Xanti Schawinsky: Eclipse at Broadway 1602
September 16 through November 22, 2014
1181 Broadway, 3^rd Floor (at 28th street)
New York, 212 481 0362

Though it hardly seems possible, digging through the art historical annals seems to always unearth the work of artists unfairly overlooked. Such is the case with Alexander “Xanti” Schawinsky, one of the original Bauhaus artists. A trailblazer in commercial advertising, pioneering theater set designer, and professor at Black Mountain College, among several other institutions, Schawinsky created a prodigious output of multifarious work in his lifetime. But since his death in 1979, his importance has gone largely unrecognized. Two shows currently on view in New York, “Xanti Schawinsky: Head Drawings and Faces of War” at the Drawing Center and “Xanti Schawinsky: Eclipse” at Broadway 1602 are of critical value in reintroducing the artist’s work to contemporary audiences.

A Polish Jew born in Switzerland, Schawinsky came to the Weimar Bauhaus in 1924 to study, then was soon put in charge of its theater department. When the school was closed under duress due to Nazi threat in 1933, Schawinsky emigrated first to Italy, and then with the assistance of Hans Albers, to the United States, in 1936. He taught at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina for two years before relocating once again, to New York, in 1939. The two bodies of work on view at the Drawing Center date to the heart of Schawinsky’s years in New York during the Second World War, when he was fully involved with the city’s vibrant community of expat artists.

In the pencil-on-paper “Head Drawings” series, Schawinsky repeatedly depicted his own likeness, composed of natural and man-made objects, like a modern-day Archimbaldo. The drawings are sensitive, and very fine, and display a highly skilled hand. It would be easy to spend hours in front of a work like Jewelry Head (1941-1944) from which a face appears in an assortment of jeweled necklaces dangling from a disembodied hand. In The Lumber Room (1946), Schawinsky has drawn his face in profile. Skin sizzles with fissures and fault lines, cracked like dried mud in the sun. One side of the face has been peeled away, revealing an inner sanctum comprised only of wooden scaffolding, which retreats to a vanishing point. Whether the scaffolding is meant to support the head from the inside, or whether it is a meaningless structure, supporting nothing at all, seems to have been left deliberately ambiguous.

In the “Faces of War” series, all of which are mix media, watercolor, and black pen works on paper, Schawinsky composed human faces from military machinery and other paraphernalia used in war. They are by turns terrifying, despondent, and humorous. Unlike the “Head Drawings,” which alluded more obliquely to Schawinsky’s despair over the calamity of World War II, the “Faces of War” series addressed it bluntly. Works like The Parachutist (1942) are chilling. The artist has depicted a military parachute with a face, its eyes and nose comprised of cannons, protruding from the center and pointed squarely at the viewer. The slotted “teeth,” formulated from the strings of the parachute, resemble the mouth of a skeleton in skull-and-crossbones iconography. However, Schawinsky was not without a sense of humor. In The Admiral (1942), a heavily armored sailing vessel has two portholes making up his beady eyes. His frothy beard is formed by the churning waves beneath the boat, and punctuated by a life preserver — the confused ‘O’ of a mouth. The expression appears perplexed rather than formidable.

The anxiety and conflicting emotions Schawinsky expressed towards the war in these 1940s works on paper is instructive when examining a selection of his later paintings from the 1960s and ‘70s at Broadway 1602, for war and its threats seem to provide the link between the two bodies of work. By the time Schawinsky made these paintings, he had returned to Europe, once again settling in Italy, where he would spend the remaining years of his life. In the front room of the gallery, several paintings airbrushed on canvas render swirling, luminous clouds of paint in vivid color. In studying them, the eye sometimes begins to see in them human faces in dreamlike states — kissing, for example, or in repose. But in works like Al-di-là (Eclipse), 1965, the deep reds and oranges of the paint simultaneously suggest an alternative, and apocalyptic, proposition. The clouds come to resemble the aftermath of a bomb — perhaps the bomb — a distinct fear prevalent during the Cold War years. The canvases in the second room offer further optical illusion. The gallery is hung with Schawinsky’s stunning “Eclipses,” geometric shapes rendered on canvas. Each canvas has stretched over it a swath of gauze, separated by a support frame. The gauze has also been painted upon, but the shapes do not precisely align. Thus, as the viewer moves about the room, the forms appear to shift. The “Eclipse” paintings are more subdued than the explosive airbrushed canvases in the front room, and hearken back to the austere Bauhaus aesthetic of Schawinsky’s early career.

