Interior with Four Figures, Roman

Four figures share a shallow, stage-like room, two men and two women, built up like painted sculpture on flat geometric planes. They overlap, yet none of them looks at another or seems aware the others are there. Schlemmer gave the 1925 canvas a double name, Roman, or Four Figures in Space, though some catalogues count five. Within a decade the new government in Germany had decided that pictures like this had no place in a German museum. In 1937 it was taken from a public collection and hung in the Munich exhibition of so-called degenerate art, staged to make modern painting look ridiculous. Two years later it was for sale, handled by the dealer Karl Buchholz for the Propaganda Ministry, which was quietly turning confiscated modern art into foreign currency. Kunstmuseum Basel bought it in 1939, one of a small group of these expelled works, with a special credit granted for the purpose. It has hung in Basel ever since.