OSKAR SCHLEMMER 4 September 1888 – 13 April 1943 B A U H A U S

BALLET

PAINTING

SCULPTURE

DRAWINGS

MASKS B I O G R A P H Y

Oskar Schlemmer was a German theater designer and key player in the Bauhaus movement in the 1920’s. The Bauhaus School (literally translating to “building house”) is famous for it’s influence in modern design - particularly architecture and interior design - as it focused on combining art and industry; it especially concentrated on the machine aesthetic, industrialization, and the simplification of visuals in design. It was quite experimental and futuristic. Schlemmer’s work with the Bauhaus embodies and represents their ideas perfectly, especially with his creation called The Triadic Ballet which he is best known for. In this ballet, the costumes wear the dancers, the line of the clothes dictate the movement as they reconstruct the silhouette and form of a human body, and the design of each environment dictates the pattern of the dance. It is bizarre and interesting and brilliant to watch, and it wholly evokes the Bauhaus and Schlemmer’s theories of design. He is a great and inspiring figure for me as he proves just how important the presence of a costume can be and how much it can fill a space. Hopefully by ex- ploring the images below, you’ll be able to understand the weight and the essence of his ideas and be inspired by their abstract nature. T R I A D I C B A L L E T

A P P R O A C H

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, T H E D A N C E S O F O S K A R

O R B I T I N G I N A B S T R A C T I O N

Oskar Schlemmer was pioneering a new form of abstract dance that remains unique in its vision. Jack Andersen wrote in The New York Times in 1984 that Schlemmer’s dances were “dances only a painter could have cho- reographed“. Schlemmer applied Nietzsche’s concept of Apollonian and Dionysian elements in art, fusing order and chaos by combining elements of painting with those of theatre. Schlemmer’s was the art of Gesamtkünstwerk: The Art of Total Theatre. P A I N T I N G S

L E G A C Y

Experimenting with contemporary paintings by himself, and ended up acquiring his own original Cubist language of forms. His viewpoint of exploration gradually shifted itself to outside the frame, extending the space of painting. Experiments like this, in addition to his interest in stage or spacial design of form, led him to develop the principle of the stage, which he later completed. It is also important to remember that his subjects were human. P A I N T I N G S

L E G A C Y

His work was 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 notust j of its form, he was fascinat- ed by every movement the body could make. S C U L P T U R E

H U M A N M O V E M E N T

Schlemmer was interested in mechanics and the potential of puppetry to convey new movement and represent technology; consequently his dancers often appear like marionettes. However, rather than being dehumanised, they embody the principles of human movement. Dances were based on simple forms with a grounding in (often ballet) technique. The footwork itself was far from fancy, but harmonized with costumes and movement to create a sensation of intricate pattern and logic. D R A W I N G S

T H O U G H T P R O C E S S

Schlemmer regards the rectangular solid space as the given principle, when thinking about the theatrical space. And therein, invisible threads make the web, linking each vertex obtained from the proportion. Dancers on the stage (or in the space) move around along the spacial stitch, tracing the white lattice on the floor, which also helps spectators picture the space Schlemmer configures. In Consideration of the theatrical concepts at the Bauhaus this way, every time just a little movement stirs the rectangular space, the dancer – the center of gravity – re- news the tension with all the vertices. The marionette-like sense of tension in Schlemmer’s stage work arises from nothing but this limitation of the space. M A S K

S E N S A T I O N S

While many writers see Schlemmer’s work as being a manifesto for a robot world – a by- product of a communist society – the qualities that prevail in his work are visuals that reel you into a sublime, unfamiliar world that evokes complex moods and startling sensations.