Word: germanic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...controversy, Feininger's nationality, which raged, momentarily, in the early 1930s when Feininger was living in Germany. Curators had a hard time classifying Feininger because though he moved to Germany when he was 16, he was born and raised in New York. Since he came to prominence as a German, he never really lost that identity. But when Museum of Modern Art curator Alfred Barr included Feininger in a 1929-30 exhibit on American artists, he ran into "outspoken hostility...
Those familiar with Feininger evidently were not so familiar with him to know he really was American. They protested his place next to Hopper, O'Keeffe, John Marin and others. Adding Feininger to an exhibit of German artists a short time later only threatened to make matters worse. Norris has tried to clarify, if not resolve, the misunderstanding by simply calling Feininger an American abroad and framing Feininger's productive years as a German phase...
...question of national identity is still complicated because Feininger's German sojourn lasted a half century and his work appears distinctly German. His most influential pieces used the color pallette of postwar German Expressionism and his rigid, distorted figures anticipated Franz Marc, Ernst Nolde--and even Italian Futurism in some respects...
...Feininger's progress and reputation had grown so much that he was invited to design the cover on the Bauhaus Proclamation, the famous design school's mission statement. Evident already in Feininger's work are the crystalline figures he later would manipulate into his most renowned paintings: renditions of German churches and town halls...
...transition to woodcuts marks an important period in both Feininger's work and German post-war works in general The process of chiseling and cutting figures in wood lent itself to Feininger's Cubist-inspired "transformation and crystallization" methods. Fragmenting and recomposing his choppy images was perfectly suited to the carving knife...