Oskar Schlemmer: Who was the Bauhaus artist and modernist German ballet choreographer?
'Bulbous mechanical creatures wearing metallic masks are not the usual image that comes to mind when one thinks of ballet'
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Oskar Schlemmer, the German artist best known for his association with the Bauhaus movement, would have been 130 years old today. The anniversary of his birth is being marked by tributes and a Google Doodle.
A painter, sculptor and choreographer, Schlemmer studied art in Stuttgart and was part of a movement to modernise the Academy of Fine Art there, promoting the works of the likes of Paul Klee.
In 1920, he moved to the Bauhaus school in Weimar to teach, and while he continued to produce paintings, sculptures and life drawings, his primary focus became choreography and stage workshop.
It was in 1922 when Schlemmer produced his best-known and most revolutionary work - Das triadisches Ballett, or “The Triadic Ballet”.
“Bulbous mechanical creatures wearing metallic masks are not the usual image that comes to mind when one thinks of ballet,” reads Google’s tribute to Schlemmer today.
“With three dancers, 12 movements, and 18 costumes, Schlemmer’s innovative approach to ballet broke with all convention to explore the relationship between body and space in new and exciting ways.
“He described the performance as ‘artistic metaphysical mathematics’, and a ‘party in form and colour’.
“The Triadic Ballet” was toured throughout Europe in the 1920s, in cities such as Weimar, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, and Paris.
It earned Schlemmer the job of head of stage workshop at the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1929, and is said to have influenced future artists including David Bowie and New Order, with reproductions staged several times in the 20th century long after Schlemmer’s death.
Schlemmer left the Bauhaus in 1929 to teach at Breslau, but it was the rise of Nazism in Germany that led to his downfall.
He was summarily dismissed without warning by the Nazi regime in May 1933, and after spells abroad in Switzerland and London he returned to Germany to find his work featured - no less than five times - in a Munich display of “degenerate art” organised by the Nazis.
As the war began, Schlemmer found work with some other artists at a lacquer factory in Wuppertal, before he died of a heart attack in 1943.
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