Xanti Schawinsky

In his own lifetime, Swiss artist Xanti Schawinsky was best known for the theatrical work he developed at the Bauhaus. During his Bauhaus years Schawinsky made albums of collaged photographs and papers, personal as well as artistic. Xanti Schawinsky: The Album is based on the albums Schawinsky conceived during his tenure in the Bauhaus theater department, working documents which provide clues to his later work at Black Mountain College and beyond. This volume presents a wealth of previously unpublished photographs and documents from this formative stage in Schawinsky’s development, offering the first opportunity to explore this material in a format reproducing that of the original album. Xanti Schawinsky: The Album is published in a limited edition of 1,000 copies in collaboration with the artist’s estate.
Though perhaps best known for his Bauhaus work, Xanti (Alexander) Schawinsky (1904–79) had a long and varied career after he fled Germany before the beginning of the Second World War. Leaving the Bauhaus when it closed in 1933, Schawinsky landed at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. It was there that Schawinsky developed his theory of the "Spectodrama," producing proto-"happenings" exploring phenomena such as space, motion, light, sound and color from scientific and performance-based perspectives. Yet protracted legal disputes over the artist’s estate meant that Schawinsky’s pioneering work was until recently almost inaccessible.

The oeuvre of Bauhaus artist Alexander "Xanti" Schawinsky (1904–79) encompasses a range of social and political investigations. Schawinsky spent a lifetime relocating—from Switzerland to Germany to Italy to the United States—and in the process developed his central themes, which include the responsibility of the individual and the repercussions of machine warfare. His Bauhaus training is manifested in his work's complex interpretation of the interrelationship between art, craft and design, and his practice traversed avant-garde theater, experimental photography, the Bauhaus jazz band, mechanical music and dance, and graphic design. This publication focuses on Schawinsky's work on paper from the 1940s, particularly the Head Drawings and Faces of War. Schawinsky's 1940s series reveal the existential struggle of an artist informed by Bauhaus idealism coping with the devastation of war.

In his lifetime, "Xanti" (Alexander) Schawinsky (1904-79) was best known for his work in the theater department at the Bauhaus. Fleeing Germany before the beginning of the Second World War, he landed at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where in the 1930s he developed his theory of the "Spectodrama." Involving multimedia productions examining elementary phenomena such as space, motion, light, sound or color from scientific, technical and performance-based perspectives, the Spectodrama represents an early form of the "happening." Beyond the avant-garde utopias of the Bauhaus and his proto-happening art, Schawinsky also worked as a painter and graphic designer.
Protracted legal disputes over the artist's estate meant that Schawinsky's work was until recently almost inaccessible; Xanti Schawinsky is the first survey of Schawinsky's extraordinarily prolific output over the course of five decades, and a long-overdue resource on the work of this key figure.