Google pays tribute to Oskar Schlemmer with a special doodle on his 130th birth anniversary

Google on Tuesday paid tribute to German, sculptor, painter, designer, and choreographer Oskar Schlemmer on his 130th birth anniversary.

The search giant created a doodle, which shows a bulbous mechanical figure standing in a ballet pose wearing metallic masks.

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 'Triadisches Ballett' or ‘Triadic Ballet,’ a groundbreaking production that premiered in Stuttgart, Germany in 1922.


Schlemmer is well-known for his work Triadic Ballet where the performers were transformed into geometrical figurines.

He was also famous for his fascination for the divine and architectural aspect of the human body. He captured each and every possible movement into his complex art form and labeled every performance as "artistic metaphysical mathematics", which according to him was the purest form of physical aesthetics.

Schlemmer also experimented with painting, sculpture, but it was his creative theater designs that are most remembered, influencing future artists like David Bowie. He once described the themes of his work: “the human figure in space, its moving and stationary functions, sitting, lying, walking, standing” as being “as simple as they are universally valid.”

Schlemmer was the youngest of six children who attended art school before becoming a director of stage research and production.

The polymath died on April 13, 1943, when Germany was under Hitler's rule.