Oskar Schlemmer completed an apprenticeship as an applied arts draughtsman in Stuttgart’s school of marquetry. In 1906 he enrolled at the Stuttgart Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) and subsequently received a scholarship to the Akademie der bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Berlin. After serving in the First World War, he designed the first figurines for the Triadic Ballet. It premiered in 1922 in Stuttgart, the year before Schlemmer was appointed to the Weimar State Bauhaus, where he headed the stage workshop from 1923. After a successful tour of Germany by his Bauhaus theater group, in 1929 he left the school and took up a professorship at the Staatliche Akademie für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe (State Academy of Art and Applied Art) in Breslau (Wrocław, today Poland). In 1932 he was appointed to the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe (United States Schools of Art and Applied Art) in Berlin. After the National Socialists rose to power, he was dismissed and spent a few months in Switzerland before settling in Baden near the Swiss border in 1934. Four years later he returned to Stuttgart and took a job in a store selling painters’ supplies. In 1940 he moved to Wuppertal, where he found work with a paint manufacturer, who also employed Georg Muche and Willi Baumeister, among others. Diagnosed with jaundice, Schlemmer died in a Baden-Baden sanatorium in 1943.
