拍品專文
This work was executed during turbulent times for Schlemmer. In the autumn of 1929 he had left the Bauhaus to take up a new position at the Staatliche Akademie für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe in Breslau. Shortly afterwards the Prussian government reduced its support for art academies due to the Depression, and in the spring of 1932 the Breslau academy closed down. In the summer of that year Schlemmer found a post in the Vereinigte Staatschulen für Kunst in Berlin - at the same time the Bauhaus was being dissolved by the National Socialist council in Dresden.
Schlemmer was not a politically active artist, but he also had no desire to ally himself with National Socialism. Despite being a loyal German citizen and a veteran of the First World War, he considered the fervent xenophobia that prevailed amongst the Nationalists to constitute "...a terrible threat for our cultural life". (Diary entry, 30 Oct. 1930, in ed. T. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, Middletown, 1972, pp. 271-272). In March 1933 the Nationalists banned an exhibition of his work at the Stuttgart Künstlerbund and five months later he was dismissed from his position at the Vereinigte Staatschulen für Kunst.
It was against this political background that Schlemmer executed his most important painting, Bauhaustreppe (K. von Maur, G. 267, The Museum of Modern Art, New York), to which this work is closely related. Geneigter Kopf nach links is a fragment depicting the head of a figure from a Bauhaustreppe composition, painted the same year as the MOMA picture, but which was later divided into three parts.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s Schlemmer concentrated on positioning figures within a pictorial space, which he formed by opposing diagonal and vertical planes. In 1925 the artist had explored this theme in an essay entitled Mensch und Kunstfigur in which he examined the relationship between man and space (published in Die Bühne im Bauhaus, Munich, 1925, p. 7-43). In the present canvas the juxtaposition of the outline of the figure with the clearly delineated background strongly conveys the spatial depth that Schlemmer was striving to achieve.
Schlemmer was not a politically active artist, but he also had no desire to ally himself with National Socialism. Despite being a loyal German citizen and a veteran of the First World War, he considered the fervent xenophobia that prevailed amongst the Nationalists to constitute "...a terrible threat for our cultural life". (Diary entry, 30 Oct. 1930, in ed. T. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, Middletown, 1972, pp. 271-272). In March 1933 the Nationalists banned an exhibition of his work at the Stuttgart Künstlerbund and five months later he was dismissed from his position at the Vereinigte Staatschulen für Kunst.
It was against this political background that Schlemmer executed his most important painting, Bauhaustreppe (K. von Maur, G. 267, The Museum of Modern Art, New York), to which this work is closely related. Geneigter Kopf nach links is a fragment depicting the head of a figure from a Bauhaustreppe composition, painted the same year as the MOMA picture, but which was later divided into three parts.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s Schlemmer concentrated on positioning figures within a pictorial space, which he formed by opposing diagonal and vertical planes. In 1925 the artist had explored this theme in an essay entitled Mensch und Kunstfigur in which he examined the relationship between man and space (published in Die Bühne im Bauhaus, Munich, 1925, p. 7-43). In the present canvas the juxtaposition of the outline of the figure with the clearly delineated background strongly conveys the spatial depth that Schlemmer was striving to achieve.