A pioneer of abstract art and dance associated with the Bauhaus, Oskar Schlemmer was primarily concerned with the figure in space, which he explored through painting, sculpture, and choreography. Schlemmer was appointed to run the sculpture and mural-painting workshops at the Bauhaus in 1920—the same year that Paul Klee entered its faculty—before he moved into the theater workshop. In his most famous work, an internationally performed avant-garde dance, Triadisches Ballet (Triadic Ballet), which premiered in 1922, figures are transformed into geometric shapes. Schlemmer approached abstraction by treating the human figure in a flat and schematic fashion, and his experience with dance was expressed in paintings such as The Dancer (1923) and The Gesture, Dancer (1922), in which the stylized torso and legs of a female figure are huge curved forms. He studied under Adolf Holzer, and designed …