Lot 631 N

“When I was admitted to the stage workshop after completing the first semester, the preliminary course, I was the happiest of all the students [...] I was particularly fond of making masks, and, after carrying out collectively planned designs, I moved to giving shape to my own creations.” (T. Lux Feininger, Das Bauhaus und ich (1947), unpublished manuscript, cf. www.kunst-archive.net/de/wvz/t_lux_feininger/texts <http://www.kunst-archive.net/de/wvz/t_lux_feininger/texts>).
Feininger's fascination for the art of mask carving, especially in the tradition of Japanese No masks, is manifested in this photograph in which he lends a darkly mysterious vividness to two masks in frontal and profile view by means of a light bulb placed behind them.


From the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College - Photography from a Swiss Private Collection
The following photographs offered for sale by the Bauhaus artists Xanti Schawinsky, Umbo (Otto Umbehr), Lucia Moholy, T. Lux Feininger and Josef Albers (lots 631-644) are from a Swiss private collection. They were acquired by the consignor in the early 1980s from the estate of Xanti Schawinsky whom he had the pleasure of knowing. As a Swiss artist with Jewish-Polish roots who studied at the Bauhaus before working as a graphic artist in Germany and Italy and moving to the USA in 1936, Schawinsky had been commuting between the USA and Europe since the 1960s. The busy artist built himself a studio in Oggebbio on the Italian side of Lake Maggiore, where he spent his time organising his work, documenting his time at the Bauhaus, writing his memoirs and preparing exhibitions, including his last exhibition in 1979 in the Galleria Flaviana in Locarno, during the preparation of which he and the consignor met.
His encounter with Xanti Schawinsky, the ideal embodiment of the universal artist in the sense of the Bauhaus, made a lasting impression on our collector, himself an artist and photographer, and led to further intense study of Schawinsky's work. A friendly connection developed between the collector and the artist as well as his family which lasted beyond Schawinsky's death in 1980. As 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 works in New York, Sheffield/Massachusetts and Oggebbio. As photography did not yet occupy a role on the art market at that time, little attention was paid to it. Nevertheless, or precisely because of this, the artist's photographic work from the 1920s to 1940s, which had hardly been discovered, let alone researched at that time, exerted a special fascination on the young collector.
Xanti Schawinsky was, as described by Eckard Neumann, the prototype of the “Ur-Bauhäusler”: “An artistic personality who in his œuvre has achieved the universality that the Bauhaus set itself as its highest aim. A creative temperament which in a spontaneous show of enthusiasm, idealism and dynamism, consistently disregarded any vestige of the past and with the stormy passion of youth turned exclusively to the new, to the human, to the New Society and the New Art with its multiform, untested and speculative media and modes of expression. […] Photography became for him only one tool for free and applied creativity. However, Schawinsky drew no distinction between these two sectors. He used photography as an experimental extension of his technical and creative means of expression, rather like John Heartfield when he said 'I paint with photos'.” (quoted from: Eckhard Neumann, Einleitung, in: Eckhard Neumann/Ronald Schmid (ed.), Xanti Schawinsky. Foto, Bern 1989, p. 12)
To commit to one medium would not have been in keeping with Schawinsky's artistic self-image, but photography nevertheless played a key role in his work and he repeatedly returned to it. While his primary interest during his time at the Bauhaus and at Black Mountain College where he taught until 1938 was the theatre class, using photography primarily for the documentation of ephemeral events, he would later, particularly in the 1940s, turn to experimental photography in the sense of a free, artistic medium for the creation of abstract compositions.
However, the present group does not only represent Schawinsky's artistic-photographic work, it also contains significant works by other photographers in his circle which were created in the late 1920s at the Bauhaus itself or in connection with its activities, in particular the Bauhaus stage. Artistic collaboration and the exchange of works were central themes at the Bauhaus, and photography took on an important function, featuring in all areas: as architecture, object and stage photography, it served to document and thus simultaneously to disseminate collective artistic achievements and ideas. At the same time, however, the camera was a constant companion in everyday life at Bauhaus celebrations and other activities. The resulting photographs, some of them in the style of snapshots, reflect the leisure activities at the Bauhaus and give an impression of he Bauhäusler's attitude to life. Under the influence of László Moholy-Nagy, protagonist of the “New Vision”, and the unity of art and technique postulated by him, a veritable “photo boom” (Jeannine Fiedler) was initiated at the Bauhaus in the second half of the 1920s. In addition to T. Lux Feininger and Umbo - who remained closely connected to the Bauhaus even after his departure - key players included Moholy-Nagy's wife Lucia Moholy, who is today considered the most important documentarian of the school's activities. Vintage prints by Umbo in particular are extremely rare today, as his studio and thus a large part of his photographic output from the pre-war years was lost in the bombing during the Second World War. Many of the vintage prints offered here have been shown in international exhibitions of the Bauhaus. In this respect, the group offered here contains important evidence of the Bauhaus history and its continuation in the USA.