The Bauhaus master Johannes Ittenis one of the prominent protagonists of early Modernism in twentieth-century art. Few people are aware of the close links between his beginnings as an artist and his experience of landscape and nature in the town of Thun and Lake Thun.

Johannes Itten gained decisive impulses for the development of his concept of art and his path towards abstraction through various stations and sojourns in Thun and its surroundings. By means of examples of the representations of nature in his early work the publication shows in scholarly depth how Itten discovered his own, very personal and later internationally famous approach to art and painting style and presents his pictorial transformation of natureextending through to the artist's late works.