Lyonel Feininger Gallery

Small but serious gallery devoted to the Bauhaus painter who loved this town

The gallery occupies a modest space but uses it well, showing a rotating selection of Feininger's prints, drawings, and paintings alongside biographical material about his long relationship with the town. It is the kind of small specialist museum that justifies a visit precisely because you would not expect to find it here.

Feininger had to leave Germany in 1937 when the Nazis declared his work degenerate and removed it from German museums. He returned to the United States and spent his final years in New York. Coming to this gallery in the town that inspired some of his best work gives the trajectory of his life a particular poignancy. The prints especially repay close attention.

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A story
Feininger was born in New York in 1871 and spent much of his career in Germany, becoming one of the masters of the Bauhaus. He was a regular visitor to Quedlinburg from the 1920s, drawn by the angular geometry of the half-timbered town. His paintings of the church towers, lanes, and rooflines are some of the most distinctive images of Quedlinburg in existence — cubist-influenced, with shafts of light breaking across medieval facades.

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