The Bauhaus Statutes of 1921 state:

“For the time being, each applicant is accepted for rehearsal for only one semester. During this six-month trial period ... the obligatory preliminary instruction must be attended, which consists of elementary formal instruction in conjunction with material studies. ... Final admission will depend on the attendance of this lesson and on the quality of the candidate’s free papers produced during this trial period.”¹

The preliminary course, the propaedeutic Bauhaus instruction (initially one, later two semesters), thus took on the character of an initiation rite (one had to have gone through it in order to be accepted into the Bauhaus community), also functioning as a selection instrument. At the same time, it became the pedagogical basis of the school. Its function was not only to cleanse from students the residual slag of prior formal conventions and traditional, academically established aesthetic ideas and practices, but also to impart elementary basic design principles on which subsequent Bauhaus teaching in the workshops was to be based.

Johannes Itten

Itten assumed an open pedagogical approach:

“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 of my pedagogical efforts. Sense development, increase of the thinking ability and the mental experience, loosening and Durchbildung (educating) of the physical organs and functions ...”²

Already in these sentences a comprehensive, holistic educational concept is manifested in complete clarity, going beyond the mere professional instruction of an artist or designer. It is a decisive rejection of one-sided specialization and a claim to enable and promote instead the growth of creative generalists/universalists. Consequently, the preliminary course was not intended to teach basic drawing skills in the traditional sense (acquired in conventional artistic training at the academies in three stages, by first copying drawings, then drawing from plaster casts, before proceeding to live models), but rather, to develop the human being as a physical, mental and spiritual entity—i.e., in an overarching educating of the aesthetic senses; a holistic education.

This included Itten’s teaching regularly beginning with certain gymnastic exercises suggested by his Stuttgart academy teacher Adolf Hölzel, the aim of which was “to give the body the ability to express itself, the ability to experience, to awaken itself. First (the student) must experience.”³ This was followed by so-called harmonization exercises and rhythmic form exercises, which Paul Klee described very vividly in 1921, albeit not without an ironic undertone, as follows:

“After he (Itten) has paced around the room several times, he heads for an easel on which there is a drawing board with a sheet of greaseproof paper. He grabs a charcoal, as if charging with energy his body gathers, and then suddenly he marks the sheet twice in a row. You see the shape of two energetic strokes, vertical and parallel on the top sheet, the students are asked to imitate his movement. ... Then he commands that they do it rhythmically, then he lets the same Exercitium be practiced standing. It seems to be a kind of body massage to train the machine to function emotionally.”⁴

The aim of this exercise was for the pupils to loosen up, relax and liberate themselves from the constraints of an academic manner and to experience movement and rhythm as an existential primal principle, as well as a basic principle of artistic organization. Itten was thus in agreement with the protagonists of the rhythm movement of that era—critics of civilization, natural philosophers, dance, music and sports pedagogues—who regarded natural rhythm as the only authentic principle of life.

The actual teaching program consisted of a sequence of different exercises, beginning with elementary two-dimensional studies and ending with complex plastic-spatial composition experiments. These exercises were integrated into Itten’s general theory of contrast, which—in addition to the overarching principle of movement—provided a theoretical framework for his entire teaching.

Exercises on light-dark contrast, which, in view of the primordial polarity of light and darkness, Itten regarded as the elementary contrast par excellence, occupied a particularly prominent place in his classroom. Usually they worked with charcoal, a sensitive material capable of modulation and well suited for representing light and darkness. Since the students at first often found it difficult to portray chiaroscuro nuances in a sufficiently differentiated manner, Itten had them make tone scales, covering the range from the lightest grey to the deepest black in even gradations. Such exercises were extended by adding “ribbons of light-dark chords,”⁵ whether in the same area size or with differently proportioned fields, tasks which then culminated in studies in which “areas of different size and tonal values” were to be distributed “evenly” in a composition that was usually constructed strictly at right angles.

For Itten, a holistic education program included not only training the sense of sight, but also the sense of touch. For this purpose, material studies were carried out which represent an interesting example of the penetration of avant-garde notions of design, common in Cubism and Dadaism at that time, into the teaching canon of a modern art school, documenting the anti-academic spirit of the Bauhaus, which was fully open to innovation.

These exercises were followed by the study of nature, about which Itten writes:

“Beginners have to make very precise, photographically accurate drawings, even colored ones, based on nature in order to train sharp, exact observation skills. I only want to train the eye, plus hand and memory, learning by heart what one has seen.”⁶

In fact, in the preliminary course, the exercise was used to draw factual representations that accurately depicted the material character of the objects.

