Architecture as Memory

In the summer of 1928 Lyonel Feininger made his first drawings of the ruins of a local church in the German village of Hoff. Through a series of happenstance episodes these Gothic ruins grew to haunt the artist’s entire body of work: across various media (pencil, watercolor, ink, oil), across space (in person from the Baltic coast, and later in New York from memory), and time (the motif spans three crucial decades of the artist’s career). While everything else in Feininger’s life was sent into a chaotic flurry – the banning of his works by the Weimar government, shutdown of the Bauhaus, forced exile from Germany – the visual motif of the ruins of Hoff remained a dependable constant. In the meantime, the image of the abandoned church took on polyphonic layers of meaning, an avenue for the artist to reflect on his own sense of belonging to the German culture, on the evolving definition of what that culture meant amid the rise of nationalistic sentiments, and on its ramifications for the private life of his family. This essay attempts to reconstruct those layers of meaning through first-hand encounters with the artist’s letters from the archive, his drawings, and reminiscences of his wife and son

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · German · Literature · Visual arts · Wife · History · Law · Literature and Cultural Memory · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory · Architecture

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