Schlemmer's "Sinnender" (Contemplator, 1931) is based on the painting of the same name from 1925, which was confiscated from the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in 1937 by the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts for the exhibition "Degenerate Art" in Munich and has been considered lost ever since. The painting was probably the last one made before a three-year break during which Schlemmer considered giving up painting entirely in favor of stage work. Since 1925, the creator of the "Triadic Ballet" (1922), which quickly became world-famous due to its visionary progressiveness, was stage director at the Dessau Bauhaus. It was not until 1928 that Schlemmer began to make paintings in which he revisited his central theme of the figure in space. After he was appointed by the State Academy of Arts and Applied Arts in Breslau (today Wroclaw) in 1929, he reached a painterly quality in depicting light and shade. Our watercolor of the "Sinnender" is also characterized by this particularly gently lighting effect and the figure’s plasticity. The cut elbow creates a strong emphasis on the horizontal level, which determines, alongside the vertical level defined by the table’s leg and the diagonal level of the head and the upper body, the location of the contemplator in the image space. Schlemmer's painting thrives on this exciting approach to the figure, a stylistic device he implemented masterfully in the painting "Bauhaus Stairs" (Museum of Modern Art, New York), which he created a year later. In contrast to the "Bauhaus Stairs", Schlemmer's "Sinnender" is one of the rare examples in which the artist not only addresses his central theme of the figure in space, but also deals with the long art historical tradition of the "Thinker" motif. The Bauhaus artist Schlemmer found a completely new approach to this art-historically important iconography, that he took to the modern age, while it had its beginnings in Dürer's famous copperplate engraving "Melencolia I" (1514) and was continued by, among others, Rodin and his famous sculpture of the "Thinker". (1880/82). Dürer's highly complex depiction of "Melencolia I", who props up her head and gazes in contemplation, is considered an allegorical self-portrait of the artist and one of the first depictions of the artistic genius. A diary entry from 1928 shows that Schlemmer also attached particular importance to the motif of the "Sinnender". He noted that the today lost painting "Sinnender" was one of the four paintings that he would definitely not want to miss in an estate exhibition (cf. diary entry of January 18, 1928). The fact that Schlemmer took up this motif again in 1931 in our painterly, large-format watercolor and that he advanced its composition underlines the outstanding importance that this work has in Schlemmer's oeuvre. This melancholic motif, that emanates a notion of resignation, might have become meaningful for Schlemmer at the height of his creativity in view of the increasing defamation by the National Socialists in 1931. [JS]