Breathe in, Breathe out – as simple as it sounds at first, Johannes Itten’s calligraphic drawing from 1922 implies a complex cosmology. A “pendulum” and “soul of the world”[1] is being breathed here, as the calligraphy paraphrases Baroque German mysticist Jakob Böhme (1575-1625). Oscillating between yellow, red, and blue, it seems as if the poem’s three-dimensional architecture of individually crafted letters is breathing the respective colour spectra itself. Crowned by a clock face, a heart-shaped pendulum rests at the centre of the calligraphic image, while two birds in the lower corners indicate a circular movement. Cosmological oneness appears to emerge from directing one’s attention towards the otherwise subconscious physical agency of breathing – an agency that connects one organism to other, possibly distant spheres. Suggesting that these forces might be empowered by extra-terrestrial influences – such as an “angel’s breath” –, Itten’s imagery spans across distant regions of space and time. What could (and has often) been read in terms of a purely esoteric, possibly anti-modern position, is related to standardized magazine typefaces at the same time–not unlike the ones that had been re-used for dada collages.
In the early 1920s, the artist’s personal cosmology is connecting colour and composition studies of ancient art works with theosophical, mystical, and philosophical sources from Europe and Asia. Although such a set of cosmological references was also popular among artist colleagues like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, or Sophie Taeuber, Itten’s transcultural apparatus appears quite unique. Drawn a few months after continuing conflicts and, finally, a resignation letter to Bauhaus director Walter Gropius, Breathe in, Breathe out marks a distinct interest in combining systematic analysis and cosmology – unlike Gropius who favoured the former as key skill for the future Bauhaus curriculum.
Before being appointed as director of the Kunstgewerbeschule and museum Zurich in 1938, Itten had established his own pedagogical initiatives in Berlin and Krefeld after having spent some years with the spiritual Mazdaznan-community in rural Switzerland during the 1920s. Taking these extensive theosophical and pedagogical activities into account, they could be considered an integral part of the artist’s practice. Transcultural explorations did play an important role in both directions: While Mazdaznan’s principles did largely depend on philosophy and religion from Iran and India, East Asian calligraphy had been included in Itten’s curricula at Weimar, Berlin, and Krefeld.
A few years after starting his new position in Zurich, Itten organized the exhibition Chinese Contemporary Painting, that followed up some of these routes in 1942. By revisiting this curatorial project that paved the way towards the opening of the Museum Rietberg[2] a decade later, I would like to reflect on some transcultural overlays and encounters between Europe and East Asia at the time.[3] Beyond individual cosmologies, the East’s programmatic position for European avant-garde movements re-appears in a prominent moment for the reconstitution of Western modernity after World War II. According to Itten, Walter Gropius proclaimed “East and West must unite!”[4] at his opening speech for the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm in 1955 – a principle that Itten himself had fought so much for at the early Bauhaus.
Modernity between Europe and East Asia
What sounds like a typical modern universalism expressed by Gropius, bears a complex transcultural history between Europe and East Asia. The East has been attributed to the role of the absolute, enigmatic other from Europe’s (semi-)colonizing[5] point of view, with regard to China in particular. On the other hand, there has been transcultural exchange between the two regions for centuries – be it through intensive trade relations, individual travelling experiences or institutions.[6] However imbalanced in many cases, a retrospective look offers a rather twisted view of mutual cultural, technological, and economical entanglements. From the seventeenth century onwards, European perspectives have been largely driven by admiration for China’s culturally sophisticated exports, resulting in huge trade deficits on the European side. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Europe`s imperial powers forced China into unfair trade and territorial agreements while leaving the country’s sovereignty intact on paper. It was on the background of Europe’s killing fields that brought devastation in place of modern progress at the beginning of the twentieth century, that the addressing of East Asia among Europe’s art circles had often been paired with a modern sensibility of crisis and physical detachment, but also with hope for transcendental unity. Searching for an alternative modernity by turning to the East has proliferated through painting, philosophy, popular literature, or music at the end of the nineteenth century before it could often be found amidst highly charged cultural policies after the First World War.
