Itten at the Bauhaus

Weimar, 1919

On 1 April 1919, the architect Walter Gropius folded two Weimar schools — the Grand-Ducal Academy of Fine Art and the School of Arts and Crafts — into a single institution he called the Bauhaus. Its ambition was radical: to dissolve the wall between fine art and craft and pursue a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work in which building, object, and image were made as one.

Among the first masters Gropius appointed, beside Lyonel Feininger and Gerhard Marcks, was a lean, shaven-headed Swiss painter and schoolteacher: Johannes Itten (1888–1967). Trained first as an elementary teacher and then as a painter under the abstractionist Eugène Gilliard, Itten arrived with a conviction that art could be taught — that beneath every composition lay a grammar a student could learn.

The preliminary course

From 1919 to 1922 the school took its shape from Itten's Vorkurs — the six-month preliminary course every newcomer had to pass before touching a workshop. He drilled students in the raw facts of their materials: the texture of wood against metal, the weight of a line, the behaviour of a color. It was the first course of its kind, and its structure — elements, materials, color — was later copied by design schools the world over.

Itten taught unusually. Borrowing from his own teacher Ernst Schneider, he refused to single out a student's work for criticism, correcting instead the mistakes the whole class shared, so no one's creative nerve was cut. He began lessons with breathing and gymnastic exercises to loosen the hand before the mind took over.

At the centre of it all sat his color wheel — the Farbkreis of twelve hues — and his theory of seven contrasts, the distinct ways colors act on one another. That theory is exactly what this service renders. Here are all seven, each a 260×260 square:

One contrast, every size

The same URL always returns byte-identical pixels, but the composition re-flows to whatever dimensions you ask for. Below is a single contrast — cold-warm, Itten's most expressive pairing of a warm hue against a cool one — held to one seed and stretched across five aspect ratios: a tall column, a square, a landscape, a wide strip, and a small thumbnail.

Mysticism and the break with Gropius

Itten was also a devotee of Mazdaznan, a neo-Zoroastrian movement of vegetarianism, fasting, and meditation that he treated as a source of artistic discipline. Some students followed him into it, shaved their heads, and adopted the diet — and the school began to feel, to Gropius, less like a workshop than a temple.

The deeper rift was philosophical. Itten prized the individual, expressive, almost spiritual path of the artist; Gropius was steering the Bauhaus toward industry and mass production, art married to the machine. The two visions could not share one preliminary course.

Late in 1923 Itten resigned. His place was taken by the Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy, who rewrote the Vorkurs toward the sober New Objectivity Gropius wanted — and the Bauhaus turned from Expressionist heat toward functional design, the style the world now remembers. In 1925 it left Weimar for a new building in Dessau and its most productive years.

The Art of Color

Itten went on to run art schools in Berlin, Krefeld, and Zürich, and to direct the Museum Rietberg. But the work that outlived him was the book that gathered the teaching from those Weimar years: The Art of Color (1961), where the twelve-hue wheel and the seven contrasts were finally set down in full. He died in Zürich in 1967.

Every tile in the strip below is a 64×64 PNG from a different seed — contrast chosen for each by the seed alone, the way a page of swatches in his book runs through the wheel:

That is the whole trick of Place Itten: hand it a size, maybe a ?contrast= and a ?seed=, and it hands back a Bauhaus-flavoured placeholder — no stored assets, the same URL forever returning the same image. Go make some →