The Cohesion of Crystalline Patchwork

Humans are captivated by patterns. We delight in figuring out how things work and fit together in harmony. In the early 20th century, many artists became fascinated with creating unique patterns that would make the viewer pause to understand the composition’s cohesion or lack thereof. These artists became less entranced by the naturalism, symbolism, and meaning behind an artwork—as was typical before their time—and more by the rhythm, color, and shape of the composition. When the painter Lyonel Feininger created, he commented, “there is no foreground or background, only a continuity of interlacing relationships.” His theory behind painting can clearly be seen in his repeated paintings of a German church named Gelmeroda, as well as in the works of Cubist, Impressionist, and Precisionist painters.

All of the shown artists in this exhibit patch together shapes and colors to create a specific ambience for the viewer. The exhibit demonstrates different artists’ renditions of structures and landscapes, based not on their reflection of how they optically observe the subject matter, but their optical rendition of its composition, calling the viewer to revaluate their assumptions of a church, a mountain, a factory, a skyscraper, and a fireplace.

Lyonel Feininger, Gelmeroda, VIII, 1921

Oil on Linen,Whitney Museum of Modern Art, 53.38a-b

On the outskirts of Weimar, there is a small Gothic church that captivated the artist Lyonel Feininger when he first visited in 1906. Since then, he painted and drew the Gelmeroda church for at least 3 decades, experimenting and modifying the crystalline qualities of light and form in his work. In this piece, he seems more interested in the shapes that connect the church to the background than the actual church itself. The geometric figures on the bottom of the painting add to the overall prism ethereality of the scene. Feininger unifies the painting by layering and overlapping rectangles.

Lyonel Feininger, Gelmeroda, 1936

Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 42.158

In 1936, Feininger still painted the Gelmeroda church in Weimar, Germany. In this rendition of the structure, he shifts from rectangles to triangles. He plays more with the transformation of light and angles to create even further cohesion between the subject and the background than in his previous renditions. This stain-glass-like oil painting seems to emanate the light that Feininger depicts. The harmony in this painting is even more complex than before, for the overlapping shapes echo each other throughout the piece—the viewer can perceive more shapes as they look almost “through” the translucent-like-quality of the painting and see that all the shapes converge towards the church, creating a transcendent effect.

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves, 1902-1906,

Oil on Canvas, Private Collection, Venturi 799

Just like Feinginger returned to Gelmeroda, Cézanne kept returning to this mountain motif. One of the last paintings he did of Mont Sainte-Victoire, this Cézanne is one of the most abstract. The shape of the composition still gives the landscape dimensionality; however, the colors are much more blended between the mountain and the sky, between the trees and the fields. In this way, his layering creates a more intense patchwork than usual, making the divisions less clear between the different aspects of the subject.

Charles Demuth, My Egypt, 1927

Oil, fabricated chalk, pencil on composition board, Whitney Museum of American Art, 31.172

Charles Demuth was one of the leading Precisionist painters in America. But instead of having this painting be purely rational and practical, he fragments the space, much like Feininger did with his church paintings. With clearly defined beams of light and shadows in intersecting diagonals, Demuth creates rigidity that either could be linking American industry to Egyptian glory, or reminding America of the dehumanization of pragmatism. Either way, Feininger might have known of this composition of overlapping shapes and diagonals when he was painting and repainting his Gelmeroda motif—noticing the power of unity in geometric composition.

Georgia O’Keeffe, City Night, 1926

Oil on canvas, Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, 80.28

 

Beginning as a Precisionist painter, Georgia O’Keeffe painted these skyscrapers to show the industrialization of America. Her simplified forms create a geometric effect, and the glowing orb below, perhaps the moon, seems to glow, just like the steeple in Gelmeroda by Feininger. The composition, while more concrete than the other works, still has a sense of shapes overlapping to form a new perspective on an everyday sight. While it is heavier and more opaque then Feininger’s Gelmeroda paintings, this work conveys a distinction between light and dark with its geometric composition.

Pablo Picasso, Man at the Fireplace, 1916

Picasso Museum, Modern Art painting collection

Around this time, Picasso and a few of his artist friends started to create works along the line of synthetic Cubism, where they would literally paste together different materials to suggest a real object. His juxtaposition of shapes echoes the patchwork of Cézanne’s Mont-Victoire. And his overlapping colors are similar to Gelmeroda. By using different shapes and textures and overlapping them in seemingly chaotic and disorganized ways, Picasso puts together, not a literal puzzle for the viewer, but a challenge to make them see something familiar in a very skewed way. This work suggests a man before a fireplace, but at first glance, one presumes it cannot be anything more than a hodge-podge of overlapping shapes.