Feininger – passionate lover of simplicity and victim of an avalanche of stupidity

 

---

Churches are powerful symbols of the Christian world, whether small village churches or huge cathedrals. Lyonel Feininger concentrated on the small, but beautiful churches that punctuate Thuringia’s landscape. We have just celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of this inspirational artist’s death on the 13th January.

He made thousands of sketches of the Thuringian landscape. He obviously loved the place. Nobody would spend so much time and effort on something they did not love. Many people put less work into their relationships with their spouses as he did into his adopted homeland. Feininger joined the Bauhaus school in 1919, one of the most influential artistic movements of the twentieth century. Later, together with Kandinsky, Klee and Jawlensky in 1924 he formed the group of artists “Die Blaue Vier”, a group of passionate artists that were striving to redefine art as leading lights within the Modernist movement.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, he closed down the Bauhaus school. Feininger returned to the town of his birth, New York. Feininger was of German parentage and continued to yearn for the Thuringian countryside that he loved, as he continued to paint and sketch examples of the “green heart of Germany’s” beauty.

Even the most extreme nationalists must have realised that he loved Germany. The problem that Feininger had to face and, quite rightly fled from, was not the fake national pride of the National Socialists, but their stupidity. The New York of the time was, however, open to new ideas and theories in art and literature - a vibrant place, full of life and excitement about the future.

There is a great danger, 50 years after Feininger’s death that stupidity will take over the world and try to smother the free exchange of ideas – in an avalanche of Pseudo-Christianity. Feininger identifies the power of simplicity that can be found in a little village church despite spending a large proportion of his life surrounded by the huge buildings of New York.. Many people still hope today that the meek shall inherit the earth.