Xanti (Alexander) Schawinsky Lot n° 640

Xanti (Alexander) Schawinsky Danse Macabre: A Sociological Study 1938 3 Vintages, gelatin silver prints. 11.8 x 18.5 cm. 12 x 19.2 cm. 11,7 x 18 cm. The first and second prints signed and numbered in pencil on the reverse, the second print additionally inscribed in ballpoint pen, the third print in ink. Provenance Estate of Xanti Schawinsky; private collection, Switzerland Literature Raphael Gygax/Heike Munder (eds.), Xanti Schawinsky. Exhibition cat. Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Zurich 2015, pp. 68 and 82 with illus. In 1938, Schawinsky produced "Danse Macabre. A Sociological Study" to the stage of Black Mountain College. The text read during the performance was based on the "Dies Irae" hymn of a medieval Latin mass for the dead (after Thomas of Celano). During the performance, the audience, themselves wrapped in dark cloaks, sat in a circle around the manege-like stage. The music for the somber play was by John Evarts. Here, too, Schawinsky drew heavily on the ideas of the Bauhaus stage, eliminating all narrative by abstracting the action. "For Schawinsky, this inclusion of people and spaces, which went beyond the framework of conventional theatre - for example, by positioning some of the participants outside the actual stage space - resulted quite logically from the Bauhaus stage's interest in the circus and in exploring the socially determined construction of subjectivity in a historical context." (quoted in Eva Diàz, Bauhaus Theater at Black Mountain College, in: Gygax/Munder, op. cit., p. 73) Introduction "From Bauhaus to Black Mountain College - Photographs from a Swiss Private Collection" see Lot 631.