Should the study of nature put the students in a position to fix what they perceived in drawings as precisely as possible and to gain “an exact idea of the tonal values and the characteristic forms,” then the intention of life drawing exercises from human models was the opposite. It was not a question here of anatomically reproducing external reality as accurately as possible, but of finding the characteristic “form of expression” or grasping the “inner movement” of the model. This was an additional indication of Itten’s break with academic traditions and, thus, his modernity:

“Today I want to teach the rhythmic drawing of nudes. The students have to draw an entire nude in circular movements while I count—drawing to the right and left, depending on the movement of the nude. Then, because the nude as a formal character also has straight lines, draw the same thing in straight lines. It is important that there is a uniform hand movement, that everything is in motion.”⁷

An interesting detail in these classes, because at that time it was extremely progressive, is the fact that nude drawing was partly accompanied by music in order to increase the feeling for the rhythmic expression of the moving model.

The analyses of old masters inspired by Hölzel in Stuttgart were also of great importance in Itten’s teaching. Itten was not interested in the philological approach to the work of art, nor in its artistic-scientific interpretation, but, rather, in gaining a direct access to the “essence” of the work through practical visual comprehension—not only in tracking down hidden compositional principles, but also in “empathizing” with the works. Oskar Schlemmer writes about this:

“Itten gives ‘analysis’ in Weimar. Shows light pictures, according to which the pupils should draw this or that essential; usually the movement, main line, curve. He refers them to a Gothic figure. Then he shows the crying Magdalena from the Grünewald Altar; the pupils try to solve the essential from the very complicated. Itten sees the experiments and thunders: ‘If you had an artistic feeling, you would not have to draw in front of this sublime representation of weeping, which would be the weeping of the world, but sit there and melt into wine. Say it and slam the door shut!’”⁸

In Itten’s preliminary course, the study of the basic “form characters”—square, triangle and circle—and their relationship to the primary colors red, blue and yellow also took up a great deal of class time. “Starting from zero” is one of the proverbial maxims of Bauhaus pedagogy. After students had “experienced” the basic forms motorically through body movements (relaxed swinging or tensed angularity), the creative possibilities of square, triangle and circle had to be worked through in a systematic series of exercises and composition studies: compositions in square, triangle or circle character, combinations of two or three characters, form divisions in square, triangle and circle character—exercises which then led to intensive proportion studies and three-dimensional form studies. It should be emphasized that for Itten these stereometric compositions were not “utopian” architectural models, after the fashion of the progressive architects in the circle of the Berlin Work Council for Art and the November Group. Furthermore, they were not meant to be purposeful preparatory exercises within the framework of the training of future architects, but in the sense of the theoretical and practical orientation of the preliminary course, as outlined above, they were intended to serve the acquisition of the most general insights into fundamental relationships between the body and space.

The same applies to the often bizarre-looking materials montages made from found objects found in dumps or scrap yards, which bear an affinity with the Dadaist movement, and in some cases show an extremely playful character. Free of any extra-aesthetic claims to exploitation, such playful exercises offered the students the opportunity to freely realize their own creative potential and thus experience their anthropological potentiality, completely in keeping with Friedrich Schiller’s dictum that man is “only human where he plays.”

After fundamental differences of opinion between Walter Gropius and Itten about the future course of the school—Gropius was looking for a socially motivated “new unity” of art and technology while Itten primarily thought of developing and strengthening artistic individuality within the framework of an “artistic” education—Itten left the Bauhaus, which he had decisively influenced in its founding phase, in the spring of 1923.

László Moholy-Nagy

Itten’s successor as head of the preliminary course was the Hungarian universal artist László Moholy-Nagy. With his emphatically rational design pedagogy concept, Moholy-Nagy became the decisive executor of the Bauhaus change of course that Gropius began instituting between 1922 and 1923—in the sense of creating a stronger orientation within the school towards technology and industry. With his artistic will Moholy-Nagy countered the expressionist exuberance, social utopian proclamations and medieval yearning for salvation which characterized the founding phase of the school. Carried off by his affirmation—indeed enthusiasm for—technology and his formal commitment to constructivism, Moholy-Nagy not only aimed at a renewal of product culture “with contemporary means,” but also included the hope of being able to positively change the individual person and society as a whole. In this hoped-for transformation, art was an “indirect means of education” intended to play a decisive role as a vehicle of sensory and cognitive differentiation.

