What the Bauhaus Preliminary Course Actually Taught

There is an object in the Harvard Art Museums catalogued as "Student Exercise from László Moholy-Nagy's Bauhaus Preliminary Course (1924)". The work itself was made by Irmgard Sörensen-Popitz, born 1896, died 1993. What Harvard holds is not the exercise. It is a gelatin silver print made by the Busch-Reisinger Museum around 1950 from an original glass-plate negative by Lucia Moholy. The exercise was a construction in some combination of wood, metal, glass and wire, balanced, and the sculpture is gone. The photograph is the artefact.

That gap is the whole problem with how the Bauhaus preliminary course gets taught. Almost all of it was ephemeral: paper folded and thrown away, tonal scales in charcoal, arrangements of wire mesh and burlap made to be looked at once. What survived is the photographs, which look like modernist sculpture, so the course gets remembered as a style course. It was not a style course. It was, depending on which of the three years you turned up, a course in self-discovery, a course in physics, or a course in thrift.

What the course was structurally

The Getty's account of the Bauhaus curriculum sets out a three-tier progression. Every student did the preliminary course in the first semester: colour and form theory, principles of composition, studies of materiality, life drawing, visual analysis. Only after passing it could a student enter a workshop (ceramics, weaving, carpentry, printing, metal, stage) as an apprentice under an artist-craftsman. A minority then advanced to building studies, described as the ultimate goal of all creative activity, though the Getty also notes that formal architecture teaching did not begin until 1927, eight years after the school opened.

So the Vorkurs was a gate. The bauhaus imaginista project describes it as performing three functions at once: an initiation rite, a selection instrument, and a pedagogical foundation. It ran for one semester at first and was later extended to two. A student who did not satisfy the preliminary course teacher did not get into the workshops, which means the person teaching it held a great deal of power over who became a Bauhaus designer at all. That is worth keeping in mind when reading about the argument that got Itten out.

The Bauhaus building at Dessau, where the preliminary course was taught after 1925. Photograph in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Itten's course: the exercises, not the aura

Johannes Itten ran the preliminary course from 1919. The bauhaus imaginista survey of the three courses lists what he actually set:

• Gymnastic exercises, taken from his own teacher Adolf Hölzel, intended to loosen physical expression before drawing

• Harmonisation and rhythmic form exercises

• Light-dark contrast studies in charcoal, building tone scales

• Material studies using found objects, with a debt to Dada

• Nature drawing, for observational accuracy

• Life drawing pursued rhythmically rather than anatomically

• Analysis of old master paintings, reduced to their underlying movement

• Basic form studies, square, triangle and circle, tied to the primary colours

• Stereometric and three-dimensional composition

Read that list without the biography attached and it is not mystical at all. Contrast studies and material studies are the backbone, and both survive into Moholy-Nagy's course and Albers' course essentially intact. The Bauhaus Kooperation's own summary groups Itten's teaching into three strands: studies of nature and materials including colour and form theory, analyses of the old masters, and life drawing, with exercises in concentration, breathing and rhythm layered over the top.

Itten's stated aim, from a 1930 text quoted by bauhaus imaginista, was not a product at all:

From the very beginning, my teaching was not geared to a particularly fixed external goal. The human being itself as a developable being to be built up seemed to me to be the task.

That is a sentence about pedagogy, and it is also a sentence that tells you why a director trying to get a school to make sellable objects would eventually find it unbearable.

The Mazdaznan business, and one correction

Mazdaznan was a syncretic movement founded in the 1890s by a figure who went by Dr Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish, born Otto Hanisch, around 1844, died 1936, whose origins were disputed even at the time. Some accounts placed his birth in Tehran; another version has him as a Leipzig typographer who reinvented himself in Chicago. It combined Zoroastrian mythology with breathing technique, strict vegetarianism, meditation, intestinal care including enemas, and sexual continence, on the premise that purifying the body was the route to spiritual clarity.

Itten met the teaching around 1912 in Bern and was a committed follower by 1919, the year the Bauhaus opened. He brought it into the school in the early 1920s. Paul Citroen, a student, later described the effect on those inside the circle: for those who belonged to the Mazdaznan group, Itten exuded a special radiance. A clique formed and became, by the project's account, exclusionary.

Here is the correction. The photograph everyone reproduces, shaven heads and monkish robes, exercising on a roof, is dated 1931 and shows Itten's own school, not the Bauhaus. By 1931 Itten had been gone from Weimar for eight years and was running a private school in Berlin, which he directed from 1926 to 1934. Using that image to illustrate the Bauhaus Vorkurs is a small, near-universal error, and it flatters the story that the Bauhaus was a cult before it was a design school.

