Woodcuts by Lyonel Feininger

        My parents have had this woodcut by Lyonel Feininger hanging in their living room since they were hip young newlyweds.  As a child I never liked it much, but as I got older I found that it grew on me.  From disliking the harsh lines and the abstractions that weren't, in my opinion, pretty, I've come to enjoy Feininger's angles and lighting.

        Feininger was born in New York in 1871, but moved to Berlin when he was 16.  He started his artistic career as a caricaturist and cartoonist before he turned to fine art.  He associated with the Expressionist art movements Die Brücke, and Blaue Reiter, and for a while taught printmaking at the Bauhaus, with its emphasis on modernism, craftsmanship, and art for the masses.  Feininger moved back to the US after his work was labelled "Degenerate" by the Nazis in 1936.  (Plus, his wife was partly Jewish.)  He died in 1956.

  

        You can see lots of elements of expressionism and modernism in his work, and aspects of Cubism.  But, perhaps unexpectedly, you can also see his love of Gothic architecture.  The woodcuts of Feininger's that I like best are those with the architecture, and those with sailing ships, which he clearly also loved.  Some of his woodcuts remind me of patchwork quilts in the way that the image is built up out of geometric shapes added together like blocks.

        I'm very grateful to my parents for exposing me to some first class original art as a child - even if I didn't appreciate all of it at the time.  (But I'm afraid I still can't stand their engraving by Ensor!)

        

[Pictures: Village Church, woodcut by Feininger, 1931;

Ships at Harbor, woodcut by Feininger, 1937 (MoMA collection);
Lighthouse, woodcut by Feininger, 1918 (published 1941) (MoMA collection);

Gelmeroda Village and Church, woodcut by Feininger, 1920;

Church, woodcut by Feininger, 1918 (MoMA collection).]

(Thanks to the MoMA Collection web site, with tons of great images.)