Bauhaus Stairway

Bauhaus Staircase is the title of a painting by Oskar Schlemmer from 1932. It arose as a protest against the closure of the Bauhaus on 30 September 1932 ordered by the National Socialist majority in the Dessau municipal council. The painting is Schlemmer's main painterly work and belongs to the era of classical modernism. In 1933, Philip Johnson and Alfred Barr bought it for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Previously, the artist had to witness how some of his murals were painted over in 1930 at the instigation of Paul Schultze-Naumburg or how the figurative frescoes on the walls of the workshop building of the Bauhaus in Weimar were cut off as "degenerate art".