[Xanti Schawinsky with the New Saxophone]

T. Lux Feininger

ca. 1928 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Feininger made this photograph of a musician when he was a student at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, where his father, the well-known painter Lyonel, taught. The saxophonist, Xanti Schawinsky, was a fellow student at the Bauhaus who played in the school’s jazz band along with Feininger. In Feininger’s photograph, the sax assumes even greater prominence than Schawinsky, as it cuts boldly into and across the composition. Demonstrating the artist’s talent for experimentation and improvisation, the photograph evokes the feelings of newness, nonconformity, and self-expression that drew scores of listeners, especially young people, to jazz.

Artist

T. Lux Feininger

Date

ca. 1928

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1989