With the defeat of the Central Powers and the rise of anti-colonialist movements globally, Europe’s political and economic hegemony was contested more and more. While some popular voices did speculate about a Decline of the West,[7] others were seeking to broaden their views in search for alternative perspectives on modernity. Particularly among the German-speaking parts of Europe, a sensibility for East Asia grew parallel to resentments against the still dominating empires of Britain and France.[8] Interestingly, this turn away from the West was widely shared across the political spectrum from the far right to the far left. Looking at ethnic exceptionalism, body consciousness in Lebensreform-movements, or anti-capitalist hopes for social change, India and China have played a particular important role at the beginning of the twentieth century. Art historian Josef Strzygowski, for instance – familiar to Itten from his Vienna period before the Bauhaus years –,[9] did even follow a vision to re-locate the origins of “Nordic” and, according to his view: “Aryan”, art in Europe via Persia to East Asia[10]– in place of ancient Greece. Itten himself had been following such a racially based exceptionalism of claimed ancestry for some time, most obviously where he had been promoting Mazdaznan concepts during the 1920s. The cult promoted a rigid control of nutrition, sexuality, and physical exercise – namely in conscious breathing –, in combination with Zoroastrianist, Christian, Hindu-Tantric and Theosophical elements. Particularly in Germany, it had become popular among Avant-Garde art circles. A manuscript for a lecture in 1919[11] reveals that Itten had integrated key points of Mazdaznan in his own holistic program for the development of the arts, just before he accepted an appointment at the Bauhaus. According to Itten, works of art should aim at “drawing the path of human evolution” by enfolding a dynamic of “concentration”. [12] Racial components of this program remain ambivalent insofar, as they were drafting an evolutionary path from plants to a white “Aryan” race as “conclusion” on the hand, while broadly acknowledging non-European art practices as well as everyone`s emancipatory right of self-determination on the other hand. Nevertheless, one finds neither Anti-Semitism, nor a cultural or social hierarchy implied in Itten`s writings[13]. Between the late 1910s and the late 1920s, Mazdaznan remained an important, but by far not the only source of inspiration for Itten`s work.
China: A transcultural media apparatus in modern Europe?
While potentially orientalist, racist, and supremacist tendencies of these concepts have been criticized broadly, the transcultural potential of modern re-orientations towards East Asia has been rarely acknowledged – with the exception of two remarkable studies focusing on China’s distinctive role. Where Britain’s Chinese Eye[14] suggests a respective perceptional apparatus for approaching the nineteenth century empire at home, Ideographic Modernism[15] traces the twisted modernist myth of China in early twentieth century literature and poetry from Europe. Looking back at willow-pattern china in Victorian interiors, travel photography or exhibits at museums, a Chinese lens is often mounted to re-adjust modern relations to nature, politics, and media. At the same time, processes of such re-coding appear across various fields of art. If James McNeill Whistler attributes Chineseness to one of his familiar models by painting her amidst Blue-and-White porcelain, or: if Franz Kafka writes a novel on the construction of The Great Wall of China; the China addressed here, both does and does not refer to the actual territory. It does, as it connects to a history of transcultural exchange by means of emblematic trade goods, or by means of well-known historic buildings. It does not, as both Whistler and Kafka never travelled to China and referred to it only as they could anticipate it through various media – and, above all: their imagination –, that largely rests on European productions of Chineseness. However, this China has been related to forms that evolved in contact with the actual place. Therefore, it cannot be considered a random exotism. Beyond generic stereotypes of the far away and “unfamiliar”, it took an “antithetical” part[16] in European modernity – even to the extent of desires to “become” Chinese.[17] As proclaimed by Whistler, Kafka, and some of their contemporaries, this imagined counterpart had obviously promised a way out of shortcomings in efficiency-driven modernization. Situated in ambiguous semi-colonial relationships, a strategic cultural alliance or even emphatic identification, respective references seem to address “at once place, commodity, people, and […], something more […]”,[18] thus resembling a broad complex of imageries and no clear-cut signifier. And yet, from the perspective of how “sensibilities [were] transform[ed]”,[19] aesthetic and geopolitical categories underwent significant changes by relating to China in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain as well as in German-speaking countries. The perceptional device that is activated here, could be considered a media apparatus that is employed where something “is not just […] thought about, but also something thought with […]”.[20] By way of “thinking with” China, a transcultural media apparatus had introduced complications in time, place, and socio-economic concepts throughout modern Europe. Taking the semi-colonial power gap into account and that hardly any of the mentioned protagonists did travel to the China of their time, the media apparatus here seems to be focused in one direction only. Could one really classify such a relationship as transcultural? Or does modern Europe’s turn to China rather resemble a one-sided projection, blinded by patterns of a notorious aesthetic-racial complex?[21] At this moment, I would like to follow the effects of this media apparatus a bit further and return to critical questions in respective paragraphs below.
