Please join us for our free April webinar, in which Edward R. Charbonneau of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design will speak on Racism in Colour Theory.
Johannes Itten
Johannes Itten (1888-1967) was a painter, teacher and colour theorist whose 1961 book The Art of Color remains highly influential today. Itten taught at the Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany from 1919-1923, while he was a member of an occult religion known as Mazdaznan. In this webinar Edward R. Charbonneau will place Itten’s colour theories into the context of his white supremacist philosophy and beliefs.
Though ostensibly a health and wellness spiritual movement, Mazdaznan through its doctrines and practices promoted a hierarchy of races where the white race was defined as having the highest purity of blood. Through diet, exercise, and other lifestyle choices, devotees to this doctrine, like Itten, sought to bring into existence what they viewed as the next evolution of humanity, a race of transparent beings, predicted to occur in 1960. The webinar will outline how Itten centered Mazdaznan ideologies to inform his mindset. He theorized that his students’ subjective colour preferences were situated in the colours of their eyes, hair, and skin, while he sought to establish universal laws of colour harmony in art and design education. Since 1961, Itten’s deeply flawed methodologies regarding colour usage and instruction have become entangled within educational systems and traditions to such degrees that their origins are nearly invisible within the shroud of their authority. Apart from contextualizing Itten’s writing through a Mazdaznan lens, the presentation will ask: How may we examine our past traditions, and utilize the insight gleaned when designing new pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning about colour theory? Moreover, how can the field open up, expand, and break free from past ideologies and dogmas to respond to contemporary practices?
This webinar will expand on the research that informed the paper of the same name, Regarding Racism in Color Theory, first presented by Edward at the International Colour Association Congress, Colour for Future, in Taipei, Taiwan, in October of 2025;
Edward R. Charbonneau is an adjunct faculty member of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. He holds an MFA degree in Visual Studies from MCAD (2006) and BFA degree in painting from the College of Visual Arts (1999), formerly of St. Paul, Minnesota. His teaching methodologies are informed by his colour theory research and practice. He independently writes, voices, and produces the podcast, Chromosphere: The Color Theory Podcast, which is currently in its fourth season with a global audience. For the past 37 years, he has created murals and large-scale installations for businesses, and private individual collectors. He lives in St. Louis Park, and works in a painting studio in St. Paul, Minnesota.
REGISTRATION
This event is free but registration by midnight AEST on Saturday April 18 is essential. Registration is now open for CSA members and will open for nonmembers on Sunday April 5. Limit: 100 registrants worldwide. Successful registrants will be notified by reply email and will be sent the Zoom link and instructions shortly before the event.
