Oskar Schlemmer

Wandfries im Haus Mendelsohn Berlin, Wandbildentwurf, 1930

Oskar Schlemmer, a student of Adolf Hölzel in Stuttgart around 1910 and an outstanding lecturer at the Bauhaus, never saw the human being as a mere motif but always considered it as part of an all-encompassing reference system. For him, the human being was a cosmic creature, a world totality consisting of intellect, nature and soul. Via the development of his ‘differentiating human’, an artificial figure shortened in a stereotyped manner, and emphasizing the basic functional and proportional correlations, Schlemmer arrived at the ideal representation of the human figure. The two large-format wall pictures Schlemmer created as friezes for the private home of architect Erich Mendelssohn in Berlin show his ideal human integrated in a spatial concept. Architecture and human figure complement each other – also within the unusual oblong format – into a universally conceived overall concept.