Biography

Oskar Schlemmer was a German artist and choreographer known for both his paintings and ballet productions. His acclaimed work The Triadic Ballet (1922), reflected Schlemmer’s interest in the convergence of colors, shapes, and human movement. “If today's arts love the machine, technology, and organization, if they aspire to precision and reject anything vague and dreamy, this implies an instinctive repudiation of chaos and a longing to find the form appropriate to our times,” he once said. Born on September 4, 1888 in Stuttgart, Germany, he studied both design and fine arts as a young man. Wounded while serving in World War I, Schlemmer returned to his hometown in 1916, where he helped update the curriculum for the Stuggart Academy of Fine Arts and attempted to have Paul Klee appointed as a faculty member. He went on to teach at Walter Gropius’s Weimar Bauhaus before the advent of the Nazi regime during the early 1930s. Over the following decade, the artist’s life was drastically altered by the Nazi’s restrictions, forcing him to earn a living working at a lacquer factory and paint traditional portraits and landscapes. Schlemmer died on April 13, 1943 in Baden-Baden, Germany. Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Albertina in Vienna, among others.