weimar republic germanyconcept:era modern

Bauhaus Stairway

Name: Provenio Provenance Knowledge Graph
License: https://provenio.art/terms

Oil on canvas by Oskar Schlemmer (1932). Figures ascend the famous Dessau Bauhaus staircase — rendered as smooth, archetypal, anonymous forms moving through geometric architectural space. Painted in the year the Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close. MoMA, New York.

Scholarly Significance

Schlemmer's farewell to the Bauhaus — painted in the year it was forced to close; key Bauhaus elegy node.

Notes

·Painted in Dessau in 1932, the year the city's Nazi-controlled government expelled the Bauhaus.
·The staircase shown is the iconic Gropius-designed glass-and-steel workshop stairway — recognizable to any Bauhaus visitor.
·MoMA acquired the work in 1942 — one of its first Schlemmer acquisitions — and it became the defining image of the museum's Bauhaus holdings.
·The figures wear clothing but are faceless — universal, archetypal, de-individualized in the Bauhaus spirit.
·Schlemmer's work was exhibited in the 1937 Entartete Kunst show; this canvas had already left Germany.