ABSTRACT
Oskar Schlemmer, who died in 1943, is probably the least known of the "masters" who dominated the Bauhaus in its most creative period. Among his immediate contemporaries, Schlemmer was closest perhaps to Feininger. Both men were profoundly influenced by Cubism, and their entire mature oeuvres derive from a very personal development of Cubist pictorial syntax. Like L. Feininger, too, Schlemmer favored a kind of crystalline light—earthbound in its origins, but essentially a medium of metaphysical yearning. What separated Schlemmer even from Feininger, however, was this obsessive interest in the human figure as the central motif and symbol of his art—indeed, as the central motif and symbol of reality itself. Schlemmer wished to convert the figure into an element of a transcendent geometrical vision. For such a vision, the human body was no longer the imperfect psychological resident of the normal workaday world; it was a sublime mechanism functioning according to the metaphysical laws of an ideal geometry.
