Anton Stankowski (1906-1998)

Anton Stankowski (1906–1998) was a pioneering graphic designer, photographer, artist, and professor, whose constructivist approach privileged clarity and symmetry. Stankowski used photography to capture dynamic forms and processes, which provided the basis for his paintings and graphic works.

In 1929 Stankowski moved to Zurich, where he worked for Max Dalang’s advertising agency. He developed a new photo-and- typographic approach called “constructive graphic art” in close collaboration with Richard Paul Lohse and Max Bill. In 1934 he had to leave Switzerland. He returned to Germany working as a freelance graphic designer until 1940 when he was conscripted into the German military and became a prisoner of war in Russia until 1948. He then worked for the Stuttgarter Illustrierte newspaper as editor, graphic designer and photographer and established his own design studio in Stuttgart in 1951. He taught at the College of Design in Ulm.

His “functional graphic designs” for IBM, SEL, VIESSMANN, Deutsche Bank and REWE as well as the now legendary “Berlin layout”, the city’s visual identity, and his chairmanship for Visual Design for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich brought attention to his practice. For Anton Stankowski there was no separation between free and applied art.

His paintings from the late 1920s to the 1990s show a continuity of constructive-concrete practice. In the early 1960s, the oblique line was introduced as a new element. In the 1970s he was increasingly concerned with an exploration of color, and in the 1980s, he abandoned panel painting and began using free forms. Still, the form remained the means to an end, “to simplify, to factualize, and to humanize – the latter is the most difficult,” said Anton Stankowski.

In 1983 he established the non-profit Stankowski Foundation to support artists and institutions bridging the separation of free and applied art. Anton Stankowski died on December 11, 1998, in Esslingen.

CV & Biography