Head profile with a painterly quality
“The abstraction of the human form, which is what it is ultimately about, creates the image in a higher sense; it does not create the natural essence of man, but an artistic essence. It creates an analogy, a symbol of the human form,” said Oskar Schlemmer about his wall paintings in 1931. (In: Museum der Gegenwart, ed. Ludwig Justi, vol. 1, issue 4, 1st quarter 1931, pp. 147-153) The head profiles, such as the present elaborate pastel of a "Geneigte Halbfigur" (Tilted Half-length Figure), are essential details of his abstraction of the human gestalt. The profile, first conceived by Schlemmer as a signet for the Bauhaus in Weimar in the early 1920s, loses some of its austerity in the powdery surface of the pastel chalk. The profile of the young boy with a full head of hair, dreamily leaning slightly to the right, and his right hand in front of his torso embodies Schlemmer's quest for the ideal symbiosis of figure and space. The boy seems to be sitting on an invisible chair, the back of which supports his upper body. Two vertical surfaces open up an additional perspective, giving the situation a firm hold of a painterly quality. Schlemmer partially covered the surface of the painting, which is done in beige, brown, and red tones with light-blue pastel hatchings. What an amazing idea to use this gesture to simulate an even deeper space behind the actual motif, an effect that suggests a possible glazing, a future simulation on site.

Schlemmer's “Geneigte Halbfigur mit rötlichen Tönen” is part of a series of works on which the artist had been working since the mid to late 1920s. They are wall compositions in the broadest sense, such as those for the Mendelssohn house in Berlin and the design concept for the walls of the Minne fountain room at the Museum Folkwang. These are holistic figures and half-length portraits that Schlemmer had been drawing since his time in Weimar in the early 1920s, and which he continued to develop and adapt to the respective locations: “constructive pictorial forms consisting of geometrically abstract elements, strictly regulated in the way they are combined, precise in their means, yet full of sensuality in their effect [..]. In the consistent preservation of the human figure, he maintains his high sensitivity for measure, weight, proportion, tension, architecture, and structure. From the human being as the measure of all things, he derives the framework of the image and its symbolic value,” is how Will Grohmann summarized Schlemmer's work. (Wandgemälde von Oskar Schlemmer und Willy Baumeister, in: Das Werk 18, 1931, issue 7, p. 194) Thus, the Inclined Half-Figure is a vital detail for the development of Schlemmer's figure and space and is closely related, not only chronologically but also stylistically, to the exceptional wall frieze for Mendelsohn in Berlin and the expansive wall design for the Museum Folkwang in Essen.


“Whenever it is a matter of design,” said Oskar Schlemmer in 1931 about his wall paintings, "of free composition that does not have the approximation of nature as its primary goal – in short, whenever it is a matter of style – the nature of the figure assumes a doll-like quality. In all earlier cultures that were also advanced – in Egyptian, early Greek, and early Indian art – the human form is far removed from naturalistic representation but all the closer to the brief symbolic figure: the icon, the idol, the doll. These symbolic figures were initially nourished and generated by a religion of nature and of gods that is almost inconceivable to us today. And precisely for this reason, it was constrained within a finite, “strict regularity” to prevent the figure from dissolving into a formless infinity.This will always be close to the elementary, simple forms. It will be the vertical and horizontal and the cubic primary forms and their variations.” (In: Museum der Gegenwart, edited by Ludwig Justi, vol. 1, issue 4, 1st quarter 1931, pp. 147-153)





The Date
The date on this pastel, “30.1.1933”, is immediately striking: it was the day that would fundamentally change modern art. The Nazis came to power, and artists were defamed as “degenerate” and ousted from their positions, for example, as professors at the academies. Whether there is a connection between this political event and the date Oskar Schlemmer chose for this large-format pastel remains somewhat uncertain. But the following event on January 30, 1933, may well have affected the artist: on January 23, 1930, the Minister of State for the Interior and Education in Thuringia, Wilhelm Frick, ordered the collection of the Weimar City Palace to be “cleansed” of modern art. Frick, who had been the first minister of the NSDAP during the Weimar Republic, ensured that works by Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde, and others were removed from the collections and put into storage. Schlemmer's wall designs in the former Bauhaus building in Weimar remained untouched until Paul Schultze-Naumburg, the school's new director, who Nazi minister Frick appointed, had them destroyed as his first official act at the beginning of October 1930. The wall paintings were painted over, and the reliefs were chiseled off.

For Oskar Schlemmer, who left the Bauhaus in Dessau after his time in Weimar in 1925 to teach at the Academy of Art and Crafts in Breslau, the destruction of his murals was a harsh disappointment, as he wrote in a letter to the art critic Paul Westheim on October 8, 1930. Yet, he remains optimistic about the future: “[Y]ou might be interested to know about the removal of my murals and sculptures in Weimar last week, or rather the fact that they were painted over. I learned this from the custodian of the building, who helped me save some of the sculptures, albeit unstable ones. In his letter, he wrote, Everything has been painted over in white, which I and many others deeply regret. But there is nothing that can be done against the new zeitgeist. I do not know for sure which side this particular zeitgeist was kindled from, whether by Director Schultze, born Naumburg, or from Frick's Ministry of Culture. After all, these things have already defied the storm and the zeitgeist for five years. Nevertheless, we can find comfort in the fact that new life will blossom from the ruins. I have recently completed nine wall paintings for the Museum Folkwang in Essen, which will be shown here in the Silesian Museum briefly and then transported to Essen.” (Oskar Schlemmer. Idealist der Form. Letters, Diaries, Writings, ed. by Andreas Hüneke, Reclam, Leipzig 1990, p. 225) These lines speak for Schlemmer's seemingly boundless optimism. This was despite the fact that his avant-garde art had been defamed not only since 1930 but also after he had left Breslau for Berlin in 1933 and was dismissed from the Vereinigte Staatsschulen Berlin. He was eventually ostracized in the 1937 exhibition “Degenerate Art” in Munich. [MvL]