Oskar Schlemmer joined the Bauhaus in 1920, employed initially as the master in charge of the mural and stone carving workshops and then from 1923 as master of the theatre workshop. While many of the pioneering artists who taught alongside him at the Bauhaus, including 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 representation of the human figure as the highest form of art. His belief that the human form possessed an essential truth would shape his artistic practice throughout his career and is evident in the present work.
Painted in 1936, Gespräch (Conversation) dates from the years Schlemmer spent in effective exile in South Baden following the rise of the National Socialists and his dismissal from his teaching post at the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe in Berlin (he had left the Bauhaus in 1929). After a two-year hiatus during which he painted almost nothing, Schlemmer resumed work in 1935, continuing to develop the simplified, geometric figuration characteristic of his Bauhaus years. That same stylization is immediately apparent in Gespräch (Conversation) although the tone of the work is somewhat different. The same belief in the dramatic impact of the human body’s simplest actions remains, but the close-up focus and darker, diffuse background introduce a heightened sense of urgency. Describing a work of the same title dating from the previous year, Ina Conzen writes that it ‘conveys the “simple emotion” of silent fellow-feeling and spiritual closeness in an intimate way not found during the Bauhaus years’ (Ina Conzen, in Exh. Cat., Oskar Schlemmer. Visions of a New World, Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, 2014-15, p. 134). This sense of emotion and the immediacy of Schlemmer’s technique marks Gespräch (Conversation) out as a significant example of the artist’s later work.
