Google has created a doodle of a ballet dancer in the abstract style of Oskar Schlemmer, to honour the German designer on his 150th birth anniversary.
"Bulbous mechanical creatures wearing metallic masks are not the usual image that comes to mind when one thinks of ballet. But that’s precisely what Oskar Schlemmer used to stage his ‘Triadic Ballet,’ a groundbreaking production that premiered in Stuttgart, Germany in 1922," Google's blog post on Tuesday's doodle read.
Schlemmer was a painter and sculptor renowned for his theatre designs and choreography. His works of abstract art mostly represented human bodies as architectural forms, reducing the figure to a rhythmic play between convex, concave and flat surfaces.
One of the founding professors of the Bauhaus, a school of art and design famous for architectural design, and the Bauhaus theatre workshop, his visionary contributions to 20th-century avant-garde art are epitomised in his dance creations and stage design.
He became known internationally with his ‘Triadic Ballett’ in Stuttgart in 1922, a dance with Utopian costumes, which move and dance like ambulant architecture.
The human figure is at the centre of Schlemmer's work, in a continuous dialogue with the space around it, as in ‘Egocentric Space Lineature’ (1924). He painted the Bauhaustreppe or Bauhaus Stairway in 1932, three years after he left the art school, according to The Museum of Modern Art in New York that currently exhibits the 'oil in canvas' painting. "The carefully choreographed arrangement of the figures and the man en pointe at the top of the stairs reflects Schlemmers role as the creator of many important dance and theatrical productions at the Bauhaus," the museum's website said. Schlemmer painted this work as Hitler assumed power, shortly before the Nazis closed the Bauhaus for good.
Schlemmer was banned from working as an artist by the Nazi regime in 1930 because of his non-conformist style, and he died of melancholia in 1943. "Fensterbilder" (1942), a series of 18 mystical paintings painted by observing people from the window of his house, is considered Schlemmer's last work.
Wednesday's doodle is visible in over 15 countries including Germany, the U.K., Austria, Spain, India, China, Australia, Argentina, and Japan among others.
