.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Kleine Sitzende in Schwarz was painted in 1935 when Schlemmer returned to painting following a period of personal turmoil. Ousted from his teaching position in Berlin by the Nazi regime in August 1933, and with his first major retrospective scheduled for Stuttgart cancelled and his Essen Folkwang wall paintings removed from show, Schlemmer and his young family undertook a series of travels before settling at rural Eichberg to the south of Baden in April 1934. Here Schlemmer busied himslf with paintings on a small scale - pictures of a type that were readily portable and could be easily hidden.
As is evinced by the present work, the human form always remained at the centre of Schlemmer's art. The teaching notes that he prepared for his Bauhaus pupils present an engaging prospectus of Schlemmer's idiosyncratic view of figure painting. His classes, offered in the late 1920s under the succinct rubric of 'Subject of instruction: man', sought to teach Schlemmer's tripartite conception of the representation of the human body - namely the formal, the biological and the philosophical.
'The part on figural representation', wrote Schlemmer, 'deals with the norms and systems of line, plane and solidity or plasticity: standard measurements, theories of proportion, Dürer's measurement and the Golden Section. These lead on to the laws of movement, the mechanics and kinetics of the body, both within itself and in space, both in natural space and in civilised space (building). Much weight is naturally given to the latter theme: the relationship of man to his habitation and its furnishing, to domestic appliances' (quoted in H. Kuchling (ed.), Oskar Schlemmer - Man, teaching notes from the Bauhaus, Cambridge, 1971, pp. 25-26).
As is evinced by the present work, the human form always remained at the centre of Schlemmer's art. The teaching notes that he prepared for his Bauhaus pupils present an engaging prospectus of Schlemmer's idiosyncratic view of figure painting. His classes, offered in the late 1920s under the succinct rubric of 'Subject of instruction: man', sought to teach Schlemmer's tripartite conception of the representation of the human body - namely the formal, the biological and the philosophical.
'The part on figural representation', wrote Schlemmer, 'deals with the norms and systems of line, plane and solidity or plasticity: standard measurements, theories of proportion, Dürer's measurement and the Golden Section. These lead on to the laws of movement, the mechanics and kinetics of the body, both within itself and in space, both in natural space and in civilised space (building). Much weight is naturally given to the latter theme: the relationship of man to his habitation and its furnishing, to domestic appliances' (quoted in H. Kuchling (ed.), Oskar Schlemmer - Man, teaching notes from the Bauhaus, Cambridge, 1971, pp. 25-26).