‘Bl. 7’ Karl Peter Röhl

• Röhl was a Bauhaus member from the very beginning and, in 1919, created the first Bauhaus logo, the ‘little star man’ • In 1922, Theo van Doesburg held his De Stijl course in Röhl’s Weimar studio, providing one of the most influential impulses for constructive modernism in Germany • These two works on paper span the spectrum from the austere De Stijl composition of 1922 to the dynamic, colourful formal language of 1926 Karl Peter Röhl was already a trained painter when he joined the newly founded State Bauhaus in Weimar in April 1919. Following an apprenticeship, he attended the schools of applied arts in Kiel and Berlin, and subsequently studied at the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Art in Weimar. At the Bauhaus, he was allocated his own studio and attended Johannes Itten’s preparatory course during his first semester. He soon became one of the students who played a decisive role in shaping the image of the fledgling school: as early as 1919, Röhl designed the first Bauhaus logo, the so-called ‘little star man’, which, as the founding emblem, remains associated to this day with the institution’s expressive early years. The real turning point in his work came when the Dutch painter and theorist Theo van Doesburg arrived in Weimar in 1921 to introduce the ideas of De Stijl to the Bauhaus. As he was barred from teaching at the school, van Doesburg held his De Stijl course in Röhl’s studio in 1922 – a course that became a meeting place for all those seeking a clear, constructive formal language. In the same year, Röhl took part in the Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists in Weimar, which brought together artists such as El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters. He also shared a close friendship with Walter Dexel. The expressive visual worlds of the early Bauhaus years now gave way to austere compositions of horizontal and vertical lines and black planes. This 1922 drawing illustrates this new beginning with great consistency: narrow bars and double lines span an open framework across the paper, at the centre of which a single black rectangle anchors the structure. Balance here arises not through symmetry, but through the precisely calibrated relationship of the elements to one another. Following his time at the Bauhaus, Röhl continued his studies as a master student under Walther Klemm at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Weimar. In 1926, he took over as head of the preparatory class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main – a role in which he passed on the experiences of Bauhaus pedagogy until 1942. During these years, he continued to develop the geometric language independently. In the work created in 1926 and inscribed by Röhl as ‘Bl. 7’, the forms gain in mass and dynamism: bright red circular discs are joined by diagonally positioned cross-shapes, a constellation reminiscent of Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist compositions and Lissitzky’s visual language. These two works thus trace the path of an artist who was one of the very first designers at the Bauhaus, whose studio harboured one of the most far-reaching impulses of Modernism, and who, in the years that followed, shaped the principles of constructive abstraction into a visual language entirely his own. | 1890 - Kiel - 1975 | Moderne Kunst | Arbeiten auf Papier | Nummer: 26x2494 | Provenance: Nachlass des Künstlers; Privatsammlung, Schweiz.

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