A small catalogue available at Broadway 1602 indicates that the work on view at the two galleries is only a small portion of Schawinsky’s varied oeuvre. Perhaps these small exhibitions will provide the spark necessary to reignite interest in this important artist’s work.

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January 12 to February 18, 2012
521 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 414-4144

There’s no explicit message in Thomas Scheibitz’s multifaceted project at Tanya Bonakdar, but its sheer scale and ambitious organization demand interpretation. They evoke the idealistic Bauhaus vision of architectural synthesis, and Scheibitz’s inventive integration of collage, painting and sculpture, while rooted in the contemporary visual environment, is inspired by the high modernism of Bauhaus style, with its bold, functional forms and its basis in the grid. The large painting that lends the exhibition its title consists of a grid with nine compartments; the sharply defined planes that connect their disparate contents build tensions between flatness and depth. While Scheibitz inclines more towards the whimsy of Paul Klee than to the systematism of Walter Gropius, there’s nonetheless an underlying dialectic to his method.

Scheibitz begins by collecting images, from the visual information that populates our computer screens to more refined photos of fashion, art and typography, which he assembles on worksheets and then elaborates upon with hand-drawn riffs; these personally inflected images give rise to denser collages, with components loosely organized in vertical/horizontal arrays. Scheibitz brings a sophisticated eye for abstraction to these overall compositions, in which contrasts in context and color generate connections across boundaries: everyday objects combine with images of his own works, classical sculpture with advertisements, and black and white photos with neon. Suggesting a generative function to this cross-fertilization, the five digital prints in this series are entitled A.G.C.T., for the nucleic acids in DNA.

Sixteen small paintings, set widely apart on the walls of the large gallery, could then be seen as cultures, in which essential features of the archived materials are isolated and refined. Often taking geometric figures or motifs from typography as a basis for improvisation, Scheibitz uses bold, dark outlines to carve out shapes, sometimes with cubistic precision and sometimes with cartoonish animation. The outlines lend them a graphic quality, but with a human inflection. A photo of a wedge of cheese gives rise to a ghostly face. The one grid painting in this group, with its compartments ambiguously brushed out, is hung diagonally, like an eccentric window.

Sculptures also spin off from these images, sometimes with functional motifs, but elsewhere with more enigmatic whimsy. A white column bears a row of black frames, like an empty film clip, while a vertical box shaped something like a lower-case “h” sprouts a row of balls on its arched spine. But A Panoramic VIEW of Basic Events, the major painting in the show, seems to work against this proliferation of images: it compresses its separate compartments into an overall composition.

Into this highly abstracted construction, Scheibitz weaves further allusions to modernist predecessors. Like Mondrian, he restricts himself to black, gray, and the primary colors, albeit freely modulated. At top center is a circle, suggesting the face of a clock – an organizing mechanism for “events”, but without hands, like the clock in Matisse’s Red Studio, an emblem of the timeless space of art. In the center below it, diagonal lines shift from flat patterns into the third dimension, recalling Paul Klee’s pedagogical diagrams of points developing into lines and planes; farther right, the planes open inward to construct a room. Other suggestions of depth imply a hidden internal structure. A wide brushstroke obscures part of the upper left panel, and the arc spanning the bottom center seems part of a bigger circle somewhere behind the grid – perhaps another, larger timepiece. This is a panorama that still leaves things covered up and ambiguous.

There’s an ad hoc quality to the central blue diagonal that breaks out of its frame – order here seems less imposed by the grid than to grow out of it. Scheibitz relies on the Bauhaus method of “Gestaltung”: arranging visual elements on a grid, so as to encourage intuitive orders to emerge. For all its finely articulated construction, “A Panoramic VIEW” retains some open-ended informality, an internalized restlessness. Some areas are only loosely brushed in; colors seep from under the borders of the planes at right center, in contrast to the sharp outlines that define the banana-shaped protrusion to their left, evidence of a constant dialectic between closing in and opening up. The “Basic Events” of the exhibition’s title might well refer to the ongoing proliferation of intuitive connections.

Scheibitz has extended a classical modernist style to embrace our late capitalist culture of constructed forms and digital images. From his informal collection of photographic reproductions emerge not modernism’s high visions of utilitarian progress, but impulses more playful and unexpected. There’s no returning to origins, but by winnowing out the basic visual elements in his archive, Scheibitz taps a reservoir of optimistic energy and affords our imaginations a space of free play.

