Panos Aravantinos

Panos Aravantinos ( Greek Πάνος Αραβαντινός , born September 7, 1884 in Corfu ; † December 1, 1930 in Paris ) was a Greek-German set designer .

Life

Detail of a stage set from 1928

Aravantinos was born in Corfu and attended drawing courses at the Polytechnic in Athens . He then studied in Berlin at the academy and after graduation in Paris. In Paris he met the painter Dimitrios Galanis , who placed him as an illustrator for magazines. From 1908 he lived in Athens, where the composer Spyros Samaras commissioned him with stage design.

Due to the First World War, Aravantinos could not settle in Germany and initially worked in Switzerland. In 1917 he came back to Germany, where he applied with his designs in Munich. In an application for set design for Richard Strauss at the Munich Opera , he prevailed against six competitors, but after completing the work he moved to Berlin, where he was engaged at the State Opera from 1919 to 1939 . One of his best-known works is the setting for the world premiere of Wozzeck by Alban Berg (1925). In addition to Emil Pirchan, he worked as a set designer at a time when the profession was not yet established in Germany. Aravantinos pleaded for a departure from the naturalistic stage design style of the late 19th century. His visionary designs are heavily influenced by modern art movements such as cubism and expressionism .

Aravantinos also worked for Hugo von Hofmannsthal . For the Hamburg Stadt-Theater and the director Leopold Sachse , he designed the setting for the Ring des Nibelungen by Richard Wagner from 1926–1927 . This suggestive work combined modern tendencies such as cubism, constructivism and expressionism with quotations from romanticism and sensitive figure psychology. In the re-production of 1937, however, the set and costumes were significantly changed and "Aryanized". Due to the war he left Germany and settled in Athens. Aravantinos died of pneumonia in Paris in 1930. One of his last sets was created for the world premiere of the opera Christophe Colomb by Darius Milhaud .

The Panos Aravantinos Decor Museum in Piraeus is dedicated to the work of Aravantinos .

literature

Constantin Chelmis: The set designer Panos Aravantinos and his work at the Berlin State Opera (1919–1930) , dissertation, Free University of Berlin, Berlin 1977.
Kerstin Schüssler-Bach: Theatrical Visions - Political Realities. The Hamburg "Ring" by Leopold Sachse in the set design by Panos Aravantinos (1926/27) and his "New Staging" (1937/38) , in: Stefan Börnchen, Georg Mein, Elisabeth Strowick (eds.): Jenseits von Bayreuth. Richard Wagner today , Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 2014.

Individual evidence

↑ Kerstin Schüssler-Bach: Theatrical visions - political realities. The Hamburg “Ring” by Leopold Sachse in the set design by Panos Aravantinos (1926/27) and his “new production” (1937/38). In: Stefan Börnchen, Georg Mein, Elisabeth Strowick (eds.): Beyond Bayreuth. Richard Wagner today , Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 2014.

personal data
SURNAME	Aravantinos, Panos
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Αραβαντινός, Πάνος (Greek)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Greek-German stage designer
DATE OF BIRTH	September 7, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH	Corfu
DATE OF DEATH	December 1, 1930
Place of death	Paris

[1] Kerstin Schüssler-Bach: Theatrical visions - political realities. The Hamburg “Ring” by Leopold Sachse in the set design by Panos Aravantinos (1926/27) and his “new production” (1937/38). In: Stefan Börnchen, Georg Mein, Elisabeth Strowick (eds.): Beyond Bayreuth. Richard Wagner today , Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 2014.