Lyonel Feininger

This painting’s compositional harmony and absence of ornamentation reflect the artist’s principles of design and his ongoing search for spiritual content in art. Over the course of several decades, Lyonel Feininger explored the motif of a church at Gelmeroda, a village near Weimar, Germany, which he had first visited in 1906. As he wrote to a friend about the region, “There are some church steeples in God-forsaken villages which belong among the most mystical achievements of so-called civilized man that I know.” That sentiment is rendered in Church at Gelmeroda XII, which presents the austere medieval structure as an elegant construction of parallel and diagonal lines emerging from an atmosphere of prismatic colors.

–Maureen O’Brien, curator of painting and sculpture