Johannes Itten: thinking with East Asia
As outlined by Chang and Bush above, the addressing of East Asia among Europe’s avant-gardes had not just contributed to the imagination of an alternative modernity, but also to an expanded understanding of mediality in the arts. As early as during his Vienna years (1916-1919), Johannes Itten got in touch with East Asian philosophy and arts, from China and India in particular.[22] One reads of a turn towards an “immaterial […] essence”[23] in diary notes of the time – relating concepts of avant-garde art production to Daoist and Buddhist sources, for instance. While this turn towards extra-European cosmologies has often been rendered “esoteric”[24] in recent research, I would argue that this term is by no means sufficient to describe the complex transcultural encounters and overlays of the respective search for an alternative modernity around 1920. On the contrary: transformations through producing, teaching, and exhibiting practices reach beyond esoteric universalism or mere exoticism.
Itten’s compiled publication Utopia, for instance, paraphrases ancient Chinese art theory sources at length, accompanied by religious and philosophical texts from other regions, and combines them with calligraphic analyses of diverse ancient artworks. “The heritage of the Chinese tells the deepest what human wisdom can say about the art of human beings. For them, word and image are signs of the spirit; […]”.[25] On the first impression, this sounds like a pretty random universalism. Moreover, the identification of perceived signs with some “spirit” suggests a direct connection between the two, ignoring the media functions of the former. In the course of further reading, the constellation might be specified by a quote from eleventh century artist Guo Xi: “Only then, after I have placed all surrounding things in their own order, my hands and spirit do meet and move in perfect freedom”.[26] Speaking through other, translated voices across centuries and geographical distance, a perceived environment, the human body, and the spirit seem to be related in particular ways. Above all, the three entities appear to operate quite autonomously, i.e., “in their own order” and thus beyond central control. Environment, body, and spirit are in movement, where they might “meet”. Although “perfect freedom” supposes a somewhat ideal constellation, it might only be a temporary one. Furthermore, the quote highlights a paradoxical significance – i.e., that meaning is both established by direct identification and indirect constellation. Itten had been inspired by the art historian and translator Ernest Fenollosa, mentioned as the source of Guo Xi’s quote. Fenollosa’s popular research on Chinese and Japanese Art[27] and The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry[28] had become standard literature on these topics at the beginning of the twentieth century. His critical view through the lens of the East on semiotic consequences of capitalist modernity – targeting meaning cut into clearly defined and freely available parts –, had inspired a generation of artists across disciplines. The East was employed to break through such Fordist abstraction,[29] as well as through narrowing dualisms between subject-object, body-mind, or medium-matter. Itten returned to this transforming perspective on numerous occasions – with regard to China in particular. Taking a closer look at his major pedagogical publications, Tagebuch 1930[30] and Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus[31] for instance, one finds many examples of Chinese ink painting, demonstrating the interconnectedness of body and spirit or particularity and wholeness – mediated by a flow of drawing movements. In published texts, teaching activities, as much as throughout artistic practice, one could speak of steps taken to transgress one-directional and Eurocentric perspectives. Moreover, Itten’s turn to East Asia appears in regular exercises of Zen Buddhism and ink painting as well.[32] Transcultural transgression did involve a permanent physical movement there. But the unsettling question remains: Did Itten actually meet East Asia?
