Artist Research

Oskar Schlemmer

Schlemmer was bon in 1988 in Stuttgart, Germany. He was a German painter, sculptor, designer, and choreographer associated with the Bauhaus. 

Schlemmer was completely independent by 1903 after the death of his parent around 1900. He supported himself as an apprentice at an inlay workshop, moving on to another apprenticeship in marquetry from 1905 to 1909.

He studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule, as well as the Academie der Bildenden Künst in Stuttgart, under the tutelage of Christian Landenberger and Fredreich Von Keller.

He moved to Berlin, where he painted she of his most important works before returning to Stuttgart as Adolf Hölzel's master pupil. In 1914, he was enlisted to fight on the Western Front during WW1 until he was injured and moved to a position with the military cartography unit in Colmar, where he resided until returning to work under Hölzel in 1918. In 1919, he turned to sculpture.

In 1920, he was invited to Weimar by Waler Gropius to run the mural-painting and sculpture departments at the Bauhaus school before heading up the theatre workshop in 1923.

Schemers ideas on art were complex and challenging even for the progressive Bauhaus movement, yet they were influential, making his one of the most important reachers at the school at the time.

In 1929, he resigned his position with the arrival of the radical communist architect, Hannes Meyer, Walter Groupius' successor. He took up a job at the Art Academy in Breslau.

He became internationally known because of "Triadisches Ballet" in Stuttgart in 1922. Some of his other works were "Slat Dance" and "Treppenwitz" in which performers became living sculptures.

His work for the Bauhaus and preoccupation with the theatre are an important factor in his work, which deals mainly with the problematic of the figure in space. While at Bauhaus, he developed a multi-disciplinary course called "Der Menach" (The Human Body).

After using Cubism as a springboard for his sculptural studies, his work became more intrigued with the possibilities of figures and the relationship to the space around them, for example, "Egocentric Space Lines" 1924.

beginning in 1929, he executed settings for the opera "Nightingale" and the ballet "Renard" by Igor Stravinsky.

At the art academy in Breslau, he painted on of his most celebrated woks, "Bauhaustreppe" (bauhaus Stairway).

He was obliged to leave Breslau Academie when it closed down in the wake of the financial crisis following the Wall Street Crash. He took up professorship at Berlin's Vereinigte Staatssuchlen Für freie Angewandere Kunst (United State School for Fine and Applied Arts) in 1932, but was pressures in 1933 to resign by the Nazi's. 

His work was displayed in the "Degenerate Arts" exhibition.