Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) was a German painter, sculptor, stage designer and and choreographer.

Schlemmer was born in Stuttgart to Carl Leonhard Schlemmer and his wife Mina Neuhaus in 1888. The youngest of six children, Schlemmer learned at an early age to provide for himself following the untimely death of both his parents around 1900.
As early as 1903 the young Schlemmer was completely independent and supporting himself as an apprentice in an inlay workshop.

In 1906 Schlemmer enrolled at the Stuttgart Academy, until he left for Berlin to work independently in 1910, where he started to paint. These early pictures anticipate Schlemmer’s life-long search for the geometric order and structure. It is also during this period that he first became interested in dance and the theater.

By 1912 Schlemmer was back in Stuttgart studying, until World War I found him fighting on the western front in 1914. After being wounded twice Schlemmer was appointed to a military cartography unit in Colmar, where he resided until the end of the war. In 1918 he was back in Stuttgart, now working under Adolf Hölzel.

The following year Schlemmer turned to the art of sculpture. The relief sculpture entitled Figure of a Youth in Components (1919) typifies his approach to the human form, a subject from which he rarely strayed. Schlemmer depicted the profile of a male youth reduced to basic geometric shapes abstracted from nature to reveal the figure’s basic structure.

The 1920s were Schlemmer’s most productive years. After his marriage to Helena Tutein he accepted the post of master of form at Bauhaus in Weimar.
At the Bauhaus, Schlemmer was first appointed as a master of the mural painting and sculpture workshops before heading the theater workshop in 1923.

His interest in the theater was essentially in the ballet. “Triadic Ballet“, first performed in Stuttgart in 1922, was a great success at the Bauhaus in 1923.
Schlemmer used three dancers dressed in puppet-like costumes to reveal the figures’ relationships to each other as well as to the space around them. saw the puppet as an idealization of the human form, a form that was able to move with perfect machinelike grace once it was liberated from the earthbound realm by the puppetmaster.

Schlemmers’ paintings from this period reflect the spatial concerns evident in his theatrical productions. The Dancer, painted in 1923, shows a single puppet-like figure frozen in step. Schlemmer set this figure within a vague stage setting where the figure interacts with the surrounding space. In other pictures from this period Schlemmer often included several figures in the same composition.

The conservative political climate of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s forced the Bauhaus to move to Dessau in 1925. Schlemmer accepted the offer to head the experimental Theater workshop in Dessau. He remained there until 1929, when he took a teaching post at the Breslau Academy, where resumed work on the mural commission he received in 1928 for the Fountain Hall of the Folkwang Museum in Essen and designed stage sets for an opera and ballet by Igor Stravinsky.

The 1930s were difficult for Schlemmer and his family. In 1933 he was dismissed from his teaching position by the Nazis, who considered his art degenerate. The Schlemmers then moved to Sehringen before his pictures were displayed at the exhibition of “Degenerate Art” in 1937.

Unable to show or sell his work, Schlemmer’s painting took on a decidedly mystical tone. The former balance that Schlemmer achieved between the rounded conical forms of his figures and their placement on a two-dimensional surface gave way to very flat, almost transparent figures bathed in a mystical light.

Schlemmer’s last years were spent working at a paint factory owned by Kurt Herbert in Wuppertal, where he had the opportunity to paint without the fear of persecution. His last series, the so called “Window Pictures”, were very small pictures painted while looking out the window of his house and observing neighbors engaged in their domestic tasks.

After numerous clinical treatments, Oskar Schlemmer died in Baden-Baden in 1943.