12 Facts About Oskar Schlemmer

Oskar Schlemmer was a German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer associated with the Bauhaus school.

Oskar Schlemmer studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Stuttgart and won a scholarship to attend the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, where he studied under the tutelage of landscape painters Christian Landenberger and Friedrich von Keller starting in 1906.

In 1910 Schlemmer moved to Berlin where he painted some of his first important works before returning to Stuttgart in 1912 as the master pupil of abstract artist Adolf Holzel, abandoning impressionism and moving toward cubism in his work.

In 1914 Oskar Schlemmer was enlisted to fight on the Western Front in World War I until he was wounded and moved to a position with the military cartography unit in Colmar, where he resided until returning to work under Holzel in 1918.

In 1919 Oskar Schlemmer turned to sculpture and had an exhibition of his work at the gallery Der Sturm in Berlin.

However, due to the heightened political atmosphere in Germany at the end of the 1920s, and in particular with the appointment of the Marxist architect Hannes Meyer as Gropius's successor, in 1929 Oskar Schlemmer resigned his position and moved to take up a job at the Art Academy in Breslau.

Oskar Schlemmer became known internationally with the premiere of his 'Triadisches Ballett' in Stuttgart in 1922.

From 1928 to 1930, Oskar Schlemmer worked on nine murals for a room in the Folkwang Museum in Essen.

Oskar Schlemmer was obliged to leave the Breslau Academy when it was closed down in the wake of the financial crisis following the Wall Street Crash, and took up a professorship at Berlin's Vereinigte Staatsschulen fur freie und angewandete Kunst in 1932, which he held until 1933 when he was forced to resign due to pressure from the Nazis.

Max Bill, in his obituary of Oskar Schlemmer, wrote that it was 'as if a curtain of silence' had descended over him during this time.

Oskar Schlemmer represented bodies as architectural forms, reducing the figure to a rhythmic play between convex, concave and flat surfaces.

In 2000, the artist's daughter Ute Jaina Oskar Schlemmer, who asserted that she owns the painting Bauhaus Stairway or is owed money for it, obtained a court order to hold it for further investigation while it was on temporary loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.