Illy Coffee – Alexander Schawinsky (Xanti) (c.1934) | Vintage Italian Coffee Advertising Poster
Around 1934, the pioneering Bauhaus-trained graphic designer Alexander Schawinsky — known professionally as Xanti — created this landmark advertising poster for Illy Coffee, the Trieste-based coffee company founded just two years earlier by Francesco Illy. The result is one of the most significant intersections of avant-garde design and Italian commercial culture in the interwar period: a poster that brought the radical visual language of the European modernist movement to bear on the most Italian of daily rituals — the espresso.
Xanti Schawinsky — Bauhaus Meets Italian Coffee
Alexander Schawinsky (1904–1979) was born in Basel and trained at the Bauhaus in Dessau under masters including Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy. He arrived in Italy in the early 1930s, where his modernist graphic sensibility found a ready market among Italy's more progressive commercial c...
