Anton Stankowski (b.1906, Gelsenkirchen, Germany; d.1998, Esslingen, Germany)

Anton Stankowski 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-based approach called “constructive graphic art,” in close collaboration with Richard Paul Lohse and Max Bill. In 1934, he was forced to leave Switzerland when his residency permit was revoked. 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 an editor, graphic designer, and photographer, eventually establishing 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, his chairmanship for Visual Design for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, and the now legendary “Berlin layout,” brought attention to his practice. For 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, he introduced the oblique line as a new element. In the 1970s he was increasingly concerned with exploring color, and in the 1980s he abandoned panel painting and began using free forms. Still, the form remained the means to an end. Or, in his own words: “To simplify, to factualize, and to humanize – the latter is the most difficult.”

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

Stankowski Stiftung