The Itten color wheel is one of the most influential tools in color theory. It was created by the Swiss painter and teacher Johannes Itten, originally for a very simple purpose—to give the students of the Bauhaus a simple "grammar of color matching." In the end, it evolved into a complete methodology blending religion, geometry, and color.
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The Birth of the Itten Color Wheel
The Itten color wheel was created by the Swiss painter and teacher Johannes Itten. In the early 20th century, Germany’s Bauhaus advocated the "unity of art and technology" and hoped to help students find a simple grammar of color matching. In 1919 Itten was appointed as one of the first teachers of the Bauhaus, with the task of distilling color experience into reproducible teaching modules.
The creation of the Itten color wheel can be divided into three steps.
First of all, Itten was a Zoroastrian, and the core of his faith was that "the universe is a sacred, symmetrical, and complete order," and that this order is expressed through numbers. For example:
These are all numbers with religious symbolism.
- △Use an equilateral triangle to represent the number 3
- ⬡Use a regular hexagon to represent the number 6. A regular hexagon can be seen as taking 6 points on a circle drawn with the vertices of an equilateral triangle as centers
- ◯Use a circle divided into 12 equal parts
Itten did something crucial—he corresponded color with geometry. He painted the three primary colors on the three corners of an equilateral triangle; whether in religion, geometry, or color, 3 represents the origin.
The process of generating the number 6 from the number 3 is, first of all, to produce the three secondary colors—by mixing the primary colors in pairs:
The three secondary colors together with the three primary colors form the 6 corners of a hexagon, which also corresponds to the origin giving rise to secondary colors, just as the universe gives rise to order. At this point the color order should be:
From the six colors above, combining them in order in pairs produces the six tertiary colors: red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-purple, and purple-red. The six tertiary colors, together with the earlier primary and secondary colors, form the Itten color wheel.
The Development of the Itten Color Wheel
Itten extended the flat color wheel into a three-dimensional sphere: 12 colors around the equator, black and white at the north and south poles, and 7 lines of latitude representing lightness levels.
He was the first to propose the seven types of color contrast: hue, light and dark, warm and cool, complementary, simultaneous contrast, saturation, and area.
In 1961 Itten published The Art of Color, in which he integrated the 12-hue color wheel, the seven types of contrast, spherical coordinates, and subjective color character into a complete methodology.
He divided students’ subjective preferences into four types, each corresponding to a set of color ranges that these people find comfortable.
The Four Types of Itten Subjective Color
Itten organized the four subjective color types he identified and the colors they like as follows: