All Photos By Gail

Bauhaus Stairway Mural (1989) speaks to Roy Lichtenstein’s dialogue with various art historical styles, which would figure prominently throughout his career. Measuring more than 26 feet tall and painted in oil and Magna on canvas, this spectacular mural pays homage to the German artist Oskar Schlemmer (1888 – 1943) and his painting Bahaustreppe (Bauhaus Stairway, 1932), which is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NYC, and reproduced below.

Schlemmer had taught at the revolutionary Bauhaus school, founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany. Led by luminaries including Marcel Breuer and Wassily Kandinsky, the Bauhaus was devoted to a new type of artistic education that united the fine and applied arts.

By the early 1930s, however,  the Bauhaus was under attack by the growing National Socialist (Nazi) party, who believed the school to be fostering socialist and modernist ideals that were destroying the country. Upon gaining control of the Dessau city government, where the Bauhaus had relocated in 1925, the Nazi’s issued a decree for the school’s closure.

While he had already left the school in 1929, upon hearing this news, Schlemmer immediately began painting Bauhaus Stairway. Based on a photograph by fellow instructor T. Lux Feininger of some of the Bauhaus’s students and faculty posed on the staircase of Gropius’s Dessau building, Schlemmer’s painting — once described as “a  melancholy memorial to the Bauhaus’s utopian ambition” — represents the Bauhaus in it’s ideal form.

Bauhaus Stairway Installation View

Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stairway was acquired by MoMA’s founding Director, Alfred H. Barr following a visit to Stuttgart, Germany, in 1933. Barr had first admired the painting at the Wurttemberg Art Society, and was shocked when the show was forced to close just a few days later, following a harsh review in the Nazi newspaper, National-Sozialistitches Kurier. The critic wrote menacingly, “This exhibition is doubtless the last chance the public will have to see painted Bolshevik art at large.“ Barr was alarmed that within days of coming to power, the Nazis had begun to attack modern art and architecture – censoring artwork, locking entire galleries, and ejecting modernists from the academies,

Given that the interdisciplinary nature of the Bauhaus had served as a model for MoMS when it was founded in 1929, Barf convinced Philip Johnson, a frequent donor, to buy Bauhaus Stairway as an eventual gift for the Museum to “spite the sons of bitches.“ The painting was featured in Bart’s influential 1938-39 exhibition Bauhaus: 1919 to 1928, and it was installed in the Museum’s stairwell beginning in June 1945, shortly after Nazi Germany surrendered to the allied powers at the end of World War II.

Here, Lichtenstein pays tribute to Schlemmer through the lens of his own brilliant pop aesthetic, reimagining Bauhaus Stairway now on a grand scale.

Photographed in the Gagosian Gallery in New York City.