Oskar Schlemmer ‘Bauhaus Stairway’ (1931) Archival Print – Bauhaus Modernist Poster

This poster carries Oskar Schlemmer’s watercolour and pencil study for Bauhaus Stairway, the loose, luminous first version of a composition he would later resolve as a large oil. Figures climb a flight of stairs in pale washes of blue, grey and rose, their bodies measured against the geometry of the building around them.

Schlemmer taught at the Bauhaus for years and ran its theatre workshop, choreographing the Triadic Ballet in which dancers became geometric forms. The human figure in architectural space was his lifelong subject, and the stairway is its clearest statement. The image also carries the moment it was made: by 1932 the Bauhaus had been forced out of Dessau under political pressure and was making its final stand in Berlin before closing for good in 1933. Figures ascend towards something at the very moment the institution beneath them was being dismantled.

The study, dated 1931, has a provisionality the finished painting sets aside. Pencil construction lines still show through the colour, the washes stay translucent, and the climbing figures feel caught mid-step. Schlemmer worked up studies like this into the celebrated oil of 1932, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York; seeing the watercolour is a way of watching that picture take shape.

Our poster imagines the study shown in Bauhaus Watercolours at the Richmond Mews Gallery in February–March 1978, part of the renewed interest in Bauhaus design that ran through that decade. The layout rests on a cool, restrained palette and spare modernist typography, echoing the clarity the school itself stood for.

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