MAN
TEACHING NOTES FROM THE BAUHAUS
Oskar Schlemmer
[Bauhaus] Oskar Schlemmer: MAN: TEACHING NOTES FROM THE BAUHAUS. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. First edition. Quarto. Dark blue cloth titled in white. Printed dust jacket. 160 pp. 81 black and white reproductions. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Price-clipped uncoated jacket with trivial wear, thus a fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
7.25 x 10 hardcover book with 160 pages and 81 black and white reproductions of Schlemmer's notebooks and notes for his Bauhaus course "Man" (which he was preparing to teach at the time of his departure in 1929). Preface by Hans M. Wingler, edited by Heimo Kuchling and translated from German by Janet Seligman.
Includes conception of man; syllabuses; drawing form the nude; proportion, figure drawing, and more.
Heimo Kuchling selected the contents from a wealth of unsorted notes and over 200 drawings, and has himself edited the notes and text in this edition. A carefully-researched selection of Oskar Schlemmer's notes and sketches from his 1928 Bauhaus course on Man, the nucleus of which is his section on figure drawing. [ Freitag 8750.]
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.