Towers over the city (hall)

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Towers over the city (hall)
Lyonel Feininger , 1931
Oil on canvas
88.3 x 124 cm
Museum Ludwig , Cologne

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

Towers over the city (Halle) is a painting by Lyonel Feininger . It was commissioned by the city of Halle from 1929–1931 and is in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne .

The work

On this picture you can see a city view with the market church of Halle. However, the church seems strangely mirrored, partly doubled, overlaid in its geometric shapes like transparent or diaphanous , without any prominent details being shown.

Various squares, rectangles, triangles and free forms can be recognized. These result in spatial architecture stacked on one another, without showing real perspective in the sense of parallel perspective or central perspective . The view of Halle shows us in different colored areas. The direction of the towers is led vertically upwards and then connected by a horizontal line. In doing so, Feininger on the one hand does justice to the Gothic idea of ​​the “skyward-facing” church towers , on the other hand he creates a clear order in the picture structure.

An ascending spatial axis from the bottom left in the lower third of the picture is broken on the right edge by cubic house shapes, but catches the downward sloping church representation and creates a well-aligned balance in the composition.

Below the visible pencil marks of the picture, the corresponding colors were carefully applied, either with a spatula or with a brush, so that different fields of color stand out clearly. The large color fields of the picture seem to have been painted over several times with dry paint, so that the different colors are still recognizable and yet appear translucent like differently colored glass panes. An indication of this is provided by the statement by Georg Muche , an artist friend of Feininger, about Feininger's studio: "On the floor, leaning against the wall, there were many panes of glass of various sizes, one behind the other, upright and across." See also: "The broken glass image" ( Link to picture)

Different colors with different brightness and transparency , some shadow zones in the sky, sky blue at the top, result in a color design from the bottom dark to the top light. This creates a spatial impression. "The gradations and series of degrees from - physical - to - non - physical - the same color, from tangible impenetrability to luminous transparency, depth or distance are means by which Feininger achieves an effect".

Lyonel Feininger succeeds in painting “physicality up to transparency” with color from the lower to the upper part of the painting and thus to achieve a harmonious color effect. In Feininger's painting, architecture is represented by transparent to crystalline surfaces.

In 1930, Lyonel Feininger painted a kind of “forerunner” to towers over the city with his painting Segelpyramid (link to picture) .

In this picture the composition of our picture is already anticipated. Only the surface of the water slopes in the opposite direction of the houses in the comparison picture. The sails correspond to the towers of the church. The diaphanous zones of the sky are almost congruent. Likewise the crystalline shadow zones in the sky. You can even find the large square illuminated from within.

interpretation

The viewer sees a clearly recognizable cityscape whose structure and transparency appear poetic. That his paintings are not a painterly portrayal of nature becomes clear from a quote from Feininger: "Passionate longing for strict room design - without any painterly addiction ... In any case, I was never a nature lover."

“It was his goal to reach the stage of transfiguration in his pictures ... to strive for this goal with his own paintings, which he himself describes as devotional, deeply religious works”.

Just as the ships glide through the water, in our picture the nave glides through the sea of ​​houses. A reference to the artistic world of Lyonel Feininger can be inferred from the analogy of the two images. The largest geometric field hovers over the church and the sail pyramid, permeated by various bright colors and transparent crystalline structures - somehow mystical or metaphysical, perhaps with a religious effect in connection with a church.

Due to his contemporary, certainly new interpretation of Cubism, which he himself preferred to call "Primsma-ism", his Gothic churches also appear timelessly romantic, and also transparent-cubic to prismatic-crystalline. His pictures are an expression of a state of mind that is only revealed to the viewer through the crystalline-prismatic coating.

So Türme über der Stadt (Halle) is his commitment to expressionism and at the same time an expression of his longing for the mystical in art. Perhaps this cubic, glass city is connotatively religious to the Revelation of John 21 : 1–15 about the heavenly Jerusalem. The church is compositionally in motion and yet at the same time, timelessly captured in silence and calm, preserved in a crystal .

Happiness, peace and quiet are certainly feelings of Feininger, which he wanted to pass on to the viewer with this picture - his last in Halle, his most beautiful, his most remarkable picture of the Halle series and thus the end of his perhaps "most beautiful time".

Provenance

Before it was confiscated in 1937, the picture was in the possession of the Moritzburg Municipal Museum, Halle. Then it was shown and vilified at the 1st exhibition on "Degenerate Art" in Munich in 1937. From 1952 to 1976 the picture was owned by the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum as part of the Haubrich Collection and was transferred to the Museum Ludwig in 1976 . Feininger's eleven Halle paintings were officially sold through art dealers and distributed around the world.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Museum Ludwig (ed.): Handbook Museum Ludwig . tape 1 . Cologne 1979, p. 213 .
  2. ↑ a b Helmut Lobeck: From Lochner to the present . Bachem, Cologne 1959, p. 78-79 .
  3. ^ Roland March : Lyonel Feininger. From Gelmeroda to Manhattan . G-und-H-Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-931768-18-X , p. 145 .
  4. ^ Roland March : Lyonel Feininger. From Gelmeroda to Manhattan . G-und-H-Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-931768-18-X , p. 147 .
  5. ↑ Link to the picture on artdaily.cc, please note copyrights
  6. ^ Roland March : Lyonel Feininger. From Gelmeroda to Manhattan . G-und-H-Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-931768-18-X , p. 39 .
  7. ↑ Link to the picture in the picture index of art and architecture , please note copyrights
  8. ↑ Andreas Hüneke : Rootless in Manhattan? Observations on Feininger's late work . In: Yearbook of the Berlin museums . tape 53 . Berlin 2011, p. 65 f .
  9. ↑ Karin Plaschy: "Klarster Kristalliker" - Lyonel Feininger Pictures as an expression of a mystical world feeling . In: Georges Bloch yearbook of the KHI of the University of Zurich . tape 9-10 , no. 2002-2003 . Zurich, S. 284, 287 , doi : 10.5169 / seals-720151 .
  10. ↑ a b Imke Bösch: From mud to crystal. In: artechock art magazine. Retrieved November 6, 2018 .
  11. ^ Carla Schulz-Hoffmann : Art without quality, Lyonel Feininger and the romanticism . In: Roland March (Ed.): Lyonel Feininger. From Gelmeroda to Manhattan . G-und-H-Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-931768-18-X , p. 321 ff .
  12. ↑ The Revelation of John, Chapter 21. In: uibk.ac.at. University of Innsbruck, accessed on November 9, 2018 .
  13. ↑ Christian Eger: Lyonel Feininger: Everything is colored here. In: Mitteldeutsche Zeitung. December 9, 2008, accessed November 8, 2018 .
  14. ^ Andreas Hüneke: Lyonel Feininger: The hall pictures . Ed .: Wolfgang Büche. Prestel, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-7913-1155-7 , pp. 19th ff .
  15. ↑ Towers over the city (hall). In: Image index of art and architecture . Philipps University of Marburg, accessed on November 8, 2018 .