SPACE TIME MATTER AND THEIR REALIZATION: XANTI
Xanti Schawinsky and The Art Squad
Xanti Schawinsky: SPACE TIME MATTER AND THEIR REALIZATION: XANTI. Brooklyn: The Art Squad [n. d.]. Single 8.5 x 11 sheet printed in two colors [recto only] and folded twice to form announcement. Two exterior panels foxed, with spotting barely intruding into the centerfold. A very good copy of a rare piece of Graphic Design ephmera.
4.25 x 5.5 folded announcement for an address to the Art Squad by Xanti Schawinsky. Design credited to Herman Letterman; typography by the Composing Room; engravings by Quality Engraving Co.; and printing by Display Printers. A phenomenal piece of ephemera that captures the rapidly modernizing Graphic Design community in New York during the War Years. Of utmost rarity.
Alexander “Xanti” Schawinsky (1904, Basel – 1979, Locarno) is usually known either for the activities of his early career, as a young ‘enfant terrible’ of Bauhaus theatre, or for the work he produced at its close as a respected and mature abstract artist. However these two perspectives ignore his tremendous versatility, and the important role he had to play in bringing Modernist ideas to different parts of the inter-war world.
Schawinsky was born in Switzerland, the son of a Polish Jew. His creative nature was obvious from an early age, and in his teens he studied art and music in Zurich, before travelling to Berlin and Cologne to learn about design and architecture. In 1924 he enrolled at the Bauhaus, and became involved in the school’s vibrant theatrical scene, also focusing on photography and painting. From the mid 1920s Schawinsky undertook wide range of professional commissions, working as a stage designer, a municipal studio director and a freelance designer. He also returned to the Bauhaus to teach.
In 1933 Germany’s growing intolerance forced him to move to Milan, where he spent several years producing commercial graphic design in association with Studio Boggeri. An invitation to join the progressive Black Mountain College brought him to the USA in 1936. He spent two years at Black Mountain introducing Bauhaus ideas to his American students, before moving to New York to take up freelance design and pursue painting – an activity which absorbed almost all of his attention in his final years. As innovative in commercial art as he was in his unpaid pieces, Schawinsky’s work demonstrated the huge creative power of the inter-war meeting of art and industry.
The Art Squad. ”Leon Friend began teaching in 1930, during the throes of the Great Depression in Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln High School where he was its first art department chairman. Abraham Lincoln will never be as famous as the Bauhaus, ULM or Cranbrook — nor is it even especially well known among most New Yorkers, unless you are a Brooklynite. But for over three decades between 1930 and 1969, it was a springboard for scores of artists, photographers and graphic designers. Friend’s curriculum balanced the fine and applied arts and offered more commercial art courses than most art trade schools. He introduced leading contemporary designers and inspired many of his students to become designers, art directors, illustrators, typographers and photographers.
Leon Friend inspired me to become a advertising designer. — Gene Federico [class of '36]
“In the mid-1930s Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn had the most ambitious graphics programme in the US, chaired by Leon Friend, author of one of the first textbooks, Graphic Design, that used European Modernism as a paradigm for contemporary commercial art. Friend’s top design and illustration students belonged to the school’s elite Art Squad and were responsible for its posters, brochures and announcements. Impressed by their output, [the Composing Room’s Dr. Robert] Leslie gave them considerable exposure and helped get real work for some of the more outstanding students, including future advertising designers Gene Federico and Bill Taubin and album-jacket pioneer Alex Steinweiss, who published his first work in PM and later curated an Art Squad exhibition at the PM Gallery. After the war Leslie featured Federico in an exhibition called “Four Veterans” and gave Steinweiss a one – man show of record covers with an ambitious catalogue. In 1940 he gave gallery and magazine space to Herbert Bayer’s class in photomontage, arguably the most cutting – edge design programme of its time. Yet though Leslie was interested in the new, he avoided fine arts approaches to commercial art. The avant-garde nature of the Bayer student show was tempered by the work’s practical application to marketable products.
“Friend's curriculum was more than a departure from the standard, cookie-cutter Board of Education pedagogy: it challenged to the common assertion that art education was merely ethereal. His history classes broadened the knowledge of those who took them; his studio classes forced students to solve professional problems; and his guest lecture classes (including Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Lucian Bernhard, Josef Binder, Lynd Ward, Chaim Gross and Moses Soyer) offered an introduction to the masters of commercial and fine art.
“Friend wanted his students to have every opportunity to succeed in the real world, and so he founded a quasi-professional extra curricular club called the "Art Squad," which for its members was more important than any varsity football, basketball or baseball team. Participation in this daily (seven day a week) program was limited to thirty students per year representing all the grades. Located in Lincoln's Room 353, Friend gave the Art Squad autonomy under the tutelage of an elected student leader who served for an eighteen-month term. Membership was by invitation and sponsorship of another student, and required a portfolio review by the membership committee. Members worked for a common cause and developed personal strengths.
“For most of us with limited economic resources,” explained a former student, Martin Solomon (class of ’48),”the career choice was to drive a cab. Thanks to Mr. Friend, we could earn a living and be challenged by working with type and image.”A partial list of his students include Seymour Chwast, Gene Federico, Jay Maisel, Irving Penn, Alex Steinweiss, Bill Taubin, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and Richard Wilde. [Steven Heller]