Feininger's early Bauhaus years, which began with his arrival in Dessau on July 30, 1926, were pivotal. The year 1927 marked a gradual but fundamental shift in his interpretation of form away from the purely static and he began to see color as unified expression. "His colors came to act together as forces creating what we called sonority (Klang) in the same way that his forms act as forces or rythyms". It was also in 1927 that he met Alfred H. Barr, Jr., whom he was to described as "a young American academic intensely interested in my work." (Hess, p. 113-115)

One paintng unique in Feininger's work dates from that year
(1927) - Broken Glass. This picture stands quite by itself
not only in Feininger's work but in modern art. In its
combination of real and unreal, substantial and insubstantial,
order and accident, it is a synthesis of all the opposites with
which Feininger's knowledge of the world was concerned. It is an epitome and an epitaph. It is one of the great moments and monuments of our century. Feininger once had said of himself, "Spatial Cubism will need one martyr." We might say, this is his monument. (Hess, op.cit. p. 114).