Lot 79 Dα

The human being unmistakably stands at the centre of Schlemmer's art and is, for him, not a representational motif but a cosmic being and world-totality. As a teacher at the Bauhaus, 1925 was a year of upheaval for Oskar Schlemmer. In March of that year, the entire teaching staff in Weimar was dismissed, and it was only after thinking the matter over that Schlemmer decided to go with Walter Gropius to Dessau, where the Bauhaus was to find its new site.

Our watercolour provides illuminating insight into Schlemmer's investigations of the manifest forms of humankind between (meta)physical being and physiognomic individual. The dualism specific to Schlemmer's worldview seems to unfold in an almost allegorical form in the profile views of a woman in a blue dress and an undressed male nude facing in opposite directions. In a foil-like manner, Schlemmer has placed the two figures exactly in front of one another, although - in their strict tectonic character - they seem less to be standing still than to have been captured in a moment of movement. Thus the work reveals to its viewers the passage of two figures and simultaneously the passage of spatiality and time, whose modes of depiction Oskar Schlemmer was able to vary in a masterful manner.