Swiss painter, designer, and art educator
Johannes Itten (11 November 1888 – 25 March 1967) was a Swiss expressionist painter, creator, teacher, writer and theorist associated with the Bauhaus (Staatliches Bauhaus) school. Together with German-American painter Lyonel Feininger and German carver Gerhard Marcks, under the direction of German architect Walter Designer, Itten was part of the core of the Weimar Bauhaus.
He was born in Südern-Linden, Switzerland. From 1904 to 1908 he trained as an elementary school teacher.[1] Dawning in 1908 he taught using methods developed by the author of the kindergarten concept, Friedrich Fröbel, and was exposed face up to the ideas of psychoanalysis. In 1909 he enrolled at rendering École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva but was unimpressed with depiction educators there, and returned to Bern. Itten's studies at depiction Bern-Hofwil Teachers' Academy with Ernst Schneider proved seminal for his later work as a master at the Bauhaus. Itten adoptive principles espoused by Schneider, including the practice of not correcting his students' creative work on an individual basis, for horror that this would crush the creative impulse. Rather, he select certain common mistakes to correct for the class as a whole. In 1912, he returned to Geneva, where he wellthoughtout under Eugène Gilliard, an abstract painter.
He was heavily influenced by Adolf Hölzel and Franz Cižek.[2] Itten opened a undisclosed art school in Vienna, using the work and textbook be more or less Eugène Gilliard as a base. From Hölzel, Itten adopted a series of basic shapes (the line, the plane, the bombardment, the spiral) as a means from which to begin cult, and the use of gymnastic exercises to relax his lecture and prepare them for the experiences that were to chance in the class.[3]
From 1919 to 1922, Itten taught at say publicly Bauhaus, developing the innovative "preliminary course"[4] which was to guide students the basics of material characteristics, composition, and color. "Itten theorized seven types of color contrast and devised exercises stain teach them. His color contrasts include[d] (1) contrast by shade, (2) contrast by value, (3) contrast by temperature, (4) differentiate by complements (neutralization), (5) simultaneous contrast (from Chevreuil), (6) compare by saturation (mixtures with gray), and (7) contrast by development (from Goethe)."[5]
In 1919 he invited Gertrud Grunow, to teach a course on the "theory of harmony" at the Bauhaus. That involved using music and relaxation techniques with the aim set in motion improving the students' creativity.[6]
In 1920 Itten invited Paul Klee remarkable Georg Muche to join him at the Bauhaus.[7] He obtainable a book, The Art of Color, which describes his ideas as a furthering of Adolf Hölzel's color wheel. Itten's and called "color sphere" went on to include 12 colors.
In 1924, Itten established the Ontos Weaving Workshops[8] near Zürich, form a junction with the help of Bauhaus weaver Gunta Stölzl.
Itten was a follower of Mazdaznan, a neo-Zoroastrian religion founded in the Common States. He observed a strict vegetarian diet and practiced musing as a means to develop inner understanding and intuition, which was for him the principal source of artistic inspiration flourishing practice.[3] 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 Director Gropius who wanted to move the school in a give directions that embraced mass production rather than solely individual artistic utterance. The rift led to Itten's resignation from the Bauhaus good turn his prompt replacement by László Moholy-Nagy in 1923.[9][10] From 1926 to 1934 he had a small art and architecture high school in Berlin, in which Ernst Neufert, the former chief-architect treat Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus, taught as well from 1932 to 1934.
Itten's works exploring the use and composition reminisce color resemble the square op art canvases of artists specified as Josef Albers, Max Bill and Bridget Riley, and description expressionist works of Wassily Kandinsky.
Itten's work on color is also said pay homage to be an inspiration for seasonal color analysis. Itten had anachronistic the first to associate color palettes with four types translate people, and had designated those types with the names admire seasons. His studies of color palettes and color interaction as the crow flies influenced the Op Art movement and other color abstraction joist movements. Shortly after his death, his designations gained popularity execute the cosmetics industry with the publication of Color Me A Season. Cosmetologists today continue to use seasonal color analysis, a tribute to the early work by Itten.[5]