Xanti (Alexander) Schawinsky Lot n° 639

Xanti (Alexander) Schawinsky Spectodrama: Play, Life, Illusion (Part I, scene 9) 1936 Vintage, gelatin silver print. 11,7 x 16,8 cm. Signed in pencil on the reverse. Provenance Estate of Xanti Schawinsky; private collection, Switzerland Literature Xanti Schawinsky. Spectodrama, exhibition cat. Gallery Carla Sozzani, Milan 1997, o.p. with ill. (detail) As a Bauhaus artist with Jewish-Polish roots, Schawinsky faced hostility even before the National Socialists took power. In 1933, he emigrated to Italy, where he worked as a freelance commercial artist. Through the mediation of Josef Albers, Schawinsky came to Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1936, where he took over the drawing and theater class and realized his first stage project together with his students in the same year: the multi-part "Spectodrama: Play, Life, Illusion". By making the basic elements of theatre - form, colour, sound, language, music, time, space and illusion - the subject matter, Schawinsky drew a connection to his earlier work at the Bauhaus stage. The "Spectodrama" consisted of a didactically structured sequence of episodes. The play of the elements "form" and "colour" can be seen here: the three basic geometric forms circle, triangle and square, each in the form of white surfaces, carried by actors hidden behind them, interact on the stage space with a rotating spectral colour disc. John Evarts accompanied the pantomimic action musically with a piano improvisation (cf. Andi Schoon, Die Ordnung der Klänge. The Interplay of the Arts from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College, Wetzlar 2005, p. 126ff.). Introduction "From Bauhaus to Black Mountain College - Photographs from a Swiss Private Collection" see Lot 631