Why he actually left

The mystical practices were a cause of friction, but the record points at a plainer dispute: control of the school's direction. Oskar Schlemmer characterised the two camps as oriental culture on one side and the American spirit, progress, the marvels of technology on the other. Gropius brought in Schlemmer and Paul Klee in ways that diluted Itten's authority. bauhaus imaginista attributes the departure to disagreements with Gropius over the art-versus-technology orientation of the school and places it in spring 1923. Wikipedia's account of the Bauhaus says he resigned in late 1923. I cannot reconcile those two from what I have read, and the gap is a reminder that even the best-documented modern art school has a fuzzy calendar.

Note the sequencing. 1923 is the year of the Bauhaus exhibition at Weimar, the one built around the experimental Haus am Horn, and the year the school turned towards industry. Itten controlled the gate through which every student passed. Changing the school's direction while leaving that gate in the hands of someone who thought the task was the development of the human being was not going to work. Whether the diet was the reason or the pretext, I have not seen a document that settles it, and I would treat any confident account of Gropius's private motives with suspicion.

Moholy-Nagy's revision: same exercises, different question

László Moholy-Nagy took the course from 1923 to 1928. What he did is more interesting than "he made it rational", which is how it is usually summarised.

He kept Itten's central device, the independent material study, and changed what it was for. The Bauhaus Kooperation puts it precisely: he shifted the focus from artistic to technical issues, and rather than fostering individuality he set out to introduce students, through a synthesis of the senses, to the technical foundations of statics, dynamics and equilibrium. So the exercises look similar in photographs and are asking a different question. Itten's material study asked what this material makes you feel. Moholy-Nagy's asked what this material can bear.

The specific exercises bauhaus imaginista records under his name: systematic tactile training using material scales, running smooth to rough or pointed to blunt; three-dimensional construction in wood, metal, glass and wire; equilibrium and balance studies that rewarded reduced mass and transparency; and collage as the medium for working on surface and plane. The Harvard object I started with is one of those balance studies. Reduced mass and transparency is not a look. It is a scoring criterion: how little material can hold this up.

He was not proposing that analysis replace intuition. Writing in 1929 he set them side by side: creativity needs intuition on the one hand and conscious analysis on the other.

Albers, and the arrival of economy

The usual telling has two teachers. There were three, and the third overlaps the second. Josef Albers enrolled as a Bauhaus student in 1920, joined the teaching staff in the early 1920s, and was made a professor in 1925 when the school moved to Dessau. The Getty's summary of the sequence is that the preliminary course was supervised first by Itten, then jointly by Moholy-Nagy and Albers, and finally by Albers alone. Albers headed it from 1928, when Moholy-Nagy left, until the school closed in 1933.

Albers' version was the most physical of the three. Bauhaus Kooperation records that he taught material studies in the first semester and extended them to as much as eighteen hours a week in the preliminary course workshop, giving students simple tools and letting them find out what metal, wood and paper would do. Eighteen hours a week is not a supporting subject. That is the timetable of a trade apprenticeship.

bauhaus imaginista separates his exercises into two families, and the distinction is genuinely useful:

Two constraints governed both. Economy of material, described as working without loss or waste, and economy of labour, enforced by restricting the student to a single tool and a single process. A sheet of paper, scored and folded, no cutting, no glue. Under those conditions you cannot fake a result by adding, which is the only way most students know how to improve something.

Albers' criterion for success, in a formulation bauhaus imaginista quotes, is one of the few teaching standards I have seen that can actually be applied: the relationship between expenditure and effect is the measure of success, and beyond their sum, one element plus one element must yield at least one interesting relationship. The second half is the test that matters. Two things placed together have to produce a third thing that neither had alone. If they do not, you have added material and gained nothing.

His view of ordinary art education, from 1924, was blunt: schools that transmit established knowledge breed pushers instead of creators, and produce administrators, not designers.

The three courses, side by side

The continuity is stronger than the breaks. All three set contrast studies. All three set material studies. All three refused copying from models. What changed was the criterion by which a result was judged good, and that is the only part of a foundation course that is really a decision.

What a foundation year is for, and what got dropped

I went through a foundation-type year myself and I did not understand what it was for until much later, which I suspect is the normal experience. The thing I got wrong at the time was thinking the exercises were warm-ups for real work. They were not warm-ups. They were the only part of the training where the answer was genuinely unknown to the teacher.

Held against the Bauhaus model, contemporary art and design foundation teaching has kept quite a lot and dropped one thing almost completely.

Kept: contrast and composition studies, in some form, usually flattened into colour theory. Kept: life drawing, though often as an elective. Kept, and in fact expanded beyond anything Weimar imagined, the idea that the first year is for unlearning secondary-school habits.

