Google doodle remembers Oskar Schlemmer - Painter, Sculptor, Designer and Choreographer

Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) was one of the most versatile all-rounders of the last century and as unusual as a painter as he was as a sculptor, draughtsman, graphic artist, stage designer, wall designer, creator of epochal dance projects and author.

Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) was one of the most versatile all-rounders of the last century and as unusual as a painter as he was as a sculptor, draughtsman, graphic artist, stage designer, wall designer, creator of epochal dance projects and author.

Google Doodle is celebrating his 130th birth anniversary.

His vision was the new man living in functional architecture, thinking clearly and acting clearly in the modern age which would never again sink into the chaos of war.

His single subject was the human figure, which he reduced to puppet-like, two-dimensional shapes that were expressive of the human body as a perfect system of proportions and functions analogous to the machine age.

Oskar Schlemmer was the youngest of six children born in September 1888 in Stuttgart, Germany. His parents, both died around 1900 and the young Oskar lived with his sister and learned at an early age to provide for himself. By 1903 he was working in an inlay workshop as an apprentice to support himself as a completely independent person then moved on to another apprenticeship in marquetry from 1905 to 1909.

Oskar painted some of his first important works having moved to Berlin in 1910, he returned to Stuttgart in 1912 as Adolf H?lzel's master pupil. In 1914 Schlemmer was enlisted to fight on the Western Front in World War I until he was wounded and moved to a position with the military cartography unit in Colmar, where he resided until returning to work under H?lzel in 1918.

Oskar got married to Helena Tutein in 1920 after turning to sculpture in 1919. Schlemmer was invited to Weimar by Walter Gropius to run the mural-painting and sculpture departments at the Bauhaus School before heading up the theater workshop in 1923. His ideas were influential in making him one of the most important teachers working at the school during his time. In 1929 Schlemmer resigned his position and moved to take up a job at the Art Academy in Breslau.

The Schlemmers then moved to Eichberg near the Swiss border. Unable to show or sell his work, Schlemmer's painting took on a decidedly mystical tone. The former balance that Schlemmer achieved between the rounded conical forms of his figures and their placement on a two-dimensional surface gave way to very flat, almost transparent, figures bathed in a mystical light.

In 1937 Schlemmer moved to Sehringen before his pictures were displayed at the National Socialist exhibition of "Degenerate Art." Schlemmer's last years were spent working at a paint factory owned by Kurt Herbert in Wuppertal. The factory offered Schlemmer the opportunity to paint without the fear of persecution.

His last series, the so-called "Window Pictures," were very small pictures painted while looking out the window of his house and observing neighbors engaged in their domestic tasks. During the summer of 1942, Schlemmer fell ill. After clinical treatments at numerous hospitals, Oskar Schlemmer died in Baden-Baden in April 1943.

His work was a rejection of pure abstraction, instead retaining a sense of the human, though not in the emotional sense but in view of the physical structure of the human.

He represented bodies as architectural forms, reducing the figure to a rhythmic play between convex, concave and flat surfaces. And not just of its form, he was fascinated by every movement the body could make; trying to capture it in his work In 1998, Schlemmer's Idealistic Encounter (1928) was sold for $1.487 million at Sotheby's in New York.