Word: lyonel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...viewer just as later Abstract Expressionist pieces "click"; unlike abstract images, however, the presence of a clearly portrayed object confounds any attempt on the museum goer's part to detect feelings of abstract communication or inspiration. Pieces such as Max Beckmann's hollow-eyed Self-Portrait and Lyonel Feiniger's playfully interpretable Hairdresser's Dummy with Mr. and Mrs. Feiniger have the modern emphasis on form which mark their contemporaries in architecture and design, but their stubborn focus on people as objects indicates a less artistic goal-politics...
...subtle tribute to an artist not to show off his greatest works, as if to say that real achievement can do without the fanfare. This might seem the guiding principle in the Busch Reisinger's new Lyonel Feininger exhibit were it not for the museum's more purposed scholarly approach. It has long been Harvard's goal to fill a niche by holding obscure but high quality shows, often groundbreaking in their approach, and surprising in their content...
...this instance, the subject is Lyonel Feininger, a world famous and influential painter most closely associated with the Weimar Bauhaus--but you won't see any of his most important works from that period or even many of his paintings. Instead you will see cartoons, newspaper clippings and pamphlet covers dating from before, during and after his rise to prominence...
Could one construct an American epic in such terms? Johnson clearly hoped to do so -- with a little help, evidently, from the work of Stuart Davis and Lyonel Feininger as well; several of his images of black Southern life from the early '40s have a wonderful amplitude and strictness of construction that hold their vivid colors together with a sort of consuming, sad energy. They are the blues, in paint. Everything seems right about the pattern of Sowing (circa 1940): the fierce orange and yellow stripes, the eccentric placement and displacement of shape, the not quite naive use of repetition...