Christoph Wagner: Johannes Itten's Lost Works of Art: Another Narrative of Abstraction

A few years before his appointment at the Bauhaus, Johannes Itten made a series of abstract paintings and sculptures that might be considered as models for a kind of Bauhaus avant-garde avant la lettre. Some of these works were destroyed by Itten himself, others are lost, and some of them he reconstructed at a later time. Recent researches on thousands of sources belonging to the work of Itten change the way we look at the history of abstraction and its reception.

Christoph Wagner is Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Regensburg. He taught at the universities of Saarbrücken and Bern, was a Visiting Professor at the Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne) in Paris, and held Visiting Scholar positions at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and at the Institute of Advanced Study in Bern. At present, he is preparing a publication on Itten, Gropius, Klee am Bauhaus in Weimar and the Catalogue Raisonné of Johannes Itten.