Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943)

Oskar Schlemmer can be described as an Universalgestalter. He was not only a sculptor and painter, but a stage and mural designer and choreographer, an artist who used a new language of form to create an idealized, abstract and universal image of man to be used as the single and true measurement for mankind.

The war played an incisive role in Schlemmer's his life, which left him in the search for a new, harmonic idea of mankind. Upon his return to Stuttgart, Schlemmer turned his artistic practice to sculpture, participating in an important exhibition at Galerie der Sturm in Berlin in 1919. One year later he was invited by Walter Gropius to run the sculpture department at the Bauhaus school in Weimar. His complex ideas were influential, making him one of the most important teachers working at the school at that time, as well as nourishing his way of ingeniously applying and adapting the Bauhaus principle.

Schlemmer’s works epitomise the aesthetic and stylistic ideals of the Bauhaus movement, reducing objects to their purest, functional form, whilst remaining true to their nature. Whereas his colleagues, among them Kandinsky and Klee, focus on abstract painting, Schlemmer dedicates himself to the subject of the human figure. By applying his rational and geometrised language of form, he creates archetypal, balletic, mannequin-like figures, illustrating the human as a neutral, depersonalised form, exempt of expression. However, in idealistically picturing humans as so-called Kunstfiguren, he does not neglect to grant his figures a certain form of autonomy and sensitivity which he appears to deem necessary for their existence. He rather uplifts his figures away from emotionality and vulnerability to a harmonic, superior world of forms.