Itten, Klee, Kandinsky: Three Ways of Teaching Vision
In the early Bauhaus, three neighbours shared a corridor and nothing else. Johannes Itten began his classes with breathing exercises and strict diets; Paul Klee sketched little diagrams of dots “going for a walk”; Wassily Kandinsky talked about points and planes as if he were teaching physics rather than painting. Put them side by side and you get something like a triptych of modern art education: three ways of teaching vision, three different stories about where creativity actually lives.
Itten: the guru of seeing
Itten’s classroom in Weimar had the feel of an ants meeting than a design school. Mazdaznan respiration practices were primarily followed by the students. They all ate vegetarian food and exercise routines; finally, they all practice meditation before touching any material around them. Itten considers the rituals significant; he does not regard them as something extra that was added to the painting but as something essential about the painting. He considers it as the foundation of the preliminary course. He thought that seeing colour in true, 'spiritual' intensity was only potential if it was perceived through a body and soul that had been everlastingly purified.
The artist used the colour balls' exercises and warm tones contrast or warm and cool contrast method, which is very strategic, but the goal is not to make better optical colors, rather make the inner colours which suits the soul. 'Vibration is the sole of colour' or something or at least to that effect in this story. A canvas in a field of energies to which his will must be attuned through a technique that verges on the devotional. In this context, creativity is simply an inborn ability that is hidden. The bad habits, dulled sences, spoilt lifestyle make it lacking in an individual. The teacher is nothing but a guru for unblocking the creativity already present inherent in the students.
Who will not fall for this as this seems to be something very promising who won’t want a charismatic figure who promises you that by doing the right exercises, the “true” creative individual in you would be out! Although Itten's views on spirituality are influenced by Mazdaznan's views on health, race and other factors, his form of mysticism proves the transformation of an educational system based on purity to an educational system that did not permit everyone. Considering a religious disposition, according to which the soul is trained to have a proper view, we may inquire whose souls would qualify for proper sight.
Klee: structures in motion
Stroll into the next door, and Klee’s studio appears more peaceful but just as radical. The Pedagogical Sketchbook by Paul Klee appears like an extraordinary physics book. In the book, the author, Paul Klee, compares poetry to geometry. He even compares transposition to either reflection or rotation. He turned drawing into a tiny narrative as “a dot that went for a walk“. He has recently taught a group of marginalised students in Madrid to draw by imagining their bodies were pens. He advocates the need to experience images by “going for walks in one” that’s a picture and “reading” it bit by bit as a sentence.
Klee is attracted to various forces like:
1. Gravity that pulls forms downwards
2. Tension that stretches the forms
3. Rhythm that repeats forms
He tells students to picture seeds sprouting, cities growing, musical themes developing, and to transform the processes into visual structures. Vision changes into a tool to understand 'how something moves' and 'to relate what moves'. There is still an air of mystery in it but the man seems to be very humble. "Children of the earth, children of the cosmos." leaving the reader in wonder. It gives the reader the belief that once there is a clear cut grammar given to people, people can build their own voicings to represent stories and ideas.
Creativity does not involve chance, but the ability of an individual to master the ‘syntax’ of a form and play with it. The instructor is similar to an engineer‑poet, who is lesser prophet. He prepares graded problems that enable the student to feel the way a poem gets constructed, falls, or becomes another. Klee's art teaching method of vision tells us that freedom doesn't mean no structure; it means living below the surface of the structure and bending the structure.
Kandinsky: the analyst of form
Little further inside along the passage, Kandinsky, another close friend and at times a foe of Klee was drawing triangles and circles on a blackboard and as charged particles. As stated at the time of it's release of Point and Line to Plane, he was treating the visual field as a system governed according to the laws: Points set up distinct tensions according to where they are placed, Lines have direction and and controls the Force of dynamism, Planes set up resonant or discordant intervals in between them. He strips things down into these basic elements at his Bauhaus courses and asks people to reconstruct them, not to imitate appearances, but to represent inner “vibrations”.
It is 'analytic' because it is concerned with the 'analysis' of written and more broadly mediated communication. Kandinsky’s ideal “spiritual in art,” though, requires it to be actualized through an artist learniong to control his materials consciously. In his classroom, a small change in the placement of a period is not subjective- it completely changes the energy of the painting. Compositions are viewed almost like equations in which different constellations of form and colour generate distinct psychic effects.
In this manner, imagination then becomes a form of experimentation, with methods of visual construction, or composition, and sound... The teacher is believed to be a conjecturer who provides a meta- language to the students so that they can name what they are feeling and tweak what they are doing. If Itten’s instructional technique is such that it creates disciples and Klee’s that it breeds explorers, Kandinsky’s are of such a type that it creates the technician of expression, i.e. it would develop the person who can reverse‑engineer the emotional charge of an image.
Three stories about creativity
What binds these three together is almost an instinctive feeling rather than an obvious method. But some authors disagree on drivetrain. Itten thinks the problem lies with spiritual blockage and so, he drills the body and psychic. Paul Klee believes the problem is due to structural illiteracy and so, he taught a grammar of becoming. Kandinsky believed that the problem lay with inarticulate intuition and so, he devised a nomenclature to enable intuition to do a little talking of its own.
Three common beliefs about teaching and creativity that continue to ravage studios and classrooms to this day. There are several common myths including the myth of the guru who promises the disciple marked changes through a change of intensity and lifestyle, myth of the system-builder who promises the disciple more freedom through structures and exercises and myth of the theorist who promises the disciple more control and security through concepts and critique. Each of the success factors mentioned above has both its benefits and bad effect on our lives.
Nowadays, schools are struggling with teaching creativity along with outcome measurement. From this viewpoint, this hypothetical Bauhaus hallway appears not as just a historical scene but a bunch of opportunities. We force student and make brutal demands from them for the desired results or work to be produced. Do we design ever smarter systems of tasks and workshops. Can they improve their intuition at theory and critique? Perhaps the lesson we should learn from Itten, Klee and Kandinsky is that whenever we teach vision, we will always have to choose between these stories, consciously or unconsciously. If we are lucky, we find a way to let them argue productively inside the same room.