Schlemmer, Oskar
German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer associated with the Bauhaus school.
Oskar Schlemmer studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in Stuttgart and won a scholarship to attend the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Stuttgart Academy of Fine Art), where he studied under the tutelage of landscape painters Christian Landenberger and Friedrich von Keller starting in 1906. In 1910 Schlemmer moved to Berlin where he painted some of his first important works before returning to Stuttgart in 1912 as the master pupil of abstract artist Adolf Hölzel, abandoning impressionism and moving toward cubism in his work.
The Bauhaus years
Schlemmer's nickel-cast "Tut Schlemmer" (1919), Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln, Germany.
The Bauhaus emblem, designed by Oskar Schlemmer (1922).
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Costumes from Schlemmer's Triadisches Ballett (1922).
Portable gramophone in a compact case, designed by Schlemmer in 1928.
In 1919 Schlemmer turned to sculpture and had an exhibition of his work at the gallery Der Sturm in Berlin.[3] At the same time he helped to update the curriculum at the Stuttgart Academy of Fine Art with the appointment of new faculty and exhibitions of modern art. Among those involved were Paul Klee and Willi Baumeister.[2] After his marriage to Helena Tutein in 1920, Schlemmer was invited to Weimar by Walter Gropius to run the mural-painting and sculpture departments at the Bauhaus School before taking over the stagecraft workshop from Lothar Schreyer in 1923.[4][3] His complex ideas were influential, making him one of the most important teachers working at the school at that time. However, due to the heightened political atmosphere in Germany at the end of the 1920s, and in particular with the appointment of the radical communist architect Hannes Meyer as Gropius's successor, in 1929 Schlemmer resigned his position and moved to take up a job at the Art Academy in Breslau.
Schlemmer became known internationally with the première of his 'Triadisches Ballett' in Stuttgart in 1922. His work for the Bauhaus and his preoccupation with the theatre are an important factor in his work, which deals mainly with the problematic of the figure in space. People, typically stylised faceless female figures, continued to be the predominant subject in his painting. While at Bauhaus, he developed the multidisciplinary course "Der Mensch (The human being)." In the human form he saw a measure that could provide a foothold in the disunity of his time. After using Cubism as a springboard for his structural studies, Schlemmer's work became intrigued with the possibilities of figures and their relationship to the space around them, for example 'Egocentric Space Lines' (1924). Schlemmer's characteristic forms can be seen in his sculptures as well as his paintings. Yet he also turned his attention to stage design, first getting involved with this in 1929, executing settings for the opera 'Nightingale' and the ballet 'Renard' by Igor Stravinsky.