The Man Who Built the Foundation Year
If you have ever taken a foundation course in art or design — a structured first year focused on materials, color, form, and composition before you specialize — you are working within a tradition that Johannes Itten did more to establish than anyone else. The Vorkurs he created at the Bauhaus in 1919 was the first systematic attempt to build a compulsory preliminary education that treated making as a discipline requiring its own foundational training, distinct from the academy tradition of copying historical models or drawing from plaster casts.
Itten was one of the first masters appointed by Gropius, arriving in October 1919 alongside Lyonel Feininger and Gerhard Marcks. He was a Swiss artist and teacher who had studied under Adolf Hölzel and absorbed influences from Friedrich Froebel’s kindergarten pedagogy — the idea that learning begins with direct, hands-on engagement with materials rather than with abstract instruction. At the Bauhaus, Gropius gave him the latitude to shape what became the school’s most distinctive pedagogical structure.
The Vorkurs
The preliminary course was compulsory for all incoming students. It ran for six months to a year before students could enter a specialized workshop. Under Itten, the Vorkurs covered an extraordinary range of ground. Students worked with raw materials — wood, metal, textiles, glass, stone — studying their properties through direct manipulation rather than from textbooks. They explored contrasts of form, texture, weight, and rhythm. They analyzed Old Master compositions to understand underlying structure. They performed breathing and movement exercises intended to sharpen physical awareness and attune the body to creative work.
Itten’s 1921 Color Star and his system of seven color contrasts — contrast of hue, light-dark, cold-warm, complementary, simultaneous, saturation, and extension — gave the Vorkurs a systematic framework for color theory that remained part of Bauhaus teaching long after he left. These were not arbitrary categories; they were tools for analyzing and controlling how color behaves in composition, and they proved durable because they described real perceptual phenomena rather than aesthetic preferences.
Student work from the period — exercises by Téry-Adler (c. 1920), Werner Graeff (1921), Mirkin (c. 1922), Herzger (1922), and Friedl Dicker (c. 1920) — shows a consistent pedagogical approach: structured assignments that required students to discover the properties of materials and forms through direct experiment, with Itten providing the conceptual framework and the critical response. The work was not free expression; it was guided exploration within a disciplined structure.
Itten also acted as form master for most of the workshops in the early period, giving him an influence over the school’s artistic direction that extended well beyond the preliminary course. He recruited Gertrud Grunow to teach harmonization exercises — a parallel program of movement, sound, and color coordination that complemented his own teaching.
Mazdaznan and Conflict
Itten’s approach to teaching was inseparable from his spiritual commitments, and this is where the story becomes more complicated. He was a follower of Mazdaznan, a quasi-religious movement that combined elements of Zoroastrianism with dietary practices, breathing exercises, and ideas about spiritual development. In 1921, he organized a Mazdaznan conference at the school. Some students followed him enthusiastically; others found the spiritual dimension irrelevant or oppressive.
The degree to which Mazdaznan dominated Itten’s teaching — as opposed to being a personal practice that colored his approach — is something the sources handle differently. What is clear is that by 1922, Gropius was moving the school toward a closer relationship with industry, and Itten’s emphasis on subjective experience, spiritual development, and intuitive making was increasingly at odds with that direction. The tension was not simply personal; it was a genuine disagreement about what the Bauhaus should be. Gropius wanted the school to produce work that engaged with industrial production. Itten wanted it to produce individuals whose creative capacity had been developed through deep engagement with materials and inner awareness.
The disagreement was not resolved through compromise. Itten left the Bauhaus in March 1923, following an exhibition of his work in Zurich the previous month. He was replaced in the autumn of 1923 by two figures who represented the new direction: László Moholy-Nagy, who took over the Vorkurs and the metal workshop with a constructivist, technology-oriented approach, and Josef Albers, who assumed responsibility for materials instruction with a rigorous, economical method focused on how materials actually behave.
The Pivot
Itten’s departure was one of the defining transitions in the Bauhaus’s history. It coincided with the 1923 Weimar Exhibition, held under the motto “Art and Technology — a New Unity,” which signaled the school’s official pivot away from the Expressionist, craft-centered character of its early years. The Vorkurs survived the transition — Moholy-Nagy, Albers, and later Kandinsky and Klee all contributed to its teaching — but its ideological orientation changed. The subjective, holistic, spiritually inflected program that Itten had created gave way to something more rational, more materials-focused, and more aligned with the industrial direction Gropius was pursuing.
It would be a mistake, though, to treat Itten as merely an eccentric obstacle that the Bauhaus had to overcome in order to become its “real” self. All the institutional sources credit him with devising and leading the course that became the school’s most important pedagogical contribution. The Vorkurs prototype — a structured foundation year emphasizing direct material experience, color theory, and formal analysis — was carried forward by Albers to Black Mountain College and then to Yale, and it became the model for foundation programs in art and design schools worldwide. Itten’s version of it was not the only version, but it was the first, and the structure he created proved more durable than the specific ideology he brought to it.
Itten himself continued to teach and write after leaving the Bauhaus. His book Design and Form, published between 1963 and 1965, reflected on his Weimar teaching methods from a distance of four decades. By then, the Vorkurs had become such a standard feature of design education that its origins in one man’s unusual combination of material rigor and spiritual practice were easy to forget.