Art, Hiking and Travel in Japan - Johannes Itten - Art - National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT)

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Johannes Itten: Ways to Art

Johannes Itten, Happy Island, 1965, oil on canvas, 75x71cm
(Images courtesy National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo)

Feeling blue? Seeing red? Swiss color theorist Johannes Itten (1888-1967) would understand. He helped explain what colors do and how they do it. He assigned colors qualities like "warm" and "cool" to describe how they react with each other and how they affect us physically and psychologically. He made Pantone and Color Me Beautiful possible.

Johannes Itten, Mountain, 1929-30,
oil on canvas, 120x100cm

Itten was also a lifelong art teacher. He started a school in Vienna in 1916. Three years later, architect Walter Gropius invited him to teach at the legendary Bauhaus in Berlin. There, Itten developed the "preliminary course," a foundation class that introduced new students to materials, color and composition. After a falling out with Gropius, Itten left the Bauhaus in 1923 but continued to teach in Berlin. Later he set down his elaborate color systems in a number of books that, like many of his innovative teaching methods, became standard curriculum in Western art schools.

This extensive exhibition of 350 works, organized by the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, looks at Itten's legacy in three parts: his teachings (via color charts and his students' exercises), his prints and paintings, and his exchanges with Japan.

Johannes Itten, Analyses of Old
Masters from In Utopia: Documents of
Reality, 1921, lithograph, 32.8x24.5cm

As the title of his major book "The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color" suggests, Itten's approach was a combination of modernist science and romantic alchemy. Large diagrams of the artist's color star, a modified color wheel with tonal rays projecting from it, and other systems explain the myriad ways colors change through mixing and juxtaposition.

The bulk of the first part of the show, however, is the drawings and experiments of Itten's students. If you've ever taken an art class, the exercises in composition, rhythm, accent and so on may look familiar. The recognition and creation of contrasts was Itten's key point, whether in different textures, collages of shapes, or the color proportions of Old Master paintings (which were reduced into color bar DNA sequences). In some exercises, students drew the object twice, objectively and subjectively, then hung them side-by-side. But unless you read Japanese or German, you may have trouble understanding the purpose of the lessons in these galleries-cum-crit rooms.

Johannese Itten, Study for Velum,
1938, tempura on paper, 45.5x31.5cm

There's a good reason Itten is remembered as a brilliant theorist and teacher but not as an artist: his paintings suck. The second part of the show gives abundant examples, from little landscapes and mediocre Kandinsky-Delaunay abstractions to uptight grids of color squares. Most feel forced or didactic no matter which of the many styles he adopts. He muddies his colors with white. He Escherizes objects into patterns, as when seagulls interlock then disperse over a seaside self-portrait, and he dabbles in mysticism, with zodiac signs circling into proto-hippie mandalas (Itten's pre-painting meditation ritual was one reason for his dismissal from the Bauhaus).

The final section of the show is a tacked-on epilogue on Itten's relationship with Japan. For example, Itten was influenced by suibokuga (ink painting) and invited artist Takehisa Yumeji to teach it at his school. Some of Yumeji's work and some of Itten's suibokuga-inflected paintings are here.

The essence of the exhibition is the striking contrast (how appropriate) between Itten's profound advances in color theory and art education and his own artistic shortcomings. It stirs up questions at the heart of 20th-century creative tensions: Did Itten's theories paralyze his inspiration? Does concept kill art?

This exhibition was held Jan-Feb 2004 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT) in Takebashi, Tokyo, Japan.