Double Window Picture
One more thing about Oskar Schlemmer’s Fensterbilder (which were the subject of an earlier post): the paradoxical use of the window motif.
Traditionally the window has been used as a framing device intended to guide the viewer’s eye to an essential part of the picture, and Schlemmer himself often made use of it in this way. When it came to the “Window Paintings,” however, he took a slightly different approach.
First of all, we are seeing through the window – we do not see it itself. Though the viewer stands, as did the painter, behind it, i.e. in the room looking out, the window itself is not visible. There is certainly nothing unusual about this, only it has nothing to do with a window per se, which here is merely a vantage point from which to paint a picture, not a framing device. So the series’ title, Fensterbilder, is somewhat ironic given that the window in question does not actually appear in any of the paintings.
A second paradox comes with the subject matter of several of the “Window Paintings,” numbers II, III, VII, XIII, and XVII, for example, where the window is used to frame another window, that is, the scene depicted is a window seen through a window which is not seen (cf Schlemmer’s description of the “Window Paintings” as “views from my window into the neighboring window”). What’s more, the window seen serves as much to reveal as to conceal: it offers us a glimpse into the inner world of the neighboring family while at the same time obscuring that view with its muntins, shades, and curtains. Thus the principal function of the window is subverted, at least in part – it gives to see, yet partially conceals, and that part which is hidden or otherwise obscured cannot be completely known. It must be guessed at, imagined, and thus retains a certain mystery, constituting a sort of “mystique of the optical,” as Schlemmer himself described it.
Finally, it is interesting that in several of the Fensterbilder, including those mentioned above, one looks out of a window in order to see in a window; the outside itself is not represented. In fact, in those paintings the window is used as a interiorizing device, allowing the painter, and thus the viewer, to look from the inside in. That second interior can be seen as a metaphor for Schlemmer’s inner state at the time he made the “Window Paintings.” Living far from his wife and children to whom he was deeply attached, he seems to have used them to capture or recreate visually a domesticity that he had to forsake in reality.
You can see a selection of the “Window Paintings” in the Fensterbilder gallery.
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Tagged: Oskar Schlemmer, painting, windows
