Context: Bauhaus – Text about the video interviews
Xanti Schawinsky and the Black Mountain College
As part of her research into Black Mountain College, art historian Sigrid Pawelke conducted around 16 interviews with former students and artists from the renowned college in 2010. In four of these videos shown here, published for the first time in a museum context, people who were in contact with Xanti Schawinsky during his years at Black Mountain College provide insights into his artistic practice, his teaching and his private life.
Ati Gropius (1926-2014),
adopted daughter of Walter Gropius, was a book illustrator, designer and gave Bauhaus workshops. She studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1943 to 1946. Xanti Schawinsky was her godfather from the Bauhaus period in Dessau and often visited the Gropius family in their family home in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Ted Dreier Jr. (1929–2019),
son of Black Mountain College co-founder Ted Dreier and nephew of art collector and patron Katherine Dreier, was a psychiatrist. Dreier regularly visited Black Mountain College as a child from 1933 to 1948 and subsequently studied there until 1952. He met Xanti Schawinsky while he was teaching there and also took part in one of his stage shows, the ‘Danse Macabre’, in 1938.
Claude Stoller (1921-2023)
was an architect in Berkeley. After seeing the Bauhaus 1919-1928 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1938, in which Xanti Schawinsky also participated, he began studying at Black Mountain College. The entrance examination for his studies was taken by Schawinsky.
Alexander Eliot (1919-2015),
author and journalist, was a student at Black Mountain College from 1936 to 1938. He was involved in the multimedia theatre performance that Schawinsky later referred to as ‘Spectodrama’. After his student days in North Carolina, Eliot remained on friendly terms with Schawinsky and other avantgarde artists in New York.
