Village Street

Modern Art

1927/29

Lyonel Feininger
American, active Germany, 1871–1956

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.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Modern Art

Artist: Lyonel Feininger
Title: Village Street
Place: United States (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1927–1929
Medium: Oil on canvas
Inscriptions: Signed, u.r.: "Feininger"
Dimensions: 80.6 × 101 cm (31 3/4 × 39 3/4 in.)
Credit Line: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sigmund Kunstadter
Reference Number: 1955.27
Copyright: © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Museum of Modern Art, Lyonel Feininger-Marsden Hartley (New York, 1944), p. 46.
Katharine Kuh, Art Has Many Faces: The Nature of Art Presented Visually, (New York, 1951) pp. n.p. (index), 59 (ill.) plate 94.
Hans Hess, Lyonel Feininger (New York: n.d. [1961]), p. 277 (ill.), fig. 312.
Art Institute of Chicago, Paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago: A Catalogue of the Picture Collection (Chicago, 1961), pp. 161, 381 (ill.).
“The Beauty of America in Great American Art,” Country Beautiful 4 (1965), pp. 102–3 (ill.).
John Maxon, The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, 1970), pp. 271 (ill.), 280.
Marjorie Elliott Bevlin, Design Through Discovery, (New York, 1980)

Berlin, National Galerie, Lyonel Feininger, September 19, 1931–January 1932, cat. no. 92.
New York, Buchholz Gallery and Willard Gallery, Lyonel Feininger, March 11-29, 1941, n.p., no. 16.
Detroit, Institute of Arts, Lyonel Feininger, July-August 1941, n.p., no. 16.
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Lyonel Feininger–Marsden Hartley, October 25, 1944–January 11, 1945, p. 46.
New York, Curt Valentin Gallery, Lyonel Feininger, March 18-April 12, 1952, n.p., (ill.) no. 10.
Tokyo, ASAHI Shimbun, Masterworks of Modern Art from The Art Institute of Chicago, pp. 37, 120–21 (ill.) no. 36; traveled to Nagaoka, Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, April 20, 1994–May 29, 1995; Nagoya, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, June 10–July 24, 1994: Yokohama Museum of Art, August 6 1994–September 25, 1994.

Buchholz Gallery, New York, by 1944 [New York 1944]. Curt Valentin Gallery, New York, by December 29,1954 [correspondence in curatorial file]. Sold to Mr. and Mrs. Sigmund Kunstadter, Chicago. Given by them to the Art Institute, March 18, 1955.

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