Hebert Bayer
Bauhaus and Beyond
 

“No institution has affected the course of twentieth century art and design so profoundly as the Bauhaus.  Its impact is staggering.  Bauhaus precedents provide sources for everything from the appearance of our urban skylines to the modern dinnerware on our hard-edged, contemporary tables.  They are found in virtually every functionally designed object and graphic today.”

Gwen Chanzit
Curator Herbert Bayer Archive
Denver Art Museum

Bauhaus and our very sense of what is modern in twentieth century art and design are practically synonymous.  We are surrounded in our everyday lives by the designs and theories put into practice by the Bauhaus.  While the school of the Bauhaus existed only from 1919 to 1933, its principals and influence resonate today because of the achievements of the artists and architects associated with it: Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Vassily  Kandinsky, Joseph Alpers, Lyonel Feininger, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Warner Drewes and Herbert Bayer.

By definition Bauhaus means construction or architecture (bau) and house (haus) in German.  It was the creation of Walter Gropius, who in 1919 assumed control of the Weimar School of the Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art.  He combined the two into the Weimar Bauhaus School.  It was Gropius’ intention to create a new generation of craftsmen without the class distinctions between craftsmen and artists.  No doubt it was an attempt to build something new and positive out of the ashes of World War I when Gropius stated “Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together.”

The central concept was that no one art form was inherently better than any other and that the fine arts and applied arts must be studied and used together.  Through good design the new artist/craftsman would create a better world.  The very fact that easel painting was replaced in the curriculum by mural painting showed Gropius’ commitment to integrate all the arts within architecture.

Of all of the artists associated with the Bauhaus during its brief 15 years, it is Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) who actually devoted a lifetime to a career which incorporated the ideal of total integration of the arts, in design, advertising, architecture, public sculpture and painting.

Herbert Bayer was born April 5, 1900 in Haag am Hausruch, Austria.  Because of a book he read by Vassily Kandinsky (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) he enrolled at Weimar Bauhaus at the age of 21.  He actually arrived at the Bauhaus six months before Kandinsky began teaching.  Bayer studied at the Bauhaus for two years, taking a leave in 1923 to travel through Italy.  He had arrived at the Bauhaus with almost no prior background in art, and thus offered the perfect “blank slate” upon which to create the essential Bauhaus artist.  Since the Bauhaus offered no art history in its curriculum it made sense to expand his firsthand knowledge of art architecture and design by spending a year traveling in Italy, sketching and painting.  To support himself he painted houses and stage sets during his travels, thus applying the integration of craftsman and artist at the first opportunity. 

In 1925 he was offered a position on the faculty at the Bauhaus, as Master of Typography.  It was then, in conjunction with the ideas of Moholy-Nagy, that Bayer developed a “universal alphabet” using only lower case letters.  This was designed to be a practical typeface, which was large enough to read and free of distortions and curlicues, sans-serif type.  Bayer applied this type design to ad copy, posters and books throughout his career.
  
In 1928 Bayer left the Bauhaus to pursue a design career in Berlin.  It was his desire to put the theories of the Bauhaus into practice in design and advertising.  In 1933 he produced a “bayer type”. During his Berlin years, in addition to his design work, Bayer ventured into photography, which he used in both commercial (ads and posters) and fine art production.  With Maholy-Nagy, Hebert Bayer was an early creator of photoplastic or photomontage.  The altering of photographic imagery through the use of multiple negatives and collage meshed well with Surrealist imagery, as in self-portrait (1932), lonely metropolitan (1932), and metamorphosis (1936).
         
The later 1930’s were difficult times for free expression.  Artists were among the many groups who felt the need to find exile outside Nazi Germany.  The Bauhaus had closed in 1933 and many of its artists/faculty had already emigrated to the United States, finding work teaching at Harvard and at the New Bauhaus in Chicago.  Bayer had traveled to the U.S. in 1937 and became involved in the design of an exhibition on the Bauhaus at the newly created Museum of Modern Art. In 1938 he moved to New York City.  Deposition (1939) while depicting the tools of Christ’s crucifixion, also portends the dark future of a Nazi victory in Europe, a victory that seemed quite possible in 1939.
         
The exhibition Bauhaus 1919-1928 opened at the Museum of Modern Art and later traveled around the United States.  It provided an introduction to modernist design to a country slow to accept abstraction in painting, much less in advertising, which required client acceptance.    During his tenure in New York, Bayer’s graphic work prospered, but when the opportunity arose to move back to a mountain environment he took it, moving to Aspen, Colorado in 1946.  He accepted a position as design consultant for Walter Paepcke and the Container Corporation of America, whose headquarters were in Chicago.
     
The Aspen of 1946 was a small mountain town of less than 800 residents and only the beginnings of a ski town, with two pre-war ski runs.  Paepcke and Bayer were instrumental in initiating the changes that would make Aspen a cultural oasis in the 1950’s and beyond.  The Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies was founded by Paepcke in 1949, with Herbert Bayer working as architect and design consultant.  He designed a complex of buildings for the institute, integrated within the natural landscape of the mountain valley.  In 1955 he created a work called  grass mound, a forty foot grassy place for relaxation, years before the concept of “earthworks” became popular.  He also created marble garden  using discards from an old marble quarry.  In 1963-64 he designed a new tent for the Aspen Music Festival.
    
With his return to mountain living, mountains and contour map elements began to emerge in his artwork from the late 1940’s on, as in his lithograph  mountains and lakes (1948).  He designed a series of ski posters, including ski broadmoor (1959).  In 1953 the Container Corporation published world atlas with graphics designed by Herbert Bayer.  His goal was to put together an atlas with clean graphics that was easy to read.  The interaction between fine art and commercial art again shows in Bayer’s paintings and prints with continuing use of weather related symbols, such as arrows, flow charts and contour maps.
      
The Container Corporation employed the talents of Man Ray and Fernand Leger as well as Bayer in the late 1930’s.  It was their concept that through good design, corporations could influence good taste and profits.  Bayer, with his Bauhaus ideals, was a natural to work in this collaboration of art and industry.  In their ads, text was limited to fifteen words of copy in order to put the emphasis on visual images