The Gate

The Gate is Lyonel Feininger's image of a monumental medieval gate in the German Baltic Sea town of Ribnitz (today called Ribnitz-Damgarten), which the artist frequently visited. Feininger incorporated faceted, tilted planes into his depiction of the massive architectural structure, which towers over clusters of small gabled buildings, trees, and diminutive pedestrians. At the upper right, the sun, with its halo of emanating rays, blazes in the sky in contrast to the dark areas, rendered with dense cross-hatching, of the shadowed planes of house roofs and the arched recesses of the gateway and the bridge. The busily worked surface of the print is a complex of deliberately jagged lines and steep angles that energize the richly aged surfaces of the medieval structures with a dynamic energy informed by Feininger's immersion in new abstract art styles, and a touch of gothic whimsy redolent of German folk tales.

In the years just prior to World War I, Feininger used his art to embrace a nostalgic fantasy of the old-world Germany of his ancestry. Ignoring the industrialization and militarization taking place around him, he elevated the remnants of medieval buildings and streetscapes to iconic status in such works as The Gate and his woodcut Gelmeroda (TF 1996.7). Until the outbreak of war, when a scarcity of copper plates induced Feininger to turn to woodcut printmaking, he made many such etchings in which the naturally angular lines and rough burr of the medium aptly convey the irregular edges and time-roughened surfaces of his architectural subjects.

Feininger's style, however, was influenced by the then-revolutionary artistic mode known as cubism, in which forms are rendered as arrangements of their component planes and angles: the houses clustered to the right of the massive gate, for example, are flattened and distorted, the sharp angles of their rooflines exaggerated to underscore their stereotypically medieval character. The Gate was published in the 1919 edition of Die Schaffenden (The Creators), and important periodical portfolio of work by modernist artists published in post-World War I Germany.

Collection Cameo companion piece, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, June 2000.

Manifest Destiny, Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois and Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizers). Venue: Loyola University Museum of Art, May 17–August 10, 2008. [exh. cat.]

Prasse, Leona E. Lyonel Feininger: A Definitive Catalogue of His Graphic Work: Etchings, Lithographs, Woodcuts. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art; Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1972. No. E-52, pp. 84–85.

The Gloria and Donald B. Marron Collection of American Prints. (exh. cat., Santa Barbara Museum of Art). Santa Barbara, California: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1981. No. 74, pp. 110–12.

Jacobowitz, Ellen S. and George H. Marcus. American Graphics, 1869–1949: Selected from the Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1982. No. 60, pp. 63–64.

Griffiths, Carey, Frances and Antony. The Print in Germany 1880–1933, The Age of Expressionism. London: British Museum Publications Limited, 1984. Cat. 194, p. 201.

Heller, Reinhold. Lyonel Feininger: Awareness, Recollection, and Nostalgia. (exh. cat., David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art). Chicago, Illinois: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 1992. Text p. 11; fig. 2, p. 8 (Granvil and Marcia Specks Collection).

Brownlee, Peter John. Manifest Destiny / Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape. (exh. cat., Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, Illinois). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for American Art and Loyola University Museum of Art, 2008. Text p. 35 (checklist).