One finds an early and influential example for such encounter in the Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta 1922,[33] where Itten and other Bauhaus protagonists presented works (mostly prints) in search for an alternative “modernity inspired by Eastern spirituality”[34] among Indian artists from circles at the reform university founded by the poet Rabindranath Tagore at the beginning of the twentieth century.[35] The nobel laureate of 1913 was widely known in German speaking countries at the time and himself in search for an alternative, holistic, and anti-colonial modernity that would integrate European, Indian, and East Asian influences. As photographs of Tagore and Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese revolutionary and first provisional president of post-monarchy China, were collected by Itten in one of his notebooks,[36] this might indicate a sympathy for emancipatory, anti-colonial movements in Asia. Another occasion for learning from East Asia had arised in Berlin at the beginning of the 1930s. After participating in an ink painting workshop by Japanese artist Shounan Mizokoshi at the residence of the Japanese commercial attaché, Itten invited Mizokoshi in 1931 as well as the artist/graphic designer Takehisa Yumeji in 1932 to lecture ink painting at the Itten-Schule – an art school in Berlin that he had founded in 1926. As a respective addition to the school’s official advertisement leaflet shows in 1932, ink painting became an important part of the curriculum.[37]
The exhibition Chinese Contemporary Painting, 1942
Even if Itten himself has never travelled to Asia, he had practiced a continuous exchange through exhibition collaborations, his own writings as well as by physical exercise: starting during his Vienna years, continuing at the early Bauhaus, but even more devoted at the Itten-Schule Berlin and, some years later, in working towards the Museum Rietberg for non-European art in Zurich between 1938 and 1952. A few years after Itten had been appointed director of the Kunstgewerbeschule and museum Zurich in 1938, he organized the exhibition Chinese Contemporary Painting at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in 1942. Based entirely on loans from private collections – including his own –, Itten primarily followed the suggestions of Eduard von der Heydt, the collector with whom he would work together closely throughout the following years. It might also have contributed to the choice of the topic and the artists that a series of similar events was organized throughout Europe in the 1930s.[38] Apart from a few historic examples from the nineteenth and seventeenth centuries – including a Qing-dynasty interior from the imperial palace –, almost one hundred works from the early twentieth century were presented at Chinese Contemporary Painting. Interestingly, some sheets of non-Chinese origin produced in the context of the Berlin Itten-Schule were also included to “show how the technical basis and inward attitude” could serve as a “vivid element for constructive art education”[39] – as a newspaper critic had put it at the time. In the following paragraphs, I would like to explore some of Itten’s commentary from the exhibition guide as well as some reviews from the press in detail.
Itten’s annotation to the work Camellia branch and cock (the branch painted by Ling Wenyuan in 1923, the cock painted by Qi Baishi in 1929) reads as follows: “The branch: rhythmically broad, free, and powerful – written down in one single vibrant, coherent view. The cock: ducked–sage and vividly characterized”.[40] This resonates very much with the author’s well-known vision for the arts: rhythm connected to one holistic movement. At the same time, cock and branch are acknowledged for different qualities, they even seem like counterparts in posture: broad and free on the one hand and ducked on the other. While Camellia branches curve over a cock bending down, the animal might be in search of something to pick. A broad variety of brush strokes and ink concentrations evoke the impression of dynamic turns and indicate spatial relations. The cocks’ legs, for instance, are taking up the direction of the camellia branches and yet pointing to a different part of the image. Feathers are crossing the plant in 90-degree angles, but finally paralleling its position by turning downwards. Despite being painted by two different artists in a 6-year-interval, one could perceive an overall and potentially ongoing movement here indeed. At the same time, a certain moment in time seems to contribute significantly to the cock’s ducked character. By combining a movement’s moment with the broader notion of a “coherent” rhythm of life, the calligraphy evokes the impression of mediating between individual existence and a constantly changing environment. According to Itten, not just an essence of the cocks’ being, but also of an artistic approach is brought to the fore by various brush strokes. Interestingly, neither the drawing’s caption nor Itten’s annotation does mention the collaboration and temporal gap between the two different contributions. Departing from a tradition of literati ink painting, Qi/Ling had developed a particular dynamic based on specific relations between brush strokes as well as based on the extraordinary variety of ink concentrations. And to a certain extent, both ways indicate a three-dimensional space. Particularly for this reason, one could associate the work with “modern” literati painting–i.e., a tendency of traditional Chinese painting that has taken up influences from Europe’s art tradition. Despite of such subtle traces of transcultural transformation, the genre was distinguished as guohua from xiyanghu (a term used for Western-style oil painting) in art discourses of the 1910s and 1920s.
