Oskar Schlemmer

Oskar Schlemmer (; 4 September 1888 – 13 April 1943) was a German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer associated with the Bauhaus school.

In 1923, he was hired as Master of Form at the Bauhaus theatre workshop, after working at the workshop of sculpture. His most famous work is Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet), which saw costumed actors transformed into geometrical representations of the human body in what he described as a "party of form and colour".

Biography

Childhood and apprenticeships Born in September 1888 in Swabia, Germany, Oskar Schlemmer was the youngest of six children. His parents, Carl Leonhard Schlemmer and Mina Neuhaus, both died around 1900 and the young Oskar lived with his sister and learned at an early age to provide for himself.

The Bauhaus years

Schlemmer's nickel-cast "Tut Schlemmer" (1919), Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln, Germany.

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. 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. in the hospital at Baden-Baden in 1943.

Legacy Schlemmer's ideas on art were complex and challenging even for the progressive Bauhaus movement. His work, nevertheless, was widely exhibited in both Germany and outside the country—a rejection of pure abstraction, instead retaining a sense of the human, though not in the emotional sense but in view of the physical structure of the human. He represented bodies as architectural forms, reducing the figure to a rhythmic play between convex, concave and flat surfaces. And not just of its form, he was fascinated by every movement the body could make—trying to capture it in his work. As well as leaving a large body of work behind, Schlemmer's art theories have also been published. A comprehensive book of his letters and diary entries from 1910 to 1943 is also available.

Along with Schlemmer's diary, his private letters to Otto Meyer and Willi Baumeister have given valuable insight on what happened at the Bauhaus, especially his writings of how the staff and students responded to the many changes and developments at the school.

Schlemmer's first retrospective in the United States was mounted by the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1986.

In 2013, Dale Eisinger of Complex ranked Triadic Ballet the 23rd best work of performance art in history, writing, "A major signal of the Bauhaus movement, Triadic Ballet cemented its place in history as one of the first examples of multimedia performance. Schlemmer even created his costumes first, and then designed the choreography around them". On 4 September 2018, to commemorate what would have been his 130th birthday, Google released a Google Doodle celebrating him.

Controversy

In 2000, the artist's daughter Ute Jaina Schlemmer, who asserted that she owns the painting Bauhaus Stairway (Bauhaustreppe) or is owed money for it, obtained a court order to hold it for further investigation while it was on temporary loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Before the injunction was served on the Neue Nationalgalerie, Bauhaus Stairway had already been packed and shipped to New York.

Art market In 1998, Schlemmer's Idealistic Encounter (1928) was sold for $1.487 million at Sotheby's in New York.