# Color at the Bauhaus > The Bauhaus never had one color theory. It had several, taught side by side: Itten's sphere and seven contrasts, Klee's moving color circle, Kandinsky's forces, Scheper's color plans for buildings and Albers's lesson that color is the most relative medium of all. Published: 2026-10-28 Canonical: https://espectro.dev/journal/bauhaus-color-theories The Bauhaus ran for only fourteen years. Walter Gropius founded it in Weimar in 1919, it moved to Dessau in 1925 and to Berlin in 1932, and it closed under pressure from the Nazi government in 1933. In that time it became the most influential art school of the century, and color was one of the things it taught most seriously. What it did not have was a single doctrine. Color at the Bauhaus was taught by painters with very different temperaments, often at the same time and sometimes in open disagreement. Reading them together is the best way to see what each one was after. ## Itten: the sphere and the seven contrasts Johannes Itten (1888–1967) shaped the school's early years. He designed the preliminary course (*Vorkurs*), the semester every new student took before entering a workshop, and color was a central part of it. Itten had studied in Stuttgart with Adolf Hölzel, who taught color through contrasts, and he looked back further to Goethe's *Theory of Colours* (1810) and to the color sphere published by the painter Philipp Otto Runge in the same year. In 1921 Itten published his own color sphere: twelve hues around the equator, running to white at one pole and black at the other, in seven steps of lightness. Flattened, it became the twelve-part color circle still printed in art textbooks, with yellow, red and blue at the center, the three secondary colors around them and six tertiary colors in the outer ring. The circle was the map. The contrasts were the method. Itten taught that every color relationship could be described through seven of them: - **Contrast of hue.** Pure colors side by side, strongest with yellow, red and blue. - **Light–dark contrast.** The difference in lightness, which Itten treated as the backbone of any composition. - **Cold–warm contrast.** Blue-green against red-orange, the strongest temperature pair on his circle. - **Complementary contrast.** Two colors that mix to gray and, placed together, intensify each other. - **Simultaneous contrast.** The eye's habit of generating the complement of a color it is looking at, tinting the neighbors. - **Contrast of saturation.** Pure colors against dulled ones. - **Contrast of extension.** The balance of areas. Following Goethe's lightness values, Itten suggested that yellow needs only a third of the area of violet to hold its own, orange half the area of blue, and red and green equal shares. He published the full system much later, in *Kunst der Farbe* (1961), translated as *The Art of Color*. But the contrasts are recognizably what he taught in Weimar, and they are the most widely used part of Bauhaus color teaching today. Itten also believed each student had a personal palette tied to temperament, and that a teacher should notice it rather than overwrite it. That conviction, and his mystical leanings more broadly, put him at odds with Gropius as the school turned toward industry. He left in 1923. ## Klee: color in motion Paul Klee (1879–1940) taught at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1931. His lectures on form and color filled thousands of pages of notes, and a short distillation appeared as the *Pedagogical Sketchbook* (1925), the second of the Bauhaus Books. Where Itten classified, Klee animated. He arranged colors on a circle and treated the complementary pairs, red and green, yellow and violet, blue and orange, as diameters crossing at a gray center. Moving from one color to the next around the edge was a gradual, peripheral change; moving across the circle meant passing through gray to the opposite. Color for Klee was always on the way somewhere, and his paintings of the period, with their graded bands and squares, read like exercises in those movements. ## Kandinsky: forces, forms and a questionnaire Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) arrived in 1922 and stayed until the school closed. He brought the system he had set out in *Concerning the Spiritual in Art* (1911): warm against cold, light against dark, colors that advance or retreat, white and black as two kinds of silence. We cover it in detail in [Kandinsky's Logic of Color](/journal/kandinsky-color-logic). At the Bauhaus he pushed those ideas toward form. In 1923 the wall-painting workshop circulated a questionnaire asking people to fill a triangle, a square and a circle with yellow, red and blue. The expected answer, and the one that became a Bauhaus emblem, was the yellow triangle, the red square and the blue circle. In *Point and Line to Plane* (1926) he extended the pairing to angles and lines. ## Grunow and Hirschfeld-Mack: color as sound and light Two less famous teachers pulled color toward the other senses. Gertrud Grunow (1870–1944), a music teacher, ran a course in harmonization in the Weimar years that linked colors, tones and bodily movement, and she sat in on assessments of new students alongside the form masters. Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack (1893–1965) led a color seminar and, with Kurt Schwerdtfeger, built the *Reflected Color-Light Plays* (*Reflektorische Farbenlichtspiele*) in 1922 and 1923: colored light projected through stencils onto a screen and moved by hand in time with music. They were among the earliest experiments with moving abstract color, decades before anyone had a screen to put it on. ## Scheper: color on the walls When the school moved to Dessau, color left the easel. Hinnerk Scheper (1897–1957), a former student, took over the wall-painting workshop and drew up the color plan for the new Bauhaus building and the masters' houses. Color there did practical work: it marked structure, distinguished load-bearing from non-bearing elements and helped people find their way through the building. The workshop also produced Bauhaus wallpapers from 1929, with fine textures and restrained tones. They were the school's most commercially successful product, and they carried its idea of color as part of architecture into ordinary homes. ## Moholy-Nagy: color by number László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), who took over the preliminary course after Itten, approached color as an industrial material. His best-known example is a set of enamel paintings he said he had ordered from a sign factory by telephone, describing them with a standard color chart and a grid on graph paper. Whether or not the phone call happened as told, the point stuck: a color can be specified, transmitted and reproduced exactly, without the painter's hand. ## Albers: color is relative Josef Albers (1888–1976) entered the Bauhaus as a student in 1920 and taught the preliminary course from 1923 until 1933. His major book on color came long after, in the United States, where he taught at Black Mountain College and then at Yale. *Interaction of Color* (1963) is arguably the most lasting thing the Bauhaus produced about color, even though it was written thirty years after the school closed. Albers turned Itten's simultaneous contrast from one item on a list into the whole subject. His exercises, made with sheets of colored paper rather than paint, show that the same color looks different on different grounds, that two different colors can be made to look identical, and that we almost never see a color as it physically is. His conclusion was that color is the most relative medium in art, and that the only reliable way to learn it is by looking and comparing, not by memorizing rules. His *Homage to the Square* series, begun in 1950, spent the rest of his life proving the point. ## What the Bauhaus left behind Set side by side, the theories pull in different directions. Itten wanted a complete system. Klee wanted color to move. Kandinsky wanted it to mean something. Scheper wanted it to work in a building, Moholy-Nagy wanted it standardized, and Albers wanted students to distrust their own eyes until they had tested them. What they shared was the conviction that color can be taught: that it is a discipline with its own exercises, not just a matter of taste. The color circle on a classroom wall, the language of warm and cool, the habit of testing a color against its neighbors before trusting it, all come from those fourteen years. Around the time the Bauhaus closed, Sanzo Wada was publishing *A Dictionary of Color Combinations* in Tokyo, a very different book built on tested groups of colors rather than a system. The two approaches meet well: the Bauhaus explains why a combination works, and [Wada's dictionary](/sanzo-wada) shows hundreds that do. The palette on this page is [combination 257](/combinations/257), red, orange yellow, blue and violet, close to the primaries and secondaries of Itten's circle. ## Sources - Johannes Itten, *The Art of Color* (*Kunst der Farbe*, 1961), and its abridged edition *The Elements of Color* (1970). - Paul Klee, *Pedagogical Sketchbook* (*Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch*, Bauhaus Book 2, 1925). - Wassily Kandinsky, *Concerning the Spiritual in Art* (1911) and *Point and Line to Plane* (Bauhaus Book 9, 1926). - László Moholy-Nagy, *Painting, Photography, Film* (Bauhaus Book 8, 1925). - Josef Albers, *Interaction of Color* (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). - Wikipedia, "Bauhaus." [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus) - Wikipedia, "Johannes Itten." [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Itten) - Wikipedia, "Josef Albers." [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Albers) - Sanzo Wada, *A Dictionary of Color Combinations*, browsable on espectro.dev at [/sanzo-wada](/sanzo-wada).