Body Color

With his shaved head and long, monkish robe, Johannes Itten cut an interesting figure in the halls of the Bahaus, where he taught the famed “preliminary course” from 1919 to 1922 that prepared his students for the diversified curriculum of that famed art school. Born November 11, 1888, Itten created a whole new way of looking at color, combining his own unique spiritual life and love of music to develop a nuanced, multifaceted approach to color, as can be seen in teaching tools such as his Farbkreis (above, from 1961). “He who wants to become a master of color must see, feel, and experience each individual color in its many endless combinations with all other colors,” Itten once wrote. “Colors must have a mystical capacity for spiritual expression, without being tied to objects."

Itten practiced the Mazdaznan faith, a religious health movement based on a combination of Christianity and Zoroastrianism that emphasized vegetarianism, breathing exercises, and the cultivation of the body. Before starting each class, Itten would make his students perform gymnastic exercises to loosen them up and free their bodies as much as their minds for his teachings. Itten wanted his students to feel color in their bodies as much as see it through their eyes and experience it in their minds. His book, The Art of Color, contains many of his almost mystical ideas on color and still inspires students today. In works such as Die Begegnung (above, from 1916), Itten put his theories into practice, creating images remarkably similar to those of the Orphic artists Frantisek Kupka and Sonia and Robert Delaunay.



Today, Itten is a forgotten figure, known only as a color theorist to intrigued specialists or as one of the many colorful characters who passed through the doors of the Bauhaus during its heyday. Space Composition I (above, from 1944) shows both Itten’s strengths and his weaknesses. In Space Composition I we see Itten composing an intricate web of color contrasts and dissonances, choosing each color with the surrounding colors in mind, maximizing each piece for maximum effect. Itten plays games with color like a chessmaster, thinking many moves ahead and seeing the whole board in a way that others simply can’t. I’ve tried to untangle for myself Itten’s color theories, but he is light years beyond me, which may be his weakness. Tied to such powerful ideas about the use of color, many of Itten’s works look like school exercises—elaborate color wheels rather than organic works of art. I just can’t feel the color in his works the way he hoped one would, which is probably more my weakness than his.

Painting Light in Space

“I became interested in painting with light, not on the surface of canvas, but directly in space,” Laszlo Moholy-Nagy once said of his photogram experiments, in which he exposed light-sensitive photographic paper upon which different objects had been placed (an example from the 1930s appears above). Moholy-Nagy, born on this date in 1895, epitomized the versatility of the Bauhaus, where he taught and practiced painting, photography, sculpture, and typography, indulging his imagination in whatever medium came to hand.

As a painter, Moholy-Nagy followed the tenets of the Constructivists, especially Kazimir Malevich. In works such as A 19 (above), Moholy-Nagy developed a cool, precise brand of abstraction that marked a sea change at the Bauhaus, where he had replaced the more mystical Johannes Itten, the previous teacher of the preliminary course all students had to take. After the excesses of Expressionism and the violence of World War I, which Moholy-Nagy witnessed firsthand, the Constructivist style offered order, stability, and, possibly, peace. Unfortunately, as Fascism took hold on Germany and World War II loomed, the Jewish Moholy-Nagy and other professors at the Bauhaus fled to the sanctuary of America. (In 2006, the Tate Modern presented the exhibit Albers & Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World, tracing the journey of Moholy-Nagy and Joseph Albers to freedom.)

I’ve often confused Moholy-Nagy’s photograms with Man Ray’s rayograms, which used the same procedure. However, looking more closely, you can see that Ray’s images focus mainly on the objects on the paper and how they are arranged, stemming mostly from his Surrealist roots and his desire to make the everyday seem unfamiliar. Moholy-Nagy uses the objects as a secondary device, concerning himself more with how those objects shape and distort the light as it strikes the paper. By literally painting with light itself, Moholy-Nagy reduced image making to its very essentials and broke new ground for photography as an art form in itself.