Lucia Moholy Lot n° 635

Lucia Moholy Feminine repetition 1925 Vintage, gelatin silver print. 14.8 x 21.3 cm. Signed in ink on the reverse, with owner's stamp, dated and titled in ballpoint pen by Xanti Schawinsky, and variously inscribed in ink and pencil by another hand. - Print discoloured at upper left and with traces of use. Mounted under passepartout. Provenance Estate of Xanti Schawinsky; private collection, Switzerland Exhibitions Salzburg 2006 (Museum der Moderne), Kunst auf der Bühne - Art on Stage. Les grands spectacles II Literature Emilie Bertonati (ed.), Das experimentelle Photo in Deutschland, 1918-1940, Munich 1978, p. 5 and p. 16 with illus. (this print); Dirk Scheper, Oskar Schlemmer. Das Triadische Ballett und die Bauhausbühne, Berlin 1988, p.126 with ill. (this print); Raphael Gygax (ed.), Xanti Schawinsky, Ausst.kat. Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Zurich 2015, p. 32 with ill. (cut-out variant). "Feminine Repetition" was the title of a play that Xanti Schawinsky worked on in 1925 as a student and later assistant to Oskar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus stage. While the play itself, a balletic pantomime, was never completed, Schawinsky was able to present excerpts of the production as a sketch-like stage improvisation titled "Tap Eccentricity" on March 20, 1926, at the Bauhaus carnival ball "Das weiße Fest." Schawinsky himself appeared in his piece as a tap dancer in tailcoat and top hat - competing with a larger-than-life "tap machine" (on the right in the picture) built by him and invisibly moved by Hermann Röseler as a symbol of the machine age. Other performers were Vladas Svipas as the "gentleman" in a summer suit, Ellen Hauschild as the wooed "lady" and, as the drummer, Werner Isaacsohn (Jackson), who accompanied the modern American jazz music played live from a gramophone. (cf. Dirk Scheper, op. cit., p. 126). The recording by Lucia Moholy presented here underlines the experimental as well as humorous character of the stage play, which contains elements of cabaret, dance revue and improvisational theatre and combines these with formal elements of Bauhaus theatre, represented by the figure of the "tap machine". At the same time, the rhythmic double exposure lends the shot something staccato-like, in keeping with the theme of tap dance. Introduction "From Bauhaus to Black Mountain College - Photographs from a Swiss Private Collection" see Lot 631