Oskar Schlemmer Bauhaus Stairway Poster

Bauhaus Stairway shows students climbing a stairway with calm, upright, almost weightless purpose, their figures measured against the geometry of the building around them. Oskar Schlemmer painted this oil in 1932, and the date carries the whole meaning of the picture.

By 1932 the Bauhaus had been forced out of Dessau under mounting political pressure and was making its final stand in Berlin; within a year it would close for good. Schlemmer had taught at the school for years and run its celebrated theatre workshop, choreographing the Triadic Ballet in which dancers became geometric forms. His lifelong subject was the human figure in architectural space, the body set against structure, and here the structure is the Bauhaus building itself. The painting reads now as an elegy: figures ascending towards something at the very moment the institution beneath them was being dismantled.

Schlemmer’s later years were hard. His work was condemned as degenerate under the Nazi regime, and he died in 1943 with much of his late output unseen. Bauhaus Stairway had already left Germany: Alfred Barr saw it in Stuttgart in 1933, days before a Nazi review forced the show to close, and arranged for Philip Johnson to buy it. It entered the Museum of Modern Art in New York as Johnson’s gift in 1942, where it became one of the defining images of the school.

Our poster imagines the painting shown at the Royal School of Painting in Knightsbridge, London, between April and June 1975, drawing on the renewed interest in Bauhaus design that ran through that decade. The layout pairs the composition with restrained modernist typography, echoing the clarity and order the school itself stood for.

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