In spite of his positive attitude to the modern, machine-determined and highly organized world, Moholy-Nagy subjected the educational system of his time to a decisive critique. Thus, he complained that the education of the “sectors of human development” under the dictates of the social division of labor and professional specialization had progressed in such a way “that the human being atrophied. ... The sectoral human being must again be founded in the central, organically growing human being in the community: strong, open, happy, as he was in his childhood. Without this organic security, the richest differentiations of the subject studies are ... mere quantitative acquisition, without increasing the intensity of life, without enlarging the circle of life. ... The future needs the whole man.”⁹

This ideal of the “whole man” was by no means original. Historically, it can be traced back to ancient Greece and coincided with the maxims of numerous progressive art educators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Itten. In his educational reflections, Moholy-Nagy proceeded from the following anthropological premise:

“Every human being is gifted. Every healthy person has a deep ability to unfold the creative energies founded in his human being. ... Originally, everyone is gifted to receive and develop sensory experiences.”¹⁰

At the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy envisioned the prerequisite for the realization of a pedagogical concept as being based on an open concept of giftedness—i.e., on the thesis of a fundamental possibility for each individual’s creative development (as given by the Bauhaus), in that this first German “Hochschule für Gestaltung” (the nickname of the academy in Dessau) “does not place the ‘subject’ at the beginning of his teaching, but man in his natural readiness to grasp the whole of life.”¹¹

Consequently, after Moholy-Nagy arrived, the student’s first year at the Bauhaus had to serve above all “the development and maturation of meaning, feeling and thoughts, especially among those young people who had an infertile accumulation of lexical knowledge behind them as a result of the usual childhood education.” And even the specialized training in one of the Bauhaus workshops was to keep the “total man” in view as the overall goal; the man “who, from his biological center, can with instinctive certainty again take an instinctive stand against all the things of life; who allows himself be taken by surprise by industry, rapidity, and the externalities of an often misunderstood ‘machine culture’ as little as the man of antiquity had the fortitude to assert himself against the forces of nature.”¹²

Against the background of the realization that in highly developed industrial societies primary experiences are increasingly supplemented, superimposed or even replaced by secondary experiences, Moholy-Nagy demanded that the Bauhaus education, which aimed at the creative universalist and not at the mere functioning specialist, that he or she must “fall back on the most primitive sources of experience” in order to arrive at the “whole of life.” In the context of this development of “primitive sources of experience,” Moholy-Nagy attached particular importance to the “experience of the material” through “primitive tactile exercises.” For him, the “School of Seeing” (Max Burchartz) was the training of the sense of touch, the “experiential comprehension of the material, as it was never achieved by the knowledge of books in the usual school business and in traditional lessons.”¹³ These tactile exercises continued what his predecessor had carried out in the preliminary course, and yet his approach differed in one important point from that of Itten. While Itten’s materials, which were to be experienced by touch, were freely “composed,” so that these material montages often had an extremely picturesque effect, Moholy’s material investigations were characterized by strict systematics, methodical consistency and, in part, a quasi-scientific approach—for example, where subjective feelings were “objectified” by so-called tactile diagrams. A case in point: in order to train haptic skills Moholy-Nagy constructed tactile boards, wheels or tapes on which materials were arranged according to certain defined criteria, usually in the form of simultaneously tangible two-line “scales,”—e.g., from smooth to rough or pointed to blunt.

Moholy-Nagy’s efforts to terminologically distinguish the concrete manifestations of different materials and to define them more precisely corresponded to his aforementioned tendencies towards systematization and the rational penetration of sensual elementary experiences. His aim was to achieve the clearest possible linguistic regulation of the term’s structure (internal structure), texture (epidermis natural) and texture (epidermis artificial). These, he felt, were used inconsistently in colloquial language. For “pedagogical purposes,” Moholy-Nagy devised exercises with different materials and tools. For example, students processed paper or cardboard in such a way that these smooth materials were given relief surfaces.

