Archivist, Christina Eliopoulos: My name is Christina Eliopoulos. I spend a lot of time researching the history of this institution and some of the works that we collect and exhibit here. And one of the stories that has really struck me is the story of this painting by Oskar Schlemmer, Bahaus Stairway, made in 1932.
This painting shows figures, most likely students or teachers walking up and down the staircase of the Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany, where Oskar Schlemmer was a teacher from 1920 to 1929. Schlemmer was unfortunately one of the first artists to fall under Nazi artistic persecution.
He painted this in response to the Nazi decree to close the Bauhaus in Dessau in August 1932. This painting and other works were exhibited as part of Oscar Schlemmer’s retrospective in his native home of Stuttgart, Germany on March 1st, 1933. And when a Nazi critic had reviewed the show, he labeled the painting as “unfinished Bolshevik” and claimed that Schlemmer was part of the graveyard of corruption that was the Dessau Bauhaus.
Shortly after that review, the next day, in fact, the paintings were taken off the walls, and locked up.
Alfred Barr, MoMA’s first museum director, who was in Stuttgart at the time upon hearing this news, rushed to the gallery and was able to see these works that were hidden away from the public because he was an American.
Barr not only understood the cultural significance of this painting representing an art movement that was trying to be stopped by the Nazis, but it must have had also a personal significance to him because The Museum of Modern Art was founded on the principles of the School of the Bauhaus.
And so Alfred Barr, upon seeing this work was determined to get it and quote “it was to get it just to spite those sons of bitches.”