UTOPIA?

Johannes Itten and Mazdaznan at the Bauhaus

As leader of the preliminary course from 1919 to 1923, Johannes Itten of Switzerland was the school’s spiritual guide, defining its early utopian phase. The preliminary course sought to strip away conventions, plunging students into fresh acts of expressive abstraction and physical making. Line, shape, and texture were conduits to self-knowledge and personal renewal. The preliminary course laid the ground for foundational programs around the world, which are still widely implemented today.

Itten was a zealous promoter of Mazdaznan, an eclectic religious movement founded by Otto Hanisch, a German-born American. Culling beliefs from Zarathustrian, Christian, and

Hindu traditions, Mazdaznan demanded a bodily regimen of sexual abstinence, cleansing enemas, and controlled breathing, as well as a vegetarian diet laden with garlic and onions. These rigors aimed to achieve more than personal wellness; Mazdaznan promoted deplorable racial views and sought to purify the so-called white race. (The doctrine considered Jews to be white.) Some of Itten’s own students followed him to the Bauhaus and formed a substantial Mazdaznan colony at the school, where Itten promoted the religion’s wellness aspects along with its white supremacist views, with Gropius’s initial support. Eventually, however, tensions around Mazdaznan developed.

Gropius feared that Itten’s mystical bent endangered the Bauhaus’s reputation as a serious school for the applied arts. The teacher’s polarizing philosophy had also produced a schism within the student body (half of which continuously smelled of garlic and onion, to the apparent annoyance of the other half ). While it is not clear if the Bauhaus director also recognized parallels between Mazdaznan’s eugenics principles Vand those of the then-nascent Nazi party, strain between the two men resulted in Itten’s departure in 1923. Before he left, Itten made a profound impact on his most extraordinary pupil, Fried Dicker.

Johannes Itten (lettering artist/author), Fried!

Dicker (typesetter), annotated proof of Utopia: Documents of Reality (Utopia: Dokumente der Wirklichkeit), 1921, letterpress and pencil, 123⁄4 × 9 inches (323 × 249 mm), Weimar. Collection of Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

UTOPIA demonstrates some of the finest typographic experiments to ever come out of the Bauhaus. It sets the tone for contemporary lettering in the next few decades.

This project introduced new ideas, it presented a new way of thinking about art and design. It introduced the concept of the “elemental” form, which focused on basic shapes, colors and lettering.