In addition to the exercises for haptic and optical sensory training, these three-dimensional construction exercises represented a second focus of Moholy-Nagy’s “general element theory.” While those three-dimensional material assemblages composed of found objects created under Itten were often characterized by bizarre charm and humorous punch lines, the construction exercises devised by Moholy-Nagy were aimed at systematically investigating problems of body and space and finding constructive solutions; meaning that these exercises, which used wood, sheet metal, glass, wire and cords as their raw materials, “primarily served to educate visual sensation and thinking in relation to construction, static and dynamic moments, balance and space” and were therefore “of elementary importance for later practice in all areas of design.”¹⁴

The reduction of mass played a central role in this. In fact, the reduction of volume was a topic of particular interest at the Bauhaus. One need only recall the tendency towards transparent architecture by Gropius (the glass curtain of the workshop wing of the Dessau Bauhaus building is particularly striking) or the reductive tubular steel furniture by Marcel Breuer. Accordingly, Moholy-Nagy had constructions made of wood, metal, glass and plastic worked out in the preliminary course, which, with drastically reduced material expenditure, sought to avoid everything block-like, which in many cases had been driven to complete transparency or merely indicated the physical as a line structure. These exercises on spatial experience, which would be inconceivable without the influence of the “spatial constructions” of Russian constructivists (Stenberg brothers, Rodchenko) and, of course, without Moholy-Nagy’s own experimental design practice, reflected the Bauhaus’s perceptible effort since the mid-1929s to achieve a radical economization of means. Moholy-Nagy writes:

“Yesterday’s artist took little care, for example, of calculating the exact weight of his work. A few kilograms or even a hundredweight was not the point with an older sculpture. The Bauhaus also learned to pay attention to this component, and every gram saved—while maintaining the same effect—often meant a small victory for the inventor.”¹⁵

In these exercises, two criteria were of central importance, namely material economics and labor economics. According to Albers, material economics means optimal material use “without loss or waste.” Education in material economy was for Albers education in rational, planned action: “There must not be anything unused left in any form, otherwise the calculation is incorrect; because chance has played along. He is unconsidered and therefore irresponsible; also spiritless, because he comes from habit.” Material economy implies discipline, and “cleanliness and exactness as the greatest disciplinary factors” are, according to Albers, also indispensable to aesthetic education (which by no means collided with the goal of promoting creativity for him, but was never acceptable for one of his most important later students in the USA, namely Robert Rauschenberg). Economy in the use of materials “leads to an emphasis on lightness”—a goal that with his tubular steel chairs Marcel Breuer, as mentioned previously, achieved in the field of product design. The principle of material economy becomes aesthetically relevant through “the activation of negativa (of remainders, intermediate, and negative values). ... If one gives equal consideration and weight to positive and negative values, then there is no ‘remainder.’ Then we no longer draw distinctions between ‘carrying’ and ‘being carried’; we no longer admit divisions between ‘serving’ and ‘being served,’ between ‘decoration’ and ‘that which is decorated.’ Every element must simultaneously help and be helped by the whole, support and be supported. In this way, base and frame disappear—and thus also the monument, which employs an excess of substructure to support a dearth of superstructure.”²²

In Albers’ “educational methodology,” material economics and labor economics are directly intertwined. Through the class division of labor, economics is practiced by restricting the worker to a single work process and radically limiting the use of tools. A vivid example of a material-economical behavior with a simultaneous labor-economical procedure is a plastic material study made out of sheet metal by Bauhaus student Alphons Frieling, which Albers commented upon as follows: “Emphasis on material-economics (without any cuts excised from the rectangle, strongest strength test, highest possible height), on labor-economics (one tool: sheet metal scissors ... one working process: only shearing, without any bending).”²³ The restriction to simple material and the demand on students’ to strictly cleave to material and labor economic procedures could be interpreted as extreme pedagogical rigor, which may perhaps seem incompatible with the goal of unfolding creativity. In fact, the works created within the Albers preliminary course demonstrate a diversity that proves the opposite: namely, that for creative people, despite external restrictions (which here, of course, were pedagogically motivated primarily—although the economic difficulties of the time cannot be overlooked), the number of possible solutions is almost limitless. For Albers, who out of conviction offered no model solutions and who was careful not to intervene “correctively” in the works of his pupils (this too was a reform pedagogy ideal Albers shared with Johannes Itten, who was born in the same year as his former student), there was basically no best solution in any of his material exercises. Rather, he accepted a variety of solutions, with the proviso that the criteria set by him had been adhered to:

“The relationship between expenditure and effect is the measure of success. Beyond their sum, one element plus one element must yield at least one interesting relationship.”²⁴

Already in November 1933, a few months after the Nazis forced the closure of the Bauhaus, Albers was able to begin a second, extremely successful career as an art teacher in the United States. There, first at Black Mountain College and later at Yale, he shaped generations of adolescent artists in the spirit of the Bauhaus; there, in a modified form, he continued his preliminary Bauhaus course and, above all, expanded it with his legendary color course, which is not the subject of this sketch for propaedeutic instruction at the Bauhaus.