Play with Heads (1923): Art, History and Details

Play with Heads (1923) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Oskar Schlemmer (German, 1888–1943).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Variations on a theme, this rare set of prints explores diverse arrangements of three heads. Each image uses a single color and was printed in a spatter technique first used in the 19th century by French lithographers like Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. By drawing a blade across a toothbrush saturated with lithographic ink, the ink is spattered onto the lithographic stone in a random pattern of variously sized dots. By controlling the fine spray of droplets, transparent forms and a wide tonal range can be obtained. Unlike his contemporaries, El Lissitzky, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, and Kurt Schwitters, whose work focused only on abstraction, Schlemmer was intensely interested in the human form. He once said, however, that he was "interested in creating human types, not portraits." Thus he did not portray specific individuals, but prototypes for a purified, timeless image of humanity.

Object facts

• Title: Play with Heads
• Date: 1923
• Creator attribution: Oskar Schlemmer (German, 1888–1943)
• Culture: Germany, 20th century
• Type: Portfolio
• Technique: lithograph
• Dimensions: Overall: 49 x 33.6 x 7 cm (19 5/16 x 13 1/4 x 2 3/4 in.)
• Collection: PR - Lithograph
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 2000.120

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, “Recent Acquisitions Press Release,” December 12, 2000, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.