1871 -1956 · New York, Berlin, Weimar and Bauhaus

Churches, towers, villages and ships become architectures of light built by crystalline planes at Lyonel Feininger.

Lyonel Feininger was born in New York in 1871 into a family of musicians. Sent to Germany at sixteen to study music, he finally chose the visual arts and trained in Hamburg, Berlin and Paris. In the 1890s, he became a highly sought-after press cartoonist and published caricatures and comics in Germany, France and the United States. From 1908, he devoted himself fully to painting. The discovery of Cubism in Paris in 1911 allowed him to invent a personal construction made of transparent plans, oblique lines and light. The villages of Thuringia, the churches of Gelmeroda, the streets, the towers and the sea remained recognizable while appearing carved from glass. Gelmeroda IV transforms the building into a spiritual elevation; The Red Tower II opposes verticality and urban movement. In 1919, Walter Gropius appointed Feininger to the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he directed the printing workshop. His Cathedral engraving adorns the school's first manifesto and symbolizes the unity of the arts. He produced more than four hundred prints and also practiced watercolor, photography and music. He produced more than four hundred prints and also practiced watercolor, photography and music. Persecuted by the Nazi regime, which classified his work among "degenerate art", he returned to the United States in 1937. He died in New York in 1956, leaving a unique synthesis of Cubism, Expressionism and Bauhaus. The selection "Lyonel Feininger" puts particularly opposite Gelmeroda IV and Halle Cathedral. Its reading favors color.

Feininger does not break down architecture to destroy it: he reconstructs it in light, like a fugue made of plans and rhythms.