To get into the cafeteria we had to crawl through a tunnel made from a beer barrel. Inside, the other students had painted motifs on the wallpaper: red squares, blue circles, and yellow triangles; I already knew these as the colours and shapes of the Bauhaus. Scraps of cloth and threads hung from the ceiling. A trumpeter was playing some tuneless beeps and bops.

We were a few drinks in when Master Itten reappeared. Now he was dressed in what looked like mayoral robes, with a Napoleonic hat and turned-up Turkish shoes. He tapped his glass, and the shuffling of others moved Charlotte over to me.

‘The graduates of this year have dressed me in these ridiculous vestments.’ There was laughter from the crowd, who were mostly dressed in black slacks and shirts, for the men and women both. ‘But there is a point. This morning the Director talked to you about the practicalities of your first year. You will learn about texture, light, colour, temperature, and form. This applies to all things, not just paint and charcoal but wire, stone, paper. From here on in you will only draw and paint when you understand the material. Production is the apex, but we will take a long time to get there.

‘Now the reason I am standing here, like this’ – there was a whooping from one side of the room, and some uncomfortable shifting from the suited Director – ‘and the reason you had to enter crawling, like toddlers, is that you – we – are here to play. There are those outside this room who cannot stand the notion of adults playing, but this is the operative approach. Play. Risk. Experimentation. Draughtsmanship. Study. Observation. Licenza. Putting your tongue in the lemon; call it what you will. Every day I want you to spend a part of it doing nothing but daydreaming. To many people that is a maddening thought. Do it. It is a radical act to do nothing.

‘What we will do here – and I urge you to learn this early on – is disposable. Indeed, in many of my classes, I will urge you to jettison what you have made. Our animating principle is not originality, it is methodology. Thinking is making; and making is thinking. If you abide by this principle, you cannot fail to enjoy yourself. Creativity is, in its babiest incarnation, freely associative, lawless, and chaotic. That is all. My voice sounds like a drum at the best of times. May God save the Bauhaus babies!’

A cheer in the room, and the sentiment was echoed all round, even by the Director, who looked more like an accountant than an architect. Then a student called for all the preliminary students to line up.

‘Brilliant, wasn’t he?’ Charlotte said beside me.

‘Yes,’ I said, though I knew I hadn’t really understood his point, ‘quite brilliant.’