Oskar Schlemmer: Google Doodle pays tribute to the German artist

As  we all know Google Doodle does not leave any chance any famous personalities to pay its tribute, on Tuesday Google Doodle paid its tribute to a German painter, Sculptor, designer and choreographer Oskar Schlemmer on his 150 birth anniversary.

In the year 1923 Oskar Schlemmer was hired as Master of Form at the Bauhaus theatre workshop, after working at the workshop of sculpture. Oskar Schlemmer’s  most famous work is Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet), which saw costumed actors transformed into geometrical representations of the human body, that Schlemmer described as a “party of form and colour”. The Google dedicated its doodle to Oskar Schlemmer, showing a bulbous mechanical figures standing in a ballet pose and wearing a metallic mask.

If we talk about the Bulbous mechanical creatures wearing a metallic masks which are not usual things that comes to our mind when we think about ballet. But that’s precisely what Oskar Schlemmer used to stage his ‘Triadic Ballet,’ a ground breaking production that premiered in Stuttgart, Germany in 1922,” Google’s blog post on Tuesday’s doodle read.

Oskar Schlemmer’s  used to represent human bodies as architectural forms, reducing the figure to a rhythmic play between convex, concave and flat surfaces.

Who was Oskar Schlemmer?

Oskar Schlemmer was a German artist, who born in 1888 in Stuttgart, he was the youngest of his siblings. Oskar was 12 when his parents died, in the year 1903 he became independent and start working  as an apprentice in an inlay workshop, then he moved  to another apprenticeship in marquetry from 1905 to 1909.

Oskar Schlemmer was famous for his fascination for his divine and architectural aspect of the human body. He painted each and every possible movement into his complex art form and labelled every performance as “artistic metaphysical mathematics”, according to him, it was the purest form of physical aesthetics.

Schlemmer also painted the Bauhaustreppe or Bauhaus Stairway in 1932, after three years he left the art school, according to The Museum of Modern Art in New York that currently exhibits the ‘oil in canvas’ painting.

“The carefully choreographed arrangement of the figures and the man en pointe at the top of the stairs reflects Schlemmer’s role as the creator of many important dance and theatrical productions at the Bauhaus,” the museum’s website said.

Oskar Schlemmer work has also painted this work as Hitler assumed power, after before the Nazis closed the Bauhaus for good. He was banned to work an artist by the Naxi regime in the year 1930 due to his non- conformist style, Oskar Schlemmer breathed his last in melancholia in 1943. “Fensterbilder” (1942), a series of 18 mystical paintings painted by observing people from the window of his house, is considered Schlemmer’s last work.

Also read: Google doodle celebrates 107th birth anniversary of Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai