T. Lux Feininger Lot n° 631

T. Lux Feininger Masks (Bauhaus Dessau) Around 1927 Vintage, gelatin silver print. 23.3 x 17.4 cm. Photographer's, agency, and owner's stamps on the reverse, and inscribed by Xanti Schawinsky in pencil and ballpoint. - Mounted under passepartout. Provenance Estate of Xanti Schawinsky; private collection, Switzerland. "When I was admitted to the stage workshop after completing the first semester, the preliminary course, I was the happiest of all students. [...] My special fondness was for making masks, and, after executing some collectively planned designs, I proceeded to give form to my own creations." (T. Lux Feininger, The Bauhaus and I (1947), unpublished manuscript, see www.kunst-archive.net/de/wvz/t_lux_feininger/texts) Feininger's fascination with the art of mask carving, particularly in the tradition of Japanese No masks, is expressed in this photograph, in which he helps two masks in frontal and profile view to achieve a gloomy, mysterious liveliness by means of a light bulb placed behind them. From Bauhaus to Black Mountain College - Photographs from a Swiss Private Collection The photographs of the Bauhaus artists Xanti Schawinsky, Umbo (Otto Umbehr), Lucia Moholy, T. Lux Feininger and Josef Albers (lots 631-644) offered for sale in the following come from a Swiss private collection. The consignor acquired them at the beginning of the 1980s from the estate of Xanti Schawinsky, whom he had the pleasure of knowing himself. A Swiss artist with Jewish-Polish roots who studied at the Bauhaus, then worked as a graphic artist in Germany and Italy before moving to the USA in 1936, Schawinsky had been commuting between the USA and Europe since the 1960s. In Oggebbio, on the Italian side of Lake Maggiore, the busy artist had built himself a studio house in the 1960s, where he spent his time organizing his work, documenting his time at the Bauhaus, writing his memoirs, and preparing exhibitions - including his last exhibition in 1979 at the Galleria Flaviana in Locarno, during the preparation of which he and the consignor met. The encounter with Xanti Schawinsky, the ideal embodiment of the universal artist in the Bauhaus sense, made a lasting impression on our collector, himself an artist and photographer, and led to further intensive study of Schawinsky's work. In addition, a friendly relationship developed between the collector and the artist and his family, which was to last beyond Schawinsky's death in 1980. As a consulting intermediary between Galleria Flaviana and the estate, consisting of Schawinsky's first wife Irene, their son Ben, and his second wife Gisela, he was able to gain insight into the artist's extensive and diverse oeuvre while viewing the work in New York, Sheffield/Massachusetts, and Oggebbio. Since photography did not yet play a role in the art market at this time, little attention was paid to it. Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of this, the artist's photographic oeuvre from the twenties to the forties, which at that time had hardly been discovered let alone researched, exerted a special fascination on the young collector. Xanti Schawinsky was, as Eckhard Neumann describes it, the prototype of the "Ur-Bauhäusler": "An artistic personality who realized the universal in his œurvre, as the Bauhaus aspired to as a conceptual approach. A creative temperament that, with a spontaneous gesture of enthusiasm, with idealism and dynamism, consistently left behind all retrospective views of the past and, with a youthfully stormy eagerness, turned exclusively to the new, to man, to the New Society, to the New Art with its manifold, untested, as well as speculative forms of expression and media. [...] Photography became for him a tool of both free and applied design. However, Schawinsky did not make a distinction between these two areas; he uses photography as an experimental extension of his technical and creative means of expression, for instance in the sense of John Heartfield: 'I paint with photo.'" (quoted from Eckhard Neumann, Introduction, in: Eckhard Neumann/Ronald Schmid (eds.), Xanti Schawinsky. Foto, Bern 1989, p. 7) It would not have corresponded to Schawinsky's artistic self-image to commit himself to a single medium, but photography nevertheless played a key role in his work, and he repeatedly resorted to it. While his primary interest was in photography during his time at the Bauhaus and at Black Mountain College in