Oskar Schlemmer

Oskar Schlemmer was the Bauhaus artist who turned the human body into geometry and set it dancing. At the famous German design school in the 1920s he ran the theatre workshop, and his masterpiece was the Triadic Ballet, in which dancers wore padded, spinning-top costumes of discs, cones and spirals that reshaped them into moving sculpture.

Everything in it was built on the number three, three dancers, three acts, colours moving from cheerful yellow through pink to a solemn black. His paintings did something similar, quiet figures on staircases and in bare rooms, simplified into calm, weighty forms, always circling the same question of the human being in modern space.

The Nazis had no patience for any of it. Dismissed from teaching in 1933, Schlemmer saw his work hung in the 1937 Degenerate Art show meant to mock modern painting, and to survive he took a job camouflaging a paint and lacquer factory. He died, worn down and largely forgotten, in 1943, his ballet costumes now icons of Bauhaus design.