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Lot Essay
Schlemmer left the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1929, to take up a professorship at the Silesian Art Academy in Breslau. He stayed in Breslau for three years, a period which was among the most productive and intense in the artist's life. Finally he was given the time, that at the Bauhaus he claims he was forced to 'steal' (letter from OS to Willi Baumeister, 15th February 1928; in T. Schlemmer, ed.: The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer (LDOS), transl. K. Winston, Illinois 1990, p. 227). Schlemmer had reached the zenith of his career, participating at almost all of the major exhibitions in Germany and Europe, being commissioned to produce several wall decorations and stage sets, including the mural cycle for the Folkwang Museum in Essen and the scenes for Schönberg's opera Die glckliche Hand at the Kroll-Oper in Berlin.
Brustbild nach links in Hell-Dunkel-Streifen was painted in 1932, the same year as Geländerszene and Bauhaustreppe, the artist's last major work now considered a masterpiece in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and before his career fell full victim to Nazi cultural politics. Schlemmer was afforded even more time to work on his new series due to the closure of the Breslau academy in April of that year, and the freedom he had to remain there and work solely on painting until the autumn, a period of calm, before the storm. In another letter to Baumeister he laments the loss of this sanctuary: ‘Last day in Breslau, in the only nice studio, which I leave very reluctantly. I live and cook in it too. Lovely view over the Dominsel and the greenery, and quiet in the Academy’ (OS to WB, 29th September 1932; Oskar Schlemmer-Archiv, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart).
The present work illustrates a side-portrait built up of carefully choreographed gradients of colour. The subject matter as well as stylistic elements of this work - the structural motif of dark and light vertical lines suggesting bars and stairways - link the work closely to Geländerszene. Schlemmer recorded a ‘crisis’ in his diary: ‘either I draw the curtain once again and plunge myself into total darkness...or I commit myself to all out use of colour, not for decorative purposes but as an essential element of painting’ (OS diary entry, 4th September 1932; LDOS, pp. 301–02). The use of thick, unstretched canvas illustrates Schlemmer's continuing adherence to the ideals of the Bauhaus movement and the constant search to unify arts and crafts. Schlemmer's coarse canvas is primed with gesso in a manner reminiscent of fresco technique, combining his role of craftsman and artist. The early orientation of the Bauhaus towards painting suggests a deeper level of nostalgia at work in his 1932 paintings; it is certainly difficult not to recall Kandinsky’s description of ‘dramatic’ and ‘light’ qualities given by an ‘upward-tending vertical format’ in his Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, published in Dessau in 1926 and the more general utopian tone of his book in trying to find a rigorous scientific basis for the description of the elements of pictorial form.
Brustbild nach links in Hell-Dunkel-Streifen was painted in 1932, the same year as Geländerszene and Bauhaustreppe, the artist's last major work now considered a masterpiece in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and before his career fell full victim to Nazi cultural politics. Schlemmer was afforded even more time to work on his new series due to the closure of the Breslau academy in April of that year, and the freedom he had to remain there and work solely on painting until the autumn, a period of calm, before the storm. In another letter to Baumeister he laments the loss of this sanctuary: ‘Last day in Breslau, in the only nice studio, which I leave very reluctantly. I live and cook in it too. Lovely view over the Dominsel and the greenery, and quiet in the Academy’ (OS to WB, 29th September 1932; Oskar Schlemmer-Archiv, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart).
The present work illustrates a side-portrait built up of carefully choreographed gradients of colour. The subject matter as well as stylistic elements of this work - the structural motif of dark and light vertical lines suggesting bars and stairways - link the work closely to Geländerszene. Schlemmer recorded a ‘crisis’ in his diary: ‘either I draw the curtain once again and plunge myself into total darkness...or I commit myself to all out use of colour, not for decorative purposes but as an essential element of painting’ (OS diary entry, 4th September 1932; LDOS, pp. 301–02). The use of thick, unstretched canvas illustrates Schlemmer's continuing adherence to the ideals of the Bauhaus movement and the constant search to unify arts and crafts. Schlemmer's coarse canvas is primed with gesso in a manner reminiscent of fresco technique, combining his role of craftsman and artist. The early orientation of the Bauhaus towards painting suggests a deeper level of nostalgia at work in his 1932 paintings; it is certainly difficult not to recall Kandinsky’s description of ‘dramatic’ and ‘light’ qualities given by an ‘upward-tending vertical format’ in his Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, published in Dessau in 1926 and the more general utopian tone of his book in trying to find a rigorous scientific basis for the description of the elements of pictorial form.