History of Art and Design: Bauhaus (possibly the greatest art school ever)

In the 1910s the world was about to birth something new, something amazing, something revolutionary and that something was the Bauhaus school of art. An art school that taught other things than art which is the best and only way to teach art students, in my opinion, because art students are hilariously good at procrastinating and doing anything else other than art. In all seriousness, the Bauhaus school was the school to become other schools, the main reason that today we have art foundation courses and we are taught art the way we do. Where we don't specialise in one technique or another but rather teach ourselves a little bit of everything from every medium we can. 

The teaching methods of the Bauhaus were similar to the modern day foundation course, as previously mentioned. The preliminary course was the one most similar to it, where before they could be allocated to specific workshops where they would train and study to become world face architects or product designers or artists they would have to learn the basics of art and to become individual people. Johannes Itten was one of those who taught at the Bauhaus as a master (doesn't he look like a zen buddhist monk in that picture or is it just me?) In the Bauhaus itself Itten encouraged those who worked under him to embrace their own thoughts and feelings and put it into their work. He himself specialised in colour theory, and the paintings he created were quite amazing in my opinion. Itten was born in Switzerland in Sudern-Linden and before becoming the renowned artist and master he became he actually trained to become an elementary ​school teacher. Then later in 1909 he went ahead and studied in  École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva but was disappointed by the tutors there and so returned home. He was taught under Ernst Schneider at the Bern-Hofwil Teachers' Academy which later helped him teach at Bauhaus. But before Bauhaus Itten opened his own private school in Vienna which was where he adopted his basic shape style where he would use circles, squares, rectangles, spirals to create pieces which described colour. He would also not correct individual students if they had made a mistake but rather would correct the class as a whole, this was also taught to him from Schneider. He joined the Bauhaus and taught in the preliminary course from 1919 to 1922. There he taught starting up students composition, material characteristics and for what he's known for; colour. Itten devised his own colour theory which were all the variants of contrasts in colour such as hue, temperature, compliments, value and saturation. His lessons also sometimes included gymnastics and relaxation techniques to help improve students creativity. Itten later went on to publish his own book which was all about colour theory and he developed the 12 colour wheel (as seen below). When Bauhaus closed he went on to open his own weaving school with the help of a fellow Bauhaus weaver Gunta Stolzl.

---