The portion of foreign students attending the Bauhaus in Weimar was Equal opportunity was a top priority. The one-semester basic course served as a trial semester, determining the suitability of the prospective students and enabling students from abroad to learn German within the community.
A large student contingent, mainly from bourgeois Viennese Jewish families, arrived with Johannes Itten at the end of A second group consisting of young Hungarian emigrants from Pecs and Budapest—some of whom had participated in the Hungarian Soviet Republic and were now undergoing political persecution—followed in the mids, arriving via Vienna and Berlin.
Oskar Schlemmer, Postcard for the Bauhaus exhibition No. Johannes Itten dominated the pedagogical profile of the Bauhaus in its first years. While still residing in Vienna, in he printed a portfolio of ten lithographs visualizing his artistic and art-pedagogical program, and demonstrating different steps and methods of artistic abstraction.
Alongside plants and an Alpine landscape are dynamic depictions of figures that appear to be inspired by Italian Futurism, complimented by non-representational, abstract compositions, cosmic visions that can also be read as symbols for different emotional states.
What remains remarkable even today is the pluralistic—one could say conceptual—approach he takes in this sequence of graphics. He presented his method of pictorial analysis at the Bauhaus based not only on German examples such as the Adoration by Meister Francke, but also a traditional Chinese ink brush master.
