Yellow Street II

Lyonel Feininger left New York for Germany at the age of sixteen to study music, but soon realized that art instead was his professional calling. It was only after he had established a distinguished career as a caricaturist, printmaker and painter did he return to the United States in 1937. His formative years included stays in Belgium and France, and he remained in Germany throughout World War I. Although Feininger’s art in general did not explicitly reference the world conflict, the presence here of the Belgian flag may allude to the effort of the Allies – now including his native America – entering the German occupied Belgium in August 1917. From a formal perspective, Yellow Street demonstrates the profound impact Cubism had on the artist’s style, although Feininger assimilated its faceted surface into his distinctive rhythmic idiom, which he described as “Prismism.”