Oskar Schlemmer
Oskar Schlemmer (4 September 1888 – 13 April 1943) was a German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer associated with the Bauhaus school.
Oskar Schlemmer
In 1923, he was hired as Master of Form at the Bauhaus theatre workshop, after working at the workshop of sculpture. His most famous work is Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet), which saw costumed actors transformed into geometrical representations of the human body in what he described as a "party of form and colour".[1]
Biography[edit]
Childhood and apprenticeships[edit]
Born in September 1888 in Swabia, Germany,[2] Oskar Schlemmer was the youngest of six children. His parents, Carl Leonhard Schlemmer and Mina Neuhaus, both died around 1900 and the young Oskar lived with his sister and learned at an early age to provide for himself.[2] By 1903 he was completely independent and supporting himself as an apprentice in an inlay workshop, moving on to another apprenticeship in marquetry from 1905 to 1909.
Oskar Schlemmer studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in Stuttgart and won a scholarship to attend the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart), 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 Hölzel, abandoning impressionism and moving toward cubism in his work. In 1914 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 Hölzel in 1918.[2] The doll-like figures he created in this period may have been a reaction to the wounded soldiers he saw in military hospitals during the war.[3]