Abstract artist / Abstract Painter / Abstract Expressionist / Geometric  Abstractionist      
                                                                  Johannes Itten



                                                                              
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Johannes Itten (1888 - 1967), painter and Swiss theorist, continues simultaneously studies at the university of Bern and the school of the Fine arts of Geneva, then sign sciences in a secondary school until 1913, year when he decides to be devoted from then on entirely to art. He follows the courses of Adolf Hölzel to the Academy of Stuttgart until 1916. He meets Willy Baumeister and Oscars Schlemmer, also students. The notebooks which he holds from this time reveal his interest for the theory of the colors and contrasts of Hölzel, and for its method of analysis of the masterpieces.

        He is familiarized with research of Blaue Reiter de Kandinsky and Marc, the cubism, the orphism, concrete art. He goes to Vienna in 1916 on the invitation of a pupil and melts his first school of art. The same year, H. Walden organizes a first personal exposure of the artist in Berlin, Galerie der Sturm.

     Thanks to the role of mediator played by Alma Mahler, met in 1917 (then wife of Gropuis), he binds especially with the musicians of the circle of Alban Berg and Arnold Schönberg. He studies the Eastern religions intensively. And in 1919, he will be among the first teachers that Gropius will join together in Weimar in its school of Bauhaus. At the Bauhaus he designed an innovative introductory course: he let students explore form, color, rhythm and contrast. Itten's principles were of tremendous influence not only on art education, but also on Kandinsky and Klee.

     His very original teaching methods, not aiming to the teaching of art but the release of the creative forces of the man, will be the base of the famous preliminary course of Bauhaus. Itten disapproves the evolution of the school towards functionalism and resigns in 1923. He teaches then in Switzerland and melts a community mazdaznan (religion zoroastrienne of ancient Iran, still practice by Guèbres and Parsis, he opens another school in Berlin (with Masters and pupils of Bauhaus) between 1926 and 1934, and directs several schools and museums to Switzerland after 1938.

     Some works published in the end of his life reveal the extreme richness of his artistic theories (on the color, the form, psychological correspondences and symbolic systems of the colors and the sounds) and teaching. Subjective approach and description objectify art, Paris, Dessain & Tolra, 1971, My preliminary course in Bauhaus. Theory of working and the forms, Ravensburg, O Maier, 1963.

Source: Cited from Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia with revisions.

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