Johannes Itten

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Johannes Itten (November 11, 1888 - May 27, 1967) was a Swiss painter, designer teacher, writer and theorist associated with the Bauhaus school.

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Life and Work

Born in Südern-Linden, Switzerland, he had a Friedrich Froebel influenced education and was initially a teacher where he was exposed to the ideas of psychoanalysis. He later enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva but then returned to Berne, after being unimpressed with the educators there.

He was taught by Eugène Gilliard, an abstract painter. From 1919-1922, Itten taught at the Bauhaus, developing the innovative preliminary course which was to teach students the basics of material characteristics, composition, and colour. He also published a book - The Art of Color- which describes these ideas as a furthering of Adolf Hozel's colour wheel. Itten's so called "color sphere" went on to include 12 colours.

Itten was a follower of Mazdaznan, a fire cult originating in the United States that was largely derived from Zoroastrianism. He observed a strict 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. Itten's mysticism and hold on the students increasingly alienated him from the other leading figures of the Bauhaus, particularly Walter Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who were moving the school in a direction that embraced mass production rather than individual artistic expression and craftsmanship. The rift led to Itten's forced resignation from the Bauhaus. Arguably, had Itten not left the Bauhaus, the school's place in history would have been much less significant.

Itten's works exploring the use and composition of colour resemble the square op-art canvases of artists such as Josef Albers, Max Bill and Bridget Riley, and the expressionist works of Wassily Kandinsky.

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