Galerie Gregor Staiger is pleased to present the second exhibition of works by the Swiss artist Alexander “Xanti” Schawinsky (born 1904 in Basel, died 1979 in Locarno). Alexander “Xanti” Schawinsky was born to a Jewish family of Polish descent in Basel in 1904. He was part of the first generation of artists to study at the Bauhaus, where he enrolled in 1924. His teachers and later friends included important artists such as Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. His main contributions there were in the theater department together with Oskar Schlemmer; he wrote plays, created sets and costumes, and performed. The exhibition shows a small selection of Schawinsky’s early works from the 1920s to the 1940s. Between 1933 and 1936, Schawinsky lived in Milan, where he worked as a commercial artist for the legendary Studio Boggeri in addition to his own artistic work.
Marked by the spirit of the Bauhaus, where the artist studied in the 1920s, and of the Black Mountain College (USA), where he taught in the latter half of the 1930s, Schawinsky’s work is characterised by its multidisciplinary nature: theatre, scenography, photography, graphic design, painting and typography are among the fields the artist explored during a career spanning six decades. Formally diverse and guided by constant experimentation, Schawinsky’s work bears close and varied connections with main movements of pre- and post-war modernism in the United States and Europe—the continent the artist left to escape Nazism and fascism in 1936, and where he returned to in the 1960s. His practice is emblematic of the transatlantic artistic exchanges sparked by the Second World War that left a lasting impression on art history, of which Schawinsky was a key player.
In 1924, at the age of twenty, Xanti Schawinsky began his studies at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus was a multidisciplinary school that is now considered one of the main hubs of architecture, visual arts, theatre and design in the twentieth century and one of the birthplaces of modern art and the avant-garde movements. Among Schawinsky’s teachers were painter Paul Klee (1879–1940), architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969) and painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946). At the Bauhaus, which moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, Schawinsky was mainly involved in the theatre workshop led by Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943). It was at this time that Schawinsky began to work on his concept of ‘Spectodrama’—a forerunner of total theatre—and it was not long before he also brought his experiments to the stage. The broad themes that would be present in his future work could already be seen here in an embryonic form, namely the elaboration
of dramatic spaces and a concern with the relationship between man and machine. Parallel to his studies, his stage experimentations and his paintings, Schawinsky devoted part of his time to his passion for music, playing the saxophone in the Bauhaus orchestra. In 1926, he worked for one season as a set designer at the municipal theatre in Zwickau (Germany). Upon his return to the Bauhaus in 1927, he gave courses based on the practical experience he had gained there.
After attacks by the National Socialist press began in 1931 and a wave of political arrests ensued, Schawinsky fled Germany in 1933. He went first to Switzerland, where he worked in Zurich and Ascona, before continuing to Milan later that year. There, he made a living mainly as a graphic designer. With his innovative, Bauhaus-influenced approach to typography and photography, Schawinsky contributed to the renewal of visual advertising in Italy. During this period, he also created several typefaces, some of which have since been digitised (for example, under the name Xanti32)1. Numerous commissions for Studio Boggeri—for brands such as Cinzano, Motta, Sanpellegrino and Olivetti—brought him recognition and commercial success. During the same period, he also created a small group of works that can be read in the spirit of Bauhaus but also of Pittura Metafisica. However, as the Italian fascists moved closer to Nazi Germany, he was also forced to flee Milan in 1936. His friend Anni and Josef Albers invited him to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where the ideas of the emigrated European modernists were further developed.
In 1938, Schawinsky left North Carolina for New York to work as a graphic designer and painting teacher at New York University and City College. A year later, he became an American citizen. In early 1940s New York, Schawinsky was confronted with the war, both directly and indirectly. As a designer, he created camouflage patterns for the U.S. Air Force, but the war also influenced his artistic production. His best-known series of works from this period, exhibited in the United States and abroad in the 1940s and 1950s, is likely Faces of War (1942). Combining watercolour and drawing, these works on paper bear titles evoking various military ranks and functions (The Admiral, The General, The Soldieretc.).Theydepictfacescomposedofweaponsandmilitaryequipment,setagainst backgrounds with colour gradients reminiscent of Schawinsky’s advertising designs and abstract, camouflage-like patterns. These brightly coloured and unsettling machine-men convey a deeply ambivalent vision of war and are a direct response to contemporaneous political events, which is rare in Schawinsky’s work.
—Raphael Gygax
at Galerie Gregor Staiger, Milano
until April 6, 2025