Village Street

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.