Using a broad range of techniques from traditional Chinese to figurative Western-style oil painting, Liu Haisu and others from Shanghai’s modernist art circles did even risk some more significant breaks with the literati heritage. An artistic method that raised special concerns from the side of traditionalists after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, was the introduction of nude modelling to the curriculum of the Shanghai Art Academy founded by Liu. Although not the only one who was embracing Western influence, he certainly has been (and is still today) known as one of its most prominent defenders at the time. With a background in various artistic practices from an early age and more than two years of travelling to several European countries, Liu had not just helped to establish spatial concepts of figure and ground in vibrant artistic discourses of republican Chinese modernism, he had also been acting as ambassador of modern Chinese Art in the West at the beginning of the 1930s.[41] Surprisingly, it was not a work by Liu with a pronounced turn to the West that had been included in the exhibition Chinese Contemporary Painting of 1942, but one with predominant roots in the literati tradition. Itten had put the catalogue commentary on Liu’s ink painting Ravens in Conversation (1923) as follows: “Strong, rough-scaly shaggy pine; above in the branch – below in the branch–the noisy ravens”.[42] To characterize how the image depicts a partially visible tree with a bird on the ground and one sitting on a branch above, the annotation directs the audience’s attention towards the tangible and the audible. As both senses cannot directly be accessed by means of visual representation, Itten emphasizes the images’ quality to mediate a holistic physical experience. One could get the impression as if the ravens’ voices would actually be echoed across the image-space, structured by a composition of organically curved brush strokes that indicate constantly change. From a stirred ground with broader lines, the “shaggy” shapes of a tree arise. The trunk is partially covered by a climbing plant, with its upper ends hanging down in tiny lines from a thick branch. If Itten’s remarks largely focus on the physical experience of oneness here, they do so by pointing at it how this is mediated by the ink paintings. Or, in Christopher Bush’s words: one imagery is thought “with” another. Even the form of Itten’s catalogue commentary seems to speak with another form of poetic reflection, i.e., that of Japanese haiku. However, the perspective of the transcultural media apparatus employed here excludes specific forms of modernism from China–such as Liu’s figurative oil painting.
Press reviews of Chinese Contemporary Painting did primarily emphasize the exhibits’ rootedness in tradition against a progressive European modernity, while acknowledging some slight “modern” breakups with tradition–by individual expression, for instance.[43] Seen through the lens of the European “contemporary”, here, some sparks of contemporaneity might have indicated a path of development. On the other hand, the audience appeared to be fascinated by a certain “timelessness” and “simplicity” – obviously projecting an idealized model of what European modernity was longing for in 1942.[44] Itten’s own introductory remarks to the catalogue did follow his primary interest in rhythm and movement, mentioning the particularly close relation of drawing and writing in Chinese ink painting as well as their integral role in Zen-Buddhist exercises to transcend human existence.[45] Interestingly, the author did not focus at all on what the shows’ title suggested, i.e., contemporary art from China. On the contrary, one finds an essay on the history and tradition of East Asian Ink Painting in four parts:[46] a short note on its mystic and particularly significant position in general, followed by an outline of the presumed invention of brush and paper approx. second century BC, and the major part quoted at length from Takehisa Yumeji’s guide on how to paint lines with ink and brush – a text written on Itten’s invitation while the Japanese artist was teaching at the Itten-Schule in Berlin from 1932 to 1933. A very short conclusion on how contemporary works at the exhibition did relate to this tradition, is included in the final paragraph. It is only here that a “middle way” of “mixing […] Western points of view with Eastern ones”[47] is acknowledged in very broad sense. Apart from that, Itten did obviously favour an ancient past for introducing Chinese Contemporary Art. By introducing both a geographical (East Asia in place of China) and temporal (second century BC in place of 1942) imprecision, the exhibition’s subject appears to be shifted–obviously towards Itten’s own concept of a universal cosmological equilibrium transgressing time and space. It seems as if the holistic approach of Breathe in, Breathe out had found a transculturally twisted continuation here. A continuation that appears to borrow much from an orientalist cliché of the inscrutable, mentioned just at the beginning of the introduction in terms of a fundamental difference: “As mysteriously foreign as the East Asian appears to us Europeans, as mysterious appears his ink painting.”[48]
