In 1920 Oskar Schlemmer was invited by Walter Gropius to join the Bauhaus school, which proved to be the perfect environment for his innovative ideas and artistic investigations to flourish. During his years at the Bauhaus, first in Weimar and later in Dessau, Schlemmer was employed as the ‘master’ in charge of the mural and stone carving workshops. He was made ‘master’ of the theatre workshop in 1923 and his explorations in architecture and dance led to his ground-breaking performance creations of ‘The Triadic Ballet’ and the ‘Bauhaus Dances’. The synthesis of art and architecture is most acutely felt in his paintings from this period, such as the present work in which he focused on positioning figures within a geoMetricas lly arranged pictorial space, formed by opposing horizontal, vertical and diagonal planes.
‘My themes – the human figure in space, its moving and stationary functions, sitting, lying, walking, standing – are as simple as they are universally valid.’
Schlemmer first introduced figures into his pictorial language in the early 1920s, as exemplified in the 1923 oil Tischgesellschaft (Group at a Table) (fig. 1), which presents a group of people in a dramatically conceived perspectival space. The contrast between the clearly defined perspective and the simplified human forms - solid, gently curved shapes, with barely indicted features - evokes a sense of classical harmony and lends a meditative quality to the composition.
This sense of mystical perception was informed by Schlemmer’s belief that the human form possessed an essential, truthful form. In Graue Jungmännergruppe, the artist does not aim to construct a narrative or allegorical composition but instead focuses on creating an extraordinarily refined composition of four figures. Seemingly frozen in space and t.mes , these figures embody Schlemmer’s belief in the dramatic impact of the simple actions of the human body in movement: standing, turning, coming and going.
In 1928 Schlemmer accepted a commission for a series of murals located in the fountain room of the Museum Folkwang in Essen. The Gesamtkunstwerk took two years to complete and focused on the artist’s central theme: the human figure and its relation to movement and space. Painted while the artist was still at the Bauhaus in Dessau, the present work is a remarkably resolved study for this group of murals entitled the 'Folkwang Zyklus'. Between 1928 and 1930, the artist produced a series of different versions for the mural cycle, before the final iteration was ultimately destroyed by the National Socialists in 1934 who categorised Schlemmer’s work as ‘degenerate’. Already shortly after its completion, the work was exhibited extensively throughout Germany and Switzerland.
While many of the pioneering artists who taught at the Bauhaus, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, championed geometric abstraction as the best way to express artistic vision, Schlemmer was unique among them for pursuing a proto-classical ideal that advocated the form of the human figure as the highest form of art. Graue Jungmännergruppe reflects the simplified, highly geometric figuration that Schlemmer developed during his Bauhaus years and which characterised many of his subsequent masterpieces.
