Portrait of Johannes Itten by Paul Stockmar. Itten standing with a star on a background

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Portrait of Johannes Itten

Photo by Paul Stockmar
© Itten Foundation, Kunstmuseum Berne

 

 

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lthough the Bauhaus was founded by an architect who considered the merging of arts and crafts key to creating an architecture of the future, for years Gropius remained the sole architect on staff. In fact, architecture was not taught until 1927. The school’s methods developed gradually and intuitively, as Gropius recruited specialists in diverse fields whose views he found interesting – and often similar to his own. One of the school’s great early personalities was Johannes Itten, an advocate for artistic intuition, a cultic (Mazdaznanist) vegetarian, and highly sensitive, considerate teacher who designed the school’s signature introductory course. The Circle of Life describes the number and kinds of subjects studied:

 

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Nikolai Ladovsky (standing with a hat in his hand) on the early stage of work on Red Stadium designed by Vkhutemas students, 1924

 

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he traditional system of education, beginning with a survey of art history before proceeding to practical training, was rejected and replaced by a Renaissance system of individual studios, although this meant the loss of much that was scientifically sound.

 

It soon became clear that the previous academic system needed to be replaced by a confirmable method, not a guild process of on-the-job instruction. Nikolai Ladovsky, the architect, played a crucial role in this. He developed a psychoanalytic methodology whose primary emphasis was space, “not stone, as the basic material of architecture.” The school’s introductory course, required of all students, was based in no small measure on Ladovsky’s ideas. “Space” was supplemented by courses on “Color,” “Form,” and “Graphics.”

Exhibition of student works on the revelation and expression of mass and weight in the lecture hall

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Exhibition of student works on the revelation and expression of mass and weight in the lecture hall

“Acrobatics”, scene II, produced by Oskar Schlemmer, 1927

Photo by Erich Consemüller © Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

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Piet Mondrian, Composition, 1929

© Mondrian/Holtzman Trust 

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ropius worked with De Stijl, the Dutch creative group that includes Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and
J. J. P. Oud, and the Bauhaus became strongly involved with ideas of neoplasticism, De Stijl’s theory of the equality of opposites: verticals and horizontals, vacancies and masses, black and white, seen as representing the opposition of natural forces.