Oskar Schlemmer Overview

Oskar Schlemmer a German artist and designer was born in Stuttgart 1888. He studied there at the Academy under the modernist Adolph Holzel from 1909 - 1914 and 1918-19919. He spending the war 1914-1918 as an military cartographer. In 1919 he exhibited in Berlin and showed his first sculpture of a formalized human figure. Although he rejected pure abstraction. Schlemmer thougt that the essential inner vision and unity nature could only be achieved through simplification. In both painting and sculpture he reduced the human figure to mechanistic manikins of extreme formality. From 1920 to 1929 he was an influential teacher at the Bauhaus in the metalwork and scupture class and particulary at the school of design. His theatricial work, created 1926-1929, which he named "architectonic dances" combined colour, light, movement and music with puppet-like human figures as the protagonist. In 1929 he moved to Breslau as a professor and also taught briefly in Berlin before being dismissed by the NS in 1933 and declared a degenerate artist. He died 1943.