Xanti Alexander Schawinsy Biography
Alexander Victor Schawinsky (also known as Xanti Schawinsky) was born in 1904 in Basel to a Polish Jewish family. In 1924 Schawinsky enrolled at the Bauhaus, where he attended the mandatory preliminary course and studied the basics of form and color theory with László Moholy-Nagy and Wassily Kandinsky, learned analytical drawing with Paul Klee, and took architecture lessons with Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer. Soon after his arrival at the Bauhaus he became a member of Oskar Schlemmer's theater workshop, where he began to create his own dance-based sketches and pantomimes. At the Bauhaus, Schawinsky already began to develop "Spectodrama", an early version of the Total Theater. Alongside his studies, theater work and painting, the Bauhausler dedicated himself to his passion for music as a saxophonist in the Bauhaus band. In 1927 Schawinsky was appointed as a teacher of stage design. But in 1929 Xanti Schawinsky left the Bauhaus for a job as head of the graphics department at the municipal building department in Magdeburg, where he worked on projects for exhibitions, theaters and museums. Due to National Socialism's political and racial discrimination against Jews, he was forced to leave for Berlin and then flee through Switzerland to Italy. Until 1936 he worked as an advertising graphic designer for Studio Boggeri in Milan and as a freelance graphic designer for large companies such as Cinzano, Motta and Illy. His first solo exhibition is held at Galerie Il Milione.
Having left Italy for political reasons, he moved to the United States, at the call of Josef Albers to teach at Black Mountain College. Here he works as a professor of drawing and color theory and together with his students he creates multimedia productions that deal with space, movement, light, sound and color. During the 1940s and 1950s in New York, he worked for the first time with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer on the design of the Pennsylvania Pavilion for the 1939 World's Fair and in many other institutions, including New York City College and the New York University. In the 1960s he returned to Europe and worked on costumes and scenography for the Stadttheater in Basel. He died in Locarno in 1979.
