OSKAR SCHLEMMER 1888 – 1943
Karin von Maur
Karin von Maur: OSKAR SCHLEMMER 1888 – 1943 [ Exposition de dessins et d'aquarelles au Centre Culturel Allemand de Paris]. Paris: Centre Culturel Allemand, Goethe-Institut, 1969. Original edition. Text in french. Slim quarto. Thick printed wrappers. 27 pp. Nine illustrations, including 4 full-page color plates. Art Museum Library inkstamp to front panel. Catalog label to spine. Pencil notation to title page, otherwise interior unmarked and very clean. Uncoated covers dusty, but a very good copy of this uncommon catalog.
9.5 x 12.5 softcover catalog with 27 pages and 9 illustrations, including 4 full-page color plates of Oskar Schlemmer’s beautiful watercolors. Catalog for the exhibition from 25 Mars - 9 Mai 1969 at the Centre Culturel Allemand, Goethe-Institut.
Oskar Schlemmer [Germany, 1888 – 1943] developed his Triadisches Ballett during his tenure as Master of Form at the Bauhaus theatre workshop. The stylized and wildly popular performance featured actors who transformed into geometrical shapes. The Ballett toured from 1922 until 1929 and helped spread the Bauhaus ethos throughout Europe.
After his experiences in the First World War, Schlemmer began to conceive the human body as a new artistic medium. He saw ballet and pantomime as free from the historical baggage of theatre and opera and thus able to present his ideas of choreographed geometry, man as dancer, transformed by costume, moving in space.
Schlemmer considered the movement of puppets and marionettes as aesthetically superior to that of humans, as it emphasised the artificial nature of every artistic medium.
Oskar Schlemmer was invited to Weimar in 1920 by Gropius to run the Bauhaus' sculpture department and stage workshop. He became internationally known with the premiere of his "Triadisches Ballett" in Stuttgart in 1922 . . . . Schlemmer spent the years 1928 to 1930 working on nine murals for the Folkwang Museum in Essen. After Gropius' resignation in 1929, Schlemmer also left the Bauhaus and accepted a post at the Akademie in Breslau. He was given a professorship at the "Vereinigte Staatsschulen" in Berlin in 1932, but the National Socialists forced him to resign in 1933. During the war, Schlemmer worked at the "Institut für Malstoffe" in Wuppertal . . . . He led a secluded life at the end of his career and made the small series of eighteen mystical "Fensterbilder" in 1942.