1919

Bridge V

Lyonel Feininger

American (active Germany), 1871 - 1956

Bridge V depicts an old stone construction spanning the Ilm River in Oberweimar, a suburb of the German city of Weimar. In this most crystalline version of a seven-year series of pictures on the same motif, the bridge’s gently sloped span turns into a dynamic compositional wedge, while the water, stone, and sky dissolve into planes of scintillating color. The architecture of historic German townscapes was a point of focus for Lyonel Feininger from 1907, when he took up painting. An encounter with Cubist painting in Paris in 1911 inspired him to marry this subject matter with a dynamic, prismatic, and increasingly abstract style. In 1919, the year of Bridge V, Feininger took a teaching position at the Bauhaus, an innovative design academy then located in Weimar that unified the disciplines of art and craft under the aegis of building and architecture.