As much as the East Asian tradition of ink painting had become part of modernist art education in Europe (already at the early Bauhaus) and of Itten’s own art practice from the 1930s onwards, it tended to ignore modernist transcultural tendencies in East Asia. Takehisa Yumeji itself, but also some well-known artists included in the Zurich exhibition like Liu Haisu were hardly known for their literati ink paintings in the 1940s, but as modernist reformers with a pronounced orientation towards the West. Some striking details, like the collaboration between Qi and Ling, or Liu’s image inscription saying that he has produced the painting at the Lake Geneva in Switzerland, might have added some further interesting layers to the transcultural encounter. The fact that their own art practices had been acknowledged by European modernism only in so far as they did comply with an imagined tradition of China in this case, raises doubts on the transcultural character of the encounters. Nothing is mentioned by Itten’s commentary about Yumeji’s extensive exploration of Art Nouveau and Western abstraction as well as early twentieth century advertising[49], or of Liu introducing plein air oil painting and nude modelling at the Shanghai Art Academy.[50]
Cosmology and mediality
For a concluding question, I´d like to take up Chang’s and Bush’s point again, looking through Itten’s lens of the 1940s. Has an avant-gardist mediality in early twentieth century Europe been affected by transcultural encounters with East Asia? Generally, there can be no doubt about its distinctive role, considering the broad circulation of respective references in art and theory of the time alike. For Itten, it seems as if “thinking with” East Asia – and China in particular –, was employed as transcultural media apparatus in two directions: firstly, to connect to a holistic (meta-)physical experience and secondly, to bring art’s mediality to the fore.
But there are question marks concerning the transcultural nature of such references. In terms of time, culture, and technology, a fundamental otherness had been established – often without trying to take a closer look on what actually happened on the “other” side. It seems that in place of mutual exchange, there were Eurocentric projections involved in many cases. One parameter that certainly had a narrowing effect on Ittens curatorial approach in 1942, was Eduard van der Heydt’s role as consultant, whose private collection has played a prominent role in a previous exhibition in 1941. Interestingly, accompanying texts as well as the broad press echo responding to the preceding show Asian Art from Swiss Collections (Kunstgewerbemuseum Zurich, 1941) were not so much focused on constructing otherness, but articulating common ground with European modernity by aiming for a unity of art and life and art’s integration into a rhythm of life.
At times, it seems that East Asia did even serve as an idealized future imagination for what a European modernity had been aiming for and had been totally failed to achieve in the 1940s – against the background of two disastrous world wars. Nevertheless, I would argue that an avant-garde mediality has been affected by transcultural encounters beyond idealized stereotypes and the construction of the inscrutable other. It is a mediality where art is, in Christopher Bush’s words, “something thought with” rhythms of life, forms of use, and a holistic, transcendental movement of creative forces – parallel to pleas for continuous improvement and “industrial practice”.[51] Thus, Itten had been combining cosmological exercise inspired by East Asia on the one hand with a European path of progress on the other. Against numerous avant-gardist “-isms” at the beginning of the twentieth century – each proclaiming one universal solution –, Itten’s cosmology did involve many voices, regions, and periods. And unlike many of his contemporaries, Itten did not follow the dualism of the primitive and developed in these contexts. Rather, he included a multitude of practices and perspectives into an ongoing process of learning, exercise, and making – even if they were accompanied by contradictions, imbalances, and projections.
