architect Walter Gropius, he was appointed the first master at the newly formed Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar. His woodcut of a cathedral...
1920s Bauhaus Landscape Prints
Woodcut
