"Fire tower" of Johannes Itten: plastic studies or protoinstallation

Abstract

"Fire tower" (1920), made in the Weimar Bauhaus period of Johanness Itten, is the most important and in the same time the less famous art-object of this artist. As an ideal expression of the program aim of Bauhaus, it represents a combination of architecture, sculpture and painting. This very difficult majestic construction has a big field with a lot of sense of different archetypal cultural meanings of past time: from antic ziggurat to the newest avant-garde experience of higher building construction. All of them help to open difficult cosmogonic sense which hidden from people and must be understand as a symbol of universe. The article gives the detail description of form and construction of the tower. Also the birth and the evolution of the theme in the creation of the artist from the numerous pencil sketches and plastic models. Special accent is made in the field of artistic impressions, which could made basis of art-object, and symbolic meaning of each part of it, as a new level of genesis, what consequently transforms the typical for Bauhaus architectural-sculptural-pictorial form into real installation.