The Bauhaus Stairway, Oskar Schlemmer (1932) | Culture
Portrait of the weekCultureThe Bauhaus Stairway, Oskar Schlemmer (1932)
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Artist: Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943), painter, sculptor and theatre designer, did his most celebrated work as director of stage research and production at the Bauhaus, the 20th century's most influential school of art, architecture and design. He created a provocative series of robotic ballets for the Bauhaus in Weimar from 1923, and at its new home in Dessau from 1926 until he left in 1928. Schlemmer's art can be seen as a manifesto for a robot society, both artistically, as it mocks the late-Romantic individualism of German painters such as Emil Nolde and Max Beckmann, and politically: in the wake of the Russian revolution a deindividualised, machine communism was very alluring.
Subject: Students ascend the staircase of the Dessau Bauhaus. The Bauhaus was launched as a centre of art and design education in 1919 with Walter Gropius's Proclamation of the Weimar Bauhaus, in which he called for "a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions, which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist". Harking back to Ruskin and Morris's ideas for a communal, craft-guild art and way of life, the Bauhaus encompassed politics from democratic socialism to communism, not to mention obscure religious beliefs. Its teachers included Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Wassily Kandinsky. By 1923, when Schlemmer became director of the Bauhaus Stage, Gropius was committing the institution to a belief in mass production and functional design. Later, it came under severe attack for its alien, supposedly Marxist modernity from far-right politicians. In 1932, the Bauhaus left Dessau, disbanding permanently soon afterwards. In 1933 Hitler became chancellor of Germany.
Distinguishing features: This painting is a farewell. All but one of the students on an ordinary day at the Bauhaus are walking away from us, up the stairs, towards the huge windows - the Bauhaus belongs in a higher realm than this one. Only one figure comes towards us, not so much walking as dancing on tiptoes. Perhaps there is still hope.
Schlemmer painted this in the year the Bauhaus was forced to abandon its beautiful modern building in Dessau. Another image, Yamawaki's collage The End of the Dessau Bauhaus (1932), makes no bones about what this meant: it shows a jackbooted Nazi leading a moustached politician to stomp on the Bauhaus.
Schlemmer's painting is more elegiac, looking back at the Bauhaus as a utopia rooted in everyday life: these are ordinary, modern young people, hair and clothes in contemporary fashions, walking purposefully, intently; they believe in what they are doing. They have the rounded, simplified, geometrical bodies that Schlemmer created in his ballets, as they ascend to the higher state of modern marionettes. And yet this is not a mad or violent idealism. There is humour and grace to it. The Dessau Bauhaus, designed by Gropius, was a beautifully calm and spatially free modern building, and in this painting the staircase forms a dynamic, brilliantly lit modern stage. In grace and seriousness of movement, and in the rational theatre of modern architecture, the painting asserts a vision of a new society. But this future is receding from us.
Inspirations and influences: Schlemmer's ideas were born in dialogue with fellow Bauhaus teachers such as Moholy-Nagy, whose Light-Space Modulator (1922-30) is a seductive modernist lighthouse.
Where is it? The Museum of Modern Art, New York
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