The publication of this article has been supported by the subject area Visual Communication at the Zurich University of the Arts.
References:
[1] Johannes Itten, “Kalligraphie. Weihnachten 1922”, in: Willy Rotzler / Anneliese Itten (ed.), Johannes Itten. Werke und Schriften, Zurich 1978, 73. Transl. by the author.
[2] The Museum Rietberg in Zurich specializes in collecting and exhibiting non-European art. It opened its doors in 1952 thanks to the donation of Eduard von der Heydt’s private collection and the initiative of Johannes Itten, the institution’s founding director.
[3] I am following the topic of transcultural encounters neither from an expert position of Sinology, nor do I speak or read Chinese. Therefore, I rely on available translations as well as on the advice of expert colleagues. A special thanks to Alexandra von Przychowski at Museum Rietberg and Qian Cui at the University of Zurich for their kind support.
[4] Johannes Itten, “1. und 2. Oktober 1955”, in: Willy Rotzler / Anneliese Itten (ed.), Johannes Itten. Werke und Schriften, Zurich 1978, 94.
[5] Cf. Jürgen Osterhammel, “Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis,” in: Wolfgang J. Mommsen (ed.), Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, London 1986, 290–314.
[6] Cf. Anna Grasskamp / Monica Juneja (ed), China, Europe, and the Transcultural Object, 1600–1800, Cham 2018.
[7] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, transl. Charles Francis Atkinson, New York 1945.
[8] Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire, Cambridge 2014.
[9] Itten was invited to a lecture On Composition at Strzygowskis chair at the University of Vienna in 1917. Cf. Rainer K. Wick, Das Bauhaus in Kalkutta. Eine Begegnung Kosmopolitischer Avantgarden, in: Portal Kunstgeschichte 2013, https://www.portalkunstgeschichte.de/meldung/das_bauhaus_in_kalkutta__eine_be-5699.html (Accessed 01.03.2023).
[10] Susanne Leeb, Die Kunst der Anderen. ‘Weltkunst’ und die anthropologische Konfiguration der Moderne, Berlin 2015, 257.
[11] The manuscript is dated «Munich, 04.02.1919», but it remains unclear if and where the drafted lecture was delivered. See: Christoph Wagner, “Johannes Itten und die Esoterik: Ein Schlüssel zum frühen Bauhaus?,” in: Esoterik Am Bauhaus : Eine Revision Der Moderne ?, Christoph Wagner, ed., Regensburg 2009, 135–43.
[12] Johannes Itten, manuscript for lecture “Menschheitsentw. Kunstentw./Macht der Konzentration”, Itten-Archive Zurich, 1919, quoted after: Wagner, “Johannes Itten und die Esoterik: Ein Schlüssel zum frühen Bauhaus?,” 141. Transl. By the author.
[13] I am following Christoph Wagner`s elaborate discussion of this controversial topic. Wagner, “Johannes Itten und die Esoterik: Ein Schlüssel zum frühen Bauhaus?,” 136-37.
[14] Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye : Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Stanford 2010.
[15] Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media, Oxford / Cambridge -Massachusetts 2010.
[16] Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, 14.
[17] Cf. Bush, Ideographic Modernism, XX–XXI.
[18] Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, 1.
[19] Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, 1.
[20] Bush, Ideographic Modernism, xxixp. Italics in original.
[21] See respective critical remarks by Karen Fang in her review: Karen Fang, “Britain’s Chinese Eye : Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Elizabeth Hope Chang”, in: Victorian Studies, 2011, No. 53, 751–53.
[22] Cf. Ernst-G. Güse, “Der Einfluss ostasiatischer Philosophie und Kunst auf Lehre und Werk von Johannes Itten”, in: Johannes Itten. Tuschezeichnen, Zurich 1988, 16–22.
[23] Johannes Itten, “15. Februar 1919”, in: Willy Rotzler / Anneliese Itten (ed.), Johannes Itten. Werke und Schriften, 62.
