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Aesthetic Education at the Bauhaus

Aesthetic Education at the Bauhaus. What was the bauhaus ?. http:// youtu.be/3_c6AlBBCCI The Staatliches Bauhaus was open from 1919-1933, closing with the rise of Nazi power. It attempted to bring the study of all arts and crafts to the fore.

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Aesthetic Education at the Bauhaus

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  1. Aesthetic Education at the Bauhaus

  2. What was the bauhaus? • http://youtu.be/3_c6AlBBCCI • The Staatliches Bauhaus was open from 1919-1933, closing with the rise of Nazi power. • It attempted to bring the study of all arts and crafts to the fore. • It combined research into innovative design with the practicalities of mass production. • At the Bauhaus, art was seen as something for everyone. • Its egalitarian ideals were frequently aligned with communism and therefore unacceptable to the Nazis. • Johannes Itten, who was heavilly influenced by the ideas of Friedrich Froebel, directed the initial pedagogy of the Bauhaus.

  3. Johannes itten 1888 - 1967 • "Play becomes joy, joy becomes work, work becomes play.“ - Johannes Itten

  4. Johannes itten 1888 - 1967 • ‘Teaching cannot be repeated in its most valuable moments – when we succeed in touching a students’ innermost core and striking a spiritual light. • This description of my teaching seems to me poor compared to what actually happened. The tone, the rhythm, the sequences of words, place and time, the mood of the students, and all the other circumstances which make for a vital atmosphere cannot be reproduced; yet it is the ineffable which helps form a climate of creativity. My teaching was intuitive finding. My own emotion gave me the power which produced the student’s readiness to learn. To teach out of inner enthusiasm is the opposite of a mere pre-planned method of instruction. • My best students are those who found new ways through their own intuition. Mere outward imitation and repetition of my procedure is without sparking power. Yet I am well aware that my teaching did not always embody something new; it was also a revival of what had been the fundamentals for artists of the past.’ • Johannes Itten, Design and Form: The Basic Couse at the Bauhaus, pg. 7.

  5. Johannes itten 1888 - 1967 • Itten was originally trained as a Froebel elementary school teacher. • Like Froebel (and Pestalozzi) he followed the idea that: • ‘Teachers who have studied only the methods of imparting fixed curricula to students are like pill sellers filling prescriptions, not like doctors.’ ibid. pg. 8. • And ‘realized that our outward-directed scientific research and technology must be balanced by inward thought and forces of the soul.’ ibid., pg. 11. • He encouraged physical and creative exercises in the classroom, like marching, singing and, of course, drawing. These were structured but much more about feeling than a pre-defined intellectual result. • He writes of how he opened the first exhibition of his students work in 1918 (the group which would go on to be the first students of the Bauhaus) with the aesthetic and spiritual words of the Ancient Chinese philosopher, Lao-Tse:

  6. Itten, aesthetics and essence • ‘Thirty spokes meet at the hub • But the void within them creates the essence of the wheel, • Clay forms pots, • But the void within creates the essence of the pot. • Walls, with windows and doors make the house. • Fundamentally, • The material contains utility, • The immaterial contains essence.’ • - Lao-Tse, Tao TeChing

  7. Wassillykandinsky1866 - 1944

  8. Kandinsky: Concerning The spiritual in art • http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5321/pg5321.html (full text for free here) • ‘Sympathy is the education of the spectator from the point of view of the artist. It has been said above that art is the child of its age. Such an art can only create an artistic feeling which is already clearly felt. This art, which has no power for the future, which is only a child of the age and cannot become a mother of the future, is a barren art. She is transitory and to all intent dies the moment the atmosphere alters which nourished her. • The other art, that which is capable of educating further, springs equally from contemporary feeling, but is at the same time not only echo and mirror of it, but also has a deep and powerful prophetic strength. • The spiritual life, to which art belongs and of which she is one of the mightiest elements, is a complicated but definite and easily definable movement forwards and upwards. This movement is the movement of experience. It may take different forms, but it holds at bottom to the same inner thought and purpose.’ • Kandinsky, W., Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

  9. Froebel, Play and Spirituality • Froebel believed that • “play is the purest, most spiritual activity of man at this stage and at the same time, typical of human life as a whole - of the inner hidden natural life in man and all things” (Froebel, 1888) (section 30 in The Education of Man)

  10. Bibliography • Schlemmer, O. (1971) Man: teaching notes from the Bauhaus Mass: MIT Press • Poling, C. (1986) Kandinsky’s teaching at the Bauhaus New York: Rizzoli • Albers, J. (1971) Interaction of Color London: Yale University Press • Itten,. J. Design and Form: the basic course at the Bauhaus • Look also at: • http://works.bepress.com/john_nivala/11

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