Dropped: the constraint of a single material and a single process, sustained for enough hours to produce actual competence. Eighteen hours a week with paper and one tool is a serious commitment of timetable, and it competes directly with software training, which has an obvious vocational claim on the same hours. I understand why it lost. But the Albers exercise and the software tutorial teach opposite lessons. The software tutorial teaches that any result is reachable if you know the command. The folded paper teaches that the material has a limit, that you will find it, and that the interesting work happens at the limit rather than past it.

There is a second thing that got dropped and is harder to argue for: the gate. The Vorkurs decided who went further. Almost no school now uses a foundation year to exclude anybody, for reasons that are partly financial and partly humane. But a course that cannot fail you is not a selection instrument, and once it stops being a selection instrument the initiation stops working too, because nothing is at stake in it. The Bauhaus course was taken seriously in part because it was survivable rather than guaranteed. That is an uncomfortable thing to admire and I am not proposing anyone reinstate it. I only want to be accurate about what made the original work.

Sources

• bauhaus imaginista, "Three Preliminary Courses: Itten, Moholy-Nagy, Albers". The exercise lists for all three teachers, Itten's 1930 statement of aim, Moholy-Nagy's 1929 line on intuition and analysis, Albers' matter and material studies, the economy constraints, the expenditure-and-effect criterion, Albers' 1924 remark on schools, the course as initiation, selection and foundation, one semester extended to two. bauhaus-imaginista.org/articles/5176/three-preliminary-courses-itten-moholy-nagy-albers/

• bauhaus imaginista, "A Mystic Milieu". Mazdaznan founded in the 1890s by Otto Hanisch (Dr Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish, c. 1844 to 1936), its practices, Itten's contact around 1912 in Bern and commitment by 1919, Paul Citroen on Itten's radiance, Schlemmer on the two camps, the 1931 photograph taken at Itten's own school. bauhaus-imaginista.org/articles/2210/a-mystic-milieu/

• Bauhaus Kooperation, "Johannes Itten's preliminary course". The three strands of his teaching, exercises in concentration, breathing and rhythm, the course as a prerequisite for workshop entry, the Mazdaznan connection. www.bauhauskooperation.com/knowledge/the-bauhaus/training/preliminary-course/johannes-ittens-preliminary-course

• Bauhaus Kooperation, "László Moholy-Nagy's preliminary course", 1923 to 1928. The shift from artistic to technical questions, statics, dynamics and equilibrium, collage, the artist-engineer. www.bauhauskooperation.com/knowledge/the-bauhaus/training/preliminary-course/laszlo-moholy-nagys-preliminary-course

• Bauhaus Kooperation, "Josef Albers's preliminary course", 1928 to 1933. Material studies in the first semester extended to up to eighteen hours a week, simple tools with metal, wood and paper, the school of invention formulation. www.bauhauskooperation.com/knowledge/the-bauhaus/training/preliminary-course/josef-alberss-preliminary-course

• Getty Research Institute, "Bauhaus: Principles and Curriculum". The three-tier structure, the compulsory first-semester preliminary course and its contents, the sequence of teachers from Itten to Moholy-Nagy and Albers jointly to Albers alone, architecture teaching only from 1927. getty.edu/research/exhibitions_events/exhibitions/bauhaus/new_artist/history/principles_curriculum/

• Harvard Art Museums, object 220386, "Student Exercise from László Moholy-Nagy's Bauhaus Preliminary Course (1924)". Work by Irmgard Sörensen-Popitz (1896 to 1993), photograph by Lucia Moholy (1894 to 1989), modern gelatin silver print made by the Busch-Reisinger Museum around 1950 from the original glass-plate negative. harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/220386

• Wikipedia, "Johannes Itten". Teaching dates at the Bauhaus, the conflict with Gropius, Mazdaznan and vegetarianism, the private Berlin school 1926 to 1934, later posts in Krefeld and Zürich, the seven colour contrasts. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Itten

• Wikipedia, "Josef Albers". Enrolled at the Bauhaus 1920, joined the faculty in the early 1920s, professor from 1925 at Dessau, glass workshop, the school's closure in 1933. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Albers

• Wikipedia, "Bauhaus". The 1923 Weimar exhibition and the Haus am Horn, Itten's resignation in late 1923 and his replacement by Moholy-Nagy, the move to Dessau in 1925, the closure of the Berlin school in 1933. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus

• Museum of Modern Art, "Bauhaus" art term. Founded by Walter Gropius in Germany in 1919, shut down by the Nazis in 1933, an experimental pedagogy focused on materials and functions rather than traditional art school methods. moma.org/collection/terms/bauhaus

Related reading

• Albers Ran Experiments, Not Poster Campaigns

• The Job Title Nobody Has Any More

• Ulm, and the Idea That Design Could Have a Method

• The Cost of Colour

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