[24] Cf. Christoph Wagner (ed.), Esoterik Am Bauhaus: Eine Revision der Moderne?, Regensburg 2009.
[25] Johannes Itten, Utopia. Dokumente der Wirklichkeit, Bruno Adler (ed.), Weimar 1921, 17.
[26] Itten, Utopia, 18. The name is indicated as [Kuo Hsi] in original.
[27] According to the Itten-Archive Zurich, his library contained the two editions of: Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, Ursprung und Entwicklung der Chinesischen und Japanischen Kunst, Leipzig 1913.
[28] Ernest Fenollosa / Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, San Francisco 1936.
[29] According to the Itten-Archive Zurich, Ford’s autobiography had been part of Itten’s library: Henry Ford, Mein Leben und Werk, Leipzig 1923.
[30] Cf. Johannes Itten, Tagebuch. Beiträge zu einem Kontrapunkt der Bildenden Kunst, Berlin 1930, 7.
[31] Cf. Johannes Itten, Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus. Gestaltungs- und Formenlehre, Ravensburg 1963, 151.
[32] Yoshimasa Kaneko, “Johannes Itten and Zen”, in: Christoph Wagner (ed.), Esoterik am Bauhaus: Eine Revision der Moderne ?, Regensburg 2009, 150–73.
[33] Cf. Regina Bittner / Kathrin Rhomberg (ed.), The Bauhaus in Calcutta : An Encounter of Cosmopolitan Avant-Gardes, Ostfildern 2013, 38.
[34] Partha Mitter, “Teaching Art at Santiniketan and Weimar: Some Unexpected Meeting Points,” in: Marion von Osten and Grant Watson (ed.), Bauhaus Imaginista: A School in the World, London 2019).
[35] The Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta was organized by Stella Kramrisch, who had been invited by Tagore to India in 1922 to establish a chair for Indian art history. They probably met at Strzygowskis Institute at the University of Vienna.
[36] Christoph Wagner, “‘Alles in Einem – Alles im Sein’: Kunst und Leben in Johannes Ittens Skizzen- und Tagebüchern 1913-1938,” in: Nina Zimmer / Christoph Wagner (eds.), Johannes Itten: Kunst Als Leben, München 2019, 14-47.
[37] Kaneko, “Johannes Itten and Zen”, 157.
[38] Some of these exhibitions were organized by Liu Haisu, participant in the Zurich exhibition of 1942. Cf. Michaela Pejcochova, “Exhibitions of Chinese Paintings in Europe in the Interwar Period: The Role of Liu Haisu as Artistic Ambassador”, in: Michelle Ying-ling Huang (ed.), The Reception of Chinese Art Across Cultures, Newcastle upon Tyne 2014, 179–99.
[39] “Aus dem Zürcher Kunstgewerbemuseum”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 11 May 1942.
[40] Johannes Itten, Chinesische Malerei der Gegenwart, Zurich 1942, n.p. Transl. by the author.
[41] Cf. Pejcochova, “Exhibitions of Chinese Paintings in Europe in the Interwar Period: The Role of Liu Haisu as Artistic Ambassador”.
[42] Itten, Chinesische Malerei Der Gegenwart, n.p. Transl. by the author.
[43] “Chinesische Maler der Gegenwart”, Die Tat, 20 May 1942.
[44] “Chinesische Maler der Gegenwart”, Die Tat, 20 May 1942.
[45] Itten, Chinesische Malerei der Gegenwart, 4-6.
[46] Itten, Chinesische Malerei der Gegenwart, 4-13.
[47] Itten, Chinesische Malerei der Gegenwart, 13.
[48] Itten, Chinesische Malerei der Gegenwart, 4.
[49] Nozomi Naoi, Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth-Century Japan, Seattle 2020.
[50] Lü Peng, A History of Art in 20th-Century China, Milan 2010, 266-75.
[51] Johannes Itten, Über die zukünftige Arbeit in Zurich (1938), in: Willy Rotzler and Anneliese Itten (ed.), Johannes Itten. Werke und Schriften, 241–42.
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