Johannes Itten

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Johannes Itten
Südern-Linden, Switzerland
Died25 March 1967(1967-03-25) (aged 78)
Zürich, Switzerland
EducationAcademy of Arts, Stuttgart
Known forPainting, Drawing, Color theory, Architecture
Notable workFarbkreis (1961)
MovementExpressionism

Johannes Itten (11 November 1888 – 25 March 1967) was a Swiss expressionist painter, designer, teacher, writer and theorist associated with the Bauhaus (Staatliches Bauhaus) school. Together with German-American painter Lyonel Feininger and German sculptor Gerhard Marcks, under the direction of German architect Walter Gropius, Itten was part of the core of the Weimar Bauhaus.

Life and work

He was born in

Südern-Linden, Switzerland. From 1904 to 1908 he trained as an elementary school teacher. Beginning in 1908 he taught using methods developed by the creator of the kindergarten concept, Friedrich Fröbel, and was exposed to the ideas of psychoanalysis. In 1909 he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva but was unimpressed with the educators there, and returned to Bern. Itten's studies at the Bern-Hofwil Teachers' Academy with Ernst Schneider proved seminal for his later work as a master at the Bauhaus. Itten adopted principles espoused by Schneider, including the practice of not correcting his students' creative work on an individual basis, for fear that this would crush the creative impulse. Rather, he selected certain common mistakes to correct for the class as a whole. In 1912, he returned to Geneva, where he studied under Eugène Gilliard, an abstract
painter.

He was heavily influenced by

gymnastic exercises to relax his students and prepare them for the experiences that were to occur in the class.[2]

Farbkreis by Johannes Itten 1961 adaptation from original printed colors (upper) and comparison with colors that are commonly found in digital adaptation (lower). Bright colors result misleading for painting use.[3] Main topic: RYB color model.

From 1919 to 1922, Itten taught at the Bauhaus, developing the innovative "preliminary course"

Goethe)."[5]

In 1919 he invited Gertrud Grunow, to teach a course on the "theory of harmony" at the Bauhaus. This involved using music and relaxation techniques with the aim of improving the students' creativity.[6]

In 1920 Itten invited

color sphere
" went on to include 12 colors.

In 1924, Itten established the Ontos Weaving Workshops[8] near Zürich, with the help of Bauhaus weaver Gunta Stölzl.

The grave of Itten, his second wife Anneliese, née Schlösser (1913-2002), and of one of their three children, Klaus Itten (1944-2023), who was a professor of geography at the University of Zurich, at the cemetery of Hönggerberg in Zürich

Itten was a follower of

vegetarian diet and practiced meditation as a means to develop inner understanding and intuition, which was for him the principal source of artistic inspiration and practice.[2] Itten's mysticism and the reverence in which he was held by a group of the students, some of whom converted to Mazdaznan (e.g. Georg Muche), created conflict with Walter Gropius who wanted to move the school in a direction that embraced mass production rather than solely individual artistic expression. The rift led to Itten's resignation from the Bauhaus and his prompt replacement by László Moholy-Nagy in 1923.[9][10] From 1926 to 1934 he had a small art and architecture school in Berlin, in which Ernst Neufert
, the former chief-architect of Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus, taught as well from 1932 to 1934.

Itten's works exploring the use and composition of color resemble the square

expressionist works of Wassily Kandinsky
.

Influence

Itten's work on color is also said to be an inspiration for

Color Me A Season. Cosmetologists today continue to use seasonal color analysis, a tribute to the early work by Itten.[5]

Bibliography

Filmography

Notes

  1. ISBN 0-13-586694-4
    .
  2. ^
    ISBN 3-8228-2105-5
    .
  3. ^ "How Itten's color diagram fails to illustrate color mixing of paints - Optica Publishing Group". opg.optica.org. Retrieved 2024-02-23.
  4. ISBN 3-8228-5907-9
    .
  5. ^
    JSTOR 3192794
  6. ISBN 978-1-85866-012-7
    .
  7. ISBN 0-500-20257-5
    .
  8. ^ "The Weavers on the Bauhaus Stairway". www.guntastolzl.org. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  9. ^ Magdalena Droste and the Bauhaus Archive, Bauhaus, Taschen, 2006
  10. ISBN 1-85669-348-1
    .

Further reading

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Johannes Itten.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Johannes_Itten&oldid=1214622209"