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 clients. His work for Illy — clean, bold, and rigorously modern — stands in striking contrast to the more decorative traditions of Italian commercial art of the period, and marks a significant moment in the development of Italian graphic design.

Illy — Trieste’s Gift to Coffee Culture

Francesco Illy founded his coffee company in Trieste in 1933, bringing with him the Austrian and Central European coffee culture of the city’s Habsburg past and combining it with the Italian passion for espresso. His innovation — the first automatic espresso machine, the illetta — and his insistence on quality and consistency established Illy as one of the world’s most respected coffee brands within a generation. Schawinsky’s 1934 poster was part of the visual identity that announced the brand to the world at the very beginning of its story.

Digitally Restored for Modern Display

Digitally restored by an artist — wear removed, colours refreshed, vintage character retained. An extraordinary piece for coffee lovers, admirers of Bauhaus design and Italian modernism, and the kitchen or café wall that deserves something genuinely historic.

Copyright: Personal use only — no resale or redistribution.

Download includes 5 high-resolution JPEG files:
4×5 ratio — prints at 4×5″ up to 40×50cm
3×4 ratio — prints at 6×8″ up to 18×24″
2×3 ratio — prints at 4×6″ up to 24×36″
International sizes — A5 to A1, 5×7″, 50×70cm
11×14″
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