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The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Avenue (northeast corner of 92nd Street)
New York NY 10128

September 10, 2004 – January 16, 2005

On the morning of October 6th 1944 a transport of cattle cars set off on the tracks from Terezin to Auschwitz. It contained mostly women and children. Few of those children survived. Together with them on the transport was their art teacher in the Nazi camp Theresienstadt (Terezin), a woman they loved who had encouraged them there to paint, design and perform plays, seeking the creative within each of them. Like Janusz Korczak, Freidl Dicker-Brandeis joined the children on what for most was to be their final journey. She insisted on volunteering that day, incapable of facing continued separation from her husband Pavel, her first cousin, who three weeks earlier had been taken. He was to survive. At her death she was 46.

Days before leaving Terezin, Frield-Dicker-Brandeis hid two suitcases containing the children’s drawings. These came to light in the 1960s and were published in the book “I Never Saw Another Butterfly.” Several of these drawings are shown at the end of the exhibition in The Jewish Museum. At this point I would like to make a personal digression. When almost twenty years ago my father (Roman Halter) and I worked on Yad Layeled, the memorial in the Ghetto Fighter’s Museum in Israel to the one and a half million Jewish children who were murdered during the Shoah, we selected some of these drawings and paintings and made from them stained glass windows. It was our intention to create a visual link between the children of Terezin and those children and adults visiting the children’s memorial today. An abstract concept would not communicate to generations whereas the drawings made by those children can speak to each of us. We wished to emphasise the creativity of the lives that were lost rather than the murderous ways in which those lives were taken.

At that time we were but partially aware of the range and sheer creative vitality of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. The exhibition at The Jewish Museum, New York will run through to January 16th 2005 and serves to remind us not only of her energy and, even more, of the dynamic spirit of discovery shared by those within the Bauhaus school. Above all the exhibition permits insight into the life of one of the most human, caring and creative women of the twentieth century.

Intensely stimulated by the newly-formed Bauhaus in 1919, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis explored every available medium, studying under Gropius, Klee, Muche, Klemmer, Kandinsky and Itten. If Itten and Klee were the teachers to whom she felt closest in spirit, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis was also drawn to ground her designs in a working understanding of practical techniques: woodwork; metal work; bookbinding; printing and typography; weaving. The exhibition and catalogue Friedl Dicker-Brandeis; Vienna 1898-Auschwitz 1944, text Ellen Makarova, coordinated by Regina Seidman-Miller, beside providing marvellous examples of her studies during her Bauhaus period also cover the most exciting period of her work when she teamed up with her lover Franz Singer to form the Aterlier Singer-Dicker. Their work was much in demand in Vienna, Prague, Budapest and Berlin and ranged from stackable chairs, modular furniture, to interior design, a tennis club house, a Montessori school including the design of the toys.

This exhibition demonstrates a wide range of her paintings and drawings. Some deserve particular comment: “Sleeping Cat,” (circa 1924), charcoal on paper with what might be an intentional or unintentional coffee stain that works on her delicate Foujita-like charcoal as essentially the umber ground of a Lascaux cave-painting of a bison (the drawing was discarded by Friedl but salvaged from the waste-basket by a fellow student). Or from her “View of the Moldau by Vysehrad,” (1934-6), a playful and delicate pastel and watercolour (mislabelled in the catalogue as an oil painting), whose delicacy fuses the childlike and the sophisticated. View from a window in “Franzensbad,” (1936-7) – a stylistic precursor of RB Kitaj’s “If Not, Not,” (1976.)

“Self Portrait in a Car,” (1940) shows her in a carriage or train, the vehicle is not certain. The perspective gives the picture a sense of accelerated motion and her face is pared down to a few minimal marks, smudges in pastel as though in some premonitory way she sees herself moving towards her end.

As an artist, Friedl’s sheer leger d’esprit came most fully to the fore when designing and thinking on paper. The designs for the apartment of Dr. Reisner are in themselves masterpieces of late-Cubism, in particular the ground-plan for the bedroom combining the boldness of Juan Gris, the poised structure of Piet Mondrian and delicacy of Paul Klee. In these works, more than any others, the energy, excitement of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis was best expressed. Her work communicates a zest for people. She is evidently happiest working in partnership with others or within the milieu of a school as student or teacher, or within her design partnership with Franz Singer. The Singer-Dicker practice flourished during the late 1920’s and their designs today still look modern and vital. And whilst at the height of her success as a designer, with an active client-base from Viennese Jewish bourgeoisie, she added to her overloaded schedule the role of a kindergarten teacher.

This exhibition is as much a time chart of two decades of central European aesthetics as an insight into the life of a gifted individual, respected and loved by her contemporaries and by the children she taught. It is an enriching and painful experience.

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