Oskar Schlemmer

The Theater of the Bauhaus

Bauhausbücher 4

Spatial dance, gestural dance, rod dance, Triadic Ballet: Oskar Schlemmer developed his costumed, masked dancer into an “art figure” synthesizing dance, masquerade, and music. The fourth volume of the Bauhausbücher presents the main characteristics of the Bauhaus concept of the stage.

The Bauhaus stage is that of the Weimar period, essentially shaped by Oskar Schlemmer, who had taken over the stage department in 1923. László Moholy-Nagy, who was appointed to the Bauhaus the same year, took an interest in abstract kinetic and luminary phenomena which he examines in his essay "Theatre, Circus, Variété." Farkas Molnár focused for his part on stage architecture, which he discusses in detail in this volume.

The series is published with the generous support of the Rudolf-August Oetker-Stiftung.

Spatial dance, gestural dance, rod dance, Triadic Ballet: Oskar Schlemmer developed his costumed, masked dancer into an “art figure” synthesizing dance, masquerade, and music. The fourth volume of the Bauhausbücher presents the main characteristics of the Bauhaus concept of the stage.

The Bauhaus stage is that of the Weimar period, essentially shaped by Oskar Schlemmer, who had taken over the stage department in 1923. László Moholy-Nagy, who was appointed to the Bauhaus the same year, took an interest in abstract kinetic and luminary phenomena which he examines in his essay "Theatre, Circus, Variété." Farkas Molnár focused for his part on stage architecture, which he discusses in detail in this volume.

The series is published with the generous support of the Rudolf-August Oetker-Stiftung.

Author(s): Oskar Schlemmer

Edited by Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy (original series), Lars Müller (English edition) in collaboration with Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin

With contributions by László Moholy-Nagy, Farkas Molnár

Design: László Moholy-Nagy (original German edition)

18 × 23 cm, 7 × 9 in

88 pages, 58 illustrations

hardback

2020, 978-3-03778-628-4, English
CHF 40.00

Oskar Schlemmer

Oskar Schlemmer completed an apprenticeship as an applied arts draughtsman in Stuttgart’s school of marquetry. In 1906 he enrolled at the Stuttgart Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) and subsequently received a scholarship to the Akademie der bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Berlin. After serving in the First World War, he designed the first figurines for the Triadic Ballet. It premiered in 1922 in Stuttgart, the year before Schlemmer was appointed to the Weimar State Bauhaus, where he headed the stage workshop from 1923. After a successful tour of Germany by his Bauhaus theater group, in 1929 he left the school and took up a professorship at the Staatliche Akademie für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe (State Academy of Art and Applied Art) in Breslau (Wrocław, today Poland). In 1932 he was appointed to the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe (United States Schools of Art and Applied Art) in Berlin. After the National Socialists rose to power, he was dismissed and spent a few months in Switzerland before settling in Baden near the Swiss border in 1934. Four years later he returned to Stuttgart and took a job in a store selling painters’ supplies. In 1940 he moved to Wuppertal, where he found work with a paint manufacturer, who also employed Georg Muche and Willi Baumeister, among others. Diagnosed with jaundice, Schlemmer died in a Baden-Baden sanatorium in 1943.

Albert Gleizes

Cubism

CHF 45.00
Bauhausbücher, vol. 13