Getty Museum

Oskar Schlemmer

Date

1926–1927

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

Object ID

a0b1b67e-98be-4ae0-b1b1-24168f786d06

> Oskar Schlemmer, a painter and leading figure in German experimental theater, was teaching at the Bauhaus when László Moholy-Nagy arrived there in 1923. This portrait of Schlemmer is one of a series of four pictures taken on the same day on the balcony of the Casa Fantoni in Ascona, Switzerland, where Moholy-Nagy and Lucia Moholy joined Schlemmer’s family for a vacation. Relaxing on a towel in the sun, Schlemmer becomes a design element in Moholy’s camera study of light and form. The shadows of the railing produce a kind of photogram on Schlemmer’s clothing, and the angle from which the picture was taken denies traditional perspective, flattening out the composition. In a variation on this image Moholy placed two dolls on a piece of paper in the same location as Schlemmer, imitating his position (see: [84.XP.124.3](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/33987/laszlo-moholy-nagy-puppen-american-1926-1927/), [84.XM.997.65](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/46649/laszlo-moholy-nagy-puppen-american-negative-1926-1927-print-1929/), and [85.XP.260.194](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/57551/laszlo-moholy-nagy-puppen-american-1926-1927/)). Without Schlemmer’s body filling the frame, the composition is even more successful in its palpable textural and tonal quality. It is also a more dramatic and menacing picture, with the dolls lying naked and helpless on the backs, trapped by the shadow grid of the railing, giving them a somewhat disturbing, Surrealist quality. Moholy-Nagy also photographed Schlemmer’s two daughters—undoubtedly the owners of the dolls—in this pose and made another variation with just one doll. > > Katherine Ware, *László Moholy-Nagy*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 48. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.

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