Xanti (Alexander) Schawinsky Lot n° 36

Xanti (Alexander) Schawinsky Flowing fragment 1928 Tempera on watercolor card, partially mounted on painting board along the edge on the reverse. 60.6 x 42.5 cm. Framed under glass. Signed 'alexander Schawinsky' in pink lower left. - With minor marginal defects, including a short tear lower left, two narrow tears right. Provenance Estate of Xanti Schawinsky; Ronald Schmid Collection, Ascona; art dealer Willem Kerseboom, Amsterdam (2009); private collection, Netherlands Exhibitions Berlin 1986 (Bauhaus Archive), Xanti Schawinsky. Painting, Stage, Graphic Design, Photography, Cat. No. 6, with color illus. p. 76 "Schawinsky's pictures breathe the air of the theater and the circus, white and red in front of lightning blue, corporeal, including classicist architecture, which, despite the technical meticulousness with which cornices and profiles are drawn, appear unreal and strange against the deep background." With these words, the art historian and museum director Ludwig Grote opened an exhibition on the Bauhaus painters in Halle in 1929. (quoted from the Grote estate, in: Archiv im Germanischen Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, no. 110). Grote was alluding to Xanti Schawinsky's architectural paintings from 1926 onwards, which show floating fragments of buildings and reflect his work as a stage designer. As a student at the Bauhaus, he worked with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and, above all, Oskar Schlemmer. He solved technical problems for Schlemmer, but was also congenially involved in artistic concepts. With these skills, Schawinsky was hired by the Zwickau municipal theater in 1926, where he designed stage sets for classical and modern productions. In this context, Schawinsky also painted the tempera painting "Fließendes Fragment" in 1928. A cloud-like structure and the architectural fragment of a profiled window frame float above a barren desert landscape and could hardly be more contrasting in their compositions. Using a glazed painting technique, he has created an imaginary space in which the building element is deprived of its function and stands in an irrational relationship to the pink cloud that conceals the sun. With certain echoes of Surrealist painting, the painting conveys a lightness and movement unusual for the Bauhaus.