The painter, draftsman, sculptor, stage designer and muralist Oskar Schlemmer was appointed to the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920 by its director, Walter Gropius. Initially, he headed the mural-painting workshop at this influential art school; later on, as Master of Form, he took charge of the wood and stone sculpture workshop. From 1923 to 1929, he supervised the stagecraft workshop. Originally designed as a birthday gift for one of his daughters, the Jointed Doll reflects Schlemmer’s practical and theoretical study of theatrical costumes. He was interested in the use of costumes to transform the human body into an abstract artistic body. Examples can be seen in his famous experimental Triadic Ballet of 1922, and he also expanded on his ideas in his essay “Man and Art Figure” written in 1925. In it, Schlemmer wrote that “the functional laws of the human body in their relationship to space” go hand in hand for him with a “typification of bodily forms.” He cited “the egg shape of the head, the vase shape of the torso, the club shape of the arms and legs, the ball shape of the joints.” These remarks accurately describe his Jointed Doll and reveal his underlying objective, namely, to fathom the relationship between the human figure and space. Only a small quantity of these jointed dolls with slight variations were made by Josef Hartwig, who worked as a master craftsman in the wood and stone sculpture department of the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1925, and designed the legendary Bauhaus chess set in 1923.