Oskar Schlemmer Lot n° 20

Oskar Schlemmer Nude and Woman Around 1925 Watercolour and pencil on very thin paper, mounted on cardboard. The motif outlined linearly in pencil 17.6 x 6.4 cm (cardboard 20.5 x 8.7 cm) Framed under glass. Not signed. - Inscribed in pencil with the work number "528" (Hans Hildebrandt) in the margin lower left. - Overall slightly browned. With small superficial paper damage in the fund laterally right. v. Maur A 194 Provenance Galerie Krugier, Geneva; Galerie Herbert Meyer-Ellinger, Frankfurt (1974); private collection Northern Germany Exhibitions Stuttgart 1953 (Württembergischer Kunstverein), Oskar Schlemmer, memorial exhibition on the 10th anniversary of his death, cat. No. 207; Bern 1959 (Kunsthalle Bern), Oskar Schlemmer, cat. No. 108; touring exhibition Hanover/ Mannheim/ Saarbrücken/ Ulm/ Wiesbaden/ Karlsruhe/ Dortmund/ Kiel/ Pforzheim/ Lübeck/ Bremen 1960/1961 (Kestner-Gesellschaft/ Städtische Kunsthalle/ Saarland-Museum/ Ulmer Museum/ Nassauischer Kunstverein/ Badischer Kunstverein/ Museum am Ostwall/ Kunsthalle, Schleswig-Holsteinischer Kunstverein/ Kunst- und Gewerbeverein Industriehaus/ Overbeck-Gesellschaft/ Kunstverein Bremen), Oskar Schlemmer, Handzeichnungen - Aquarelle, cat. No. 33; Geneva 1964 (Galerie Krugier), Oskar Schlemmer, Suites No. 6, cat. No. 46; Geneva 1972 (Galerie Krugier), Le Silence des Autres, cat. No. 3 with ill.; Geneva 1973 (Musée Rath), Art du XXe Siècle, Collections genevoises, cat. No. 80 with ill. p. 100; Cologne 1974 (International Art Market), Galerie Jan Krugier Geneva Literature Hans Hildebrandt (ed.), Oskar Schlemmer. Monographie, Munich 1952, Oskar Schlemmer: Katalog des Werks, no. 528, p. 142 ("Nudes and Women", here dated "ca. 1924/1925") The year 1925 was a year of upheaval for Oskar Schlemmer as a teacher at the Bauhaus. In March of that year, all of the teachers in Weimar had been dismissed, and only after some deliberation did Schlemmer decide to go with Walter Gropius to Dessau, where the Bauhaus was to find its new home. Artistically, Schlemmer's visual production of this period operates in the field of tension between sculpture and painting, stage and architecture, and thus embodies the universal claim of the Bauhaus doctrine in an impressive manner. At the center of his art is unmistakably the human being, who for him is not a representational motif, but rather a cosmic being and world totality. Our watercolour provides an illuminating insight into Schlemmer's explorations of the forms of the human being between (meta-)physical being and physiognomic individuality. Almost allegorically, the specific dualism of Schlemmer's world view seems to fan out in the opposing side views of a woman in a blue dress and a naked male nude. Schlemmer places the two figures precisely in front of each other, their strict tectonics seeming less to pause than to be caught in a moment of movement. The passage of two figures is thus revealed to the viewer, and at the same time the passage of spatiality and time, the modes of representation of which the artist Oskar Schlemmer is able to vary masterfully.