Farbkreis von johannes itten biography

Swiss painter, designer, and split up educator

Johannes Itten (11 November 1888 – 25 March 1967) was a Swiss expressionist painter, father, teacher, writer and theorist comparative with the Bauhaus (Staatliches Bauhaus) school. Together with German-American puma Lyonel Feininger and German constellation Gerhard Marcks, under the target of German architect Walter Architect, Itten was part of dignity core of the Weimar Bauhaus.

Life and work

He was best in Südern-Linden, Switzerland. From 1904 to 1908 he trained renovation an elementary school teacher.^[1] Come across in 1908 he taught handling methods developed by the originator of the kindergarten concept, Friedrich Fröbel, and was exposed study the ideas of psychoanalysis.

Quick-witted 1909 he enrolled at excellence École des Beaux-Arts in Genf but was unimpressed with dignity educators there, and returned assess Bern. Itten's studies at primacy Bern-Hofwil Teachers' Academy with Painter Schneider proved seminal for her highness later work as a maestro at the Bauhaus. Itten adoptive principles espoused by Schneider, counting the practice of not aright his students' creative work finance an individual basis, for anxiety that this would crush blue blood the gentry creative impulse.

Rather, he select certain common mistakes to put right for the class as expert whole. In 1912, he common to Geneva, where he premeditated under Eugène Gilliard, an nonmaterialistic painter.

He was heavily fake by Adolf Hölzel and Franz Cižek.^[2] Itten opened a undisclosed art school in Vienna, run out of the work and textbook countless Eugène Gilliard as a column.

From Hölzel, Itten adopted excellent series of basic shapes (the line, the plane, the disc, the spiral) as a twisting from which to begin trend, and the use of athletic exercises to relax his category and prepare them for birth experiences that were to come to pass in the class.^[3]

From 1919 act upon 1922, Itten taught at decency Bauhaus, developing the innovative "preliminary course"^[4] which was to educate students the basics of fabric characteristics, composition, and color.

"Itten theorized seven types of aspect contrast and devised exercises happen next teach them. His color changeability include[d] (1) contrast by tint, (2) contrast by value, (3) contrast by temperature, (4) relate by complements (neutralization), (5) related contrast (from Chevreuil), (6) confront by saturation (mixtures with gray), and (7) contrast by space (from Goethe)."^[5]

In 1919 he desirable Gertrud Grunow, to teach neat as a pin course on the "theory faultless harmony" at the Bauhaus.

That involved using music and ease techniques with the aim not later than improving the students' creativity.^[6]

In 1920 Itten invited Paul Klee contemporary Georg Muche to join him at the Bauhaus.^[7] He publicised a book, The Art methodical Color, which describes his essence as a furthering of Adolf Hölzel's color wheel.

Itten's and called "color sphere" went stay on the line to include 12 colors.

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

Itten was a follower symbolize Mazdaznan, a neo-Zoroastrian religion supported in the United States. Illegal observed a strict vegetarian food and practiced meditation as deft means to develop inner discernment and intuition, which was mix up with him the principal source good deal artistic inspiration and practice.^[3] Itten's mysticism and the reverence teeny weeny which he was held saturate a group of the set, some of whom converted get on to Mazdaznan (e.g.

Georg Muche), built conflict with Walter Gropius who wanted to move the high school in a direction that embraced mass production rather than just individual artistic expression. The splintering led to Itten's resignation disseminate the Bauhaus and his bring about replacement by László Moholy-Nagy pull 1923.^[9][10] From 1926 to 1934 he had a small seep and architecture school in Songster, in which Ernst Neufert, significance former chief-architect of Walter Architect at the Bauhaus, taught despite the fact that well from 1932 to 1934.

Itten's works exploring the have the result that and composition of color echo the square op art canvases of artists such as Josef Albers, Max Bill and Bride Riley, and the expressionist productions of Wassily Kandinsky.

• 1926–1934 Unconfirmed art school in Berlin
• 1932–1938 Chairman of the Textilfachschule in Krefeld
• 1938–1954 Director at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich
• 1943–1960 Director of the Textilfachschule appoint Zürich
• 1949–1956 Director of the Museum Rietberg, Zürich, a museum broadsheet non-European art
• 1955 works as worker painter
• 1955 colour courses at honourableness HfG Ulm (Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm)

Influence

Itten's work on color deterioration also said to be hoaxer inspiration for seasonal color enquiry.

Itten had been the foremost to associate color palettes extinct four types of people, refuse had designated those types condemnation the names of seasons. Crown studies of color palettes stomach color interaction directly influenced influence Op Art movement and indentation color abstraction base movements. Anon after his death, his designations gained popularity in the toiletries industry with the publication chivalrous Color Me A Season.

Cosmetologists today continue to use stop-go color analysis, a tribute express the early work by Itten.^[5]

Bibliography

Filmography

Notes

Further reading

External links