Josef Albers

Albers was a German-American was a painter, sculptor, architect and teacher who became Bauhaus master in 1925. He started studying art in Munich, then the Bauhaus in the early 1920's. He was asked to begin teaching a glass workshop at the Bauhaus in 1923 that mixed painting, crafts and design. In 1925 Albers moved with the Bauhaus to Dessau and then Berlin, teaching glass making and furniture design.

After the final closure of the Bauhaus in 1933, Albers moved to America and gained his citizenship in 1939 he taught at Black Mountain college and Yale university and painted some of his most famous pieces such as the square series where he experimented with colour theory this inspired Albers to create further series such as Variants, Biconjugates, Structural Constellations, and his sandblasted glass paintings.  Albers died in New Haven in 1976. The same year, the Josef Albers Foundation was established, and, in 1983, a museum dedicated to the artist was opened in Bottrop, Germany.

Oskar Schlemmer

Oskar Schlemmer studied applied graphic design at a marquetry workshop in Stuttgart from 1903 to 1905. Between 1906 and 1910, he studied for one semester at the school of applied arts in Stuttgart and then received a scholarship to the city’s Akademie der bildende Künste (academy of art). In 1911/12, Schlemmer worked as a freelance painter in Berlin and made contact with Herwarth Walden’s gallery, Der Sturm. In 1912, he returned to Stuttgart and became one of Adolf Hölzel’s master students. In 1913/14, he opened and directed the Neuer Kunstsalon (new art salon) in the Neckartor district. Together with Willi Baumeister and Hermann Stenner, he designed murals for the main hall of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) exhibition in Cologne in 1914. From 1914 to 1918, he served in the war. In 1920, he produced his first figurines for the Triadic Ballet, which was first performed in Stuttgart in 1922.

In January 1921, Schlemmer was appointed by Walter Gropius as one of the first masters at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar. As a master of form, he initially directed the wall painting department (alternating with Johannes Itten) and the stone sculpture workshop, and he also taught life drawing. From 1922 to 1923, he directed the stone sculpture workshop, the wood sculpture workshop (and the metal workshop temporarily) as a master of form. He also continued to teach life drawing. For the Bauhaus exhibition held in Weimar in 1923, Schlemmer contributed significantly to the fields of wall design, painting, sculpture, print graphics, advertising and the stage. From 1923 to 1929, he was the head of the stage workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. In 1927/28, he taught figure drawing and offered his course Der Mensch (the human being) from 1928. Schlemmer was the director of the Bauhaus stage’s national tour in 1928/29. He left the Bauhaus on 11th July 1929.

Triadisches Ballett
Inspired in part by Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and his observations and experiences during the First World War, Oskar Schlemmer began to conceive of the human body as a new artistic medium. He saw ballet and pantomime as free from the historical baggage of theatre and opera and thus able to present his ideas of choreographed geometry, man as dancer, transformed by costume, moving in space.
The idea of the ballet was based on the principle of the trinity. It has 3 acts, 3 participants (2 male, 1 female), 12 dances and 18 costumes. Each act had a different colour and mood. The first three scenes, against a lemon yellow background to affect a cheerful, burlesque mood; the two middle scenes, on a pink stage, festive and solemn and the final three scenes, on black, were intended to be mystical and fantastic.
He saw the movement of puppets and marionettes as aesthetically superior to that of humans, as it emphasised that the medium of every art is artificial. This artifice could be expressed through stylised movements and the abstraction of the human body. His consideration of the human form (the abstract geometry of the body e.g. a cylinder for the neck, a circle for head and eyes) led to the all important costume design, to create what he called his ‘figurine'. The music followed and finally the dance movements were decided.
Schlemmer saw the modern world driven by two main currents, the mechanised (man as machine and the body as a mechanism) and the primordial impulses (the depths of creative urges). He claimed that the choreographed geometry of dance offered a synthesis, the Dionysian and emotional origins of dance, becomes strict and Apollonian in its final form.