The Bauhaus and Johannes Itten

Translating to ‘Building House’ The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius. With somewhat specific goals, The Bauhaus tackled various aspects of design. The Bauhaus philosophy was to achieve a unity in the arts. This required a sense of partnership and equality between artist and craftsmen, hence the students at The Bauhaus learnt both craftsmanship and artistry with equal importance. Some other philosophies they promoted was the notion of form following function. They wanted their products to have an emphasis on functionality and an aesthetic that, while looks good, does not in any way hinder its functionality in any way. This lead to simplistic and ‘to the point’ designs. One could call their design principles very utilitarian in essence. Their designs were made to be the most functional they could be that would help the most people they could. Aesthetically, Bauhaus followed their principles which meant that their look was characterised by simple yet strong shapes that serve a very clear purpose. The work was clean and void of unnecessary decoration, contrary to some of its predecessor’s like Art Deco and Art Nouveau.  

Johannes Itten was a teacher at The Bauhaus school.  He is namely known for his work with colour. His work with the colour wheel is arguably some of his more popular work but for this blog post I’d like to explore another one of his works that ties in very closely to the colour wheel.  This very simple work over here is, at first glance just a bunch of different coloured squares on different backgrounds. That in theory is a correct description but there is a bit more to this that makes It all the more interesting. Looking deeper into this work we can make the observation that this is an exploration colours effect on itself. The colour of the internal square is repeated on its horizontal counterpart, but the background is different. This gives the impression that the colours are different but they are in fact the same colour. This shows how colours interact with each other and how our mind perceives these colour combinations together. 

We can see The Bauhaus principles even in this work by Johannes Itten. The use of simple shapes was very typical of the style. The piece also tries to convey a message about the relationship of colour in a very straightforward and practical way which was also very typical of Bauhaus.

I do appreciate the work that The Bauhaus was trying to accomplish and all the remnants we see of it to this day in our current designs. That said, I would personally never choose to willingly work with that ethic in mind. The whole notion of ‘Art for the sake of Society’ rubs me the wrong way and makes me think there would be lots of thrown away ideas because it was not needed or functional enough.

References:   Johannes-itten-johannes-itten.com-2014[Last accessed on 23/01/2015][ http://www.johannes-itten.com/]