The purpose of this paper is to examine the major theme of Oskar Schlemmer(1888~ 1943)’s ‘Figure and Space’ in relation to the educational ideology of Bauhaus. Bauhaus was an art school that existed in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The objective of the establishment was to pursue the integration of all areas of art, centering on architecture, especially industrial arts and fine arts. However, in 1923 they veered away from their original direction and intention toward objective functionalism, emphasizing the machine and technique. The teachers at Bauhaus evolved the ‘Bauhaus Style’ by applying rectangles and right angles to the painting, sculpture, architecture, and design.
Schlemmer, teaching at Bauhaus from 1923 to 1929, did his best to fit in with the educational ideology of the school. He had great interest in the ideology of Bauhaus that sought to integrate all forms of art centered on architecture. In 1923, he produced a number of murals with figures on the walls along the hallways and the stairs of the workshops. The motions of the figures schematized here give the impression of floating in the air beyond 2-dimensional plane, and the mural obtains the characteristic of being unified into the architecture. Schlemmer recognized the importance of non-mechanization, along with the age of machines and techniques, that the educational ideology of Bauhaus focused on since 1923. He found the possibility of non-mechanization from his major theme, ‘figure,’ and pursued the ‘typical figure’ that transcends the age while maintaining the properties of the mechanical age. In other words, he tried to reach the world of essence through “humans” in the background of the ever-changing visual phenomena during the chaotic age at the beginning of the 20th century, where reason and contradiction ruled the world along with wars, revolutions, and the development of science. In his approaches, Jakob Bohme’s image of the ideal human that overcame the differences between individuals and the gender, Carl Gustav Carus’s symbolic human that approached essence by moving away from chances, and Ludwig Klages’s human movement acted as the ideological background. With such ideological influences, as well as the influence of cubism, Schlemmer emphasized mathematical regularity and successfully induced the balance between the typical figure and the space in the system of solid geometric order.
The educational activities of Schlemmer brought quite a bit of success to stage art and one of his masterpieces, ‘Triadic Ballet,’ was performed during the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923. Schlemmer’s stage works are represented through the relationship between the typical images of the dancers and systematic movements, the relationship between dancers, and the relationship between the dancer and the space with the systematic movements of the dancers visually defining the borders of the space. These characteristics are also found in his paintings produced in the 1920’s and the beginning of 1930’s. The figures in the paintings form invisible linear rhythms through various sizes, motions, directions, and intervals, and the linear rhythm extends to the experience of time and space. Schlemmer’s paintings eventually extend to the wall, the space, and the architecture beyond the properties of isolated panel painting. This very extension matches the educational ideology of Bauhaus, which attempted to integrate all forms of art with architecture in its center. Especially, the unchanged postures of the typical figures that are absorbed into their movements without emotional disturbance, and the transparent colors applied to the figures and the spaces give us the mysterious atmosphere beyond the realm of the material world. Here, Schlemmer successfully realized his intention of expressing the things that cannot be mechanized, in a world where everything was mechanized, and that the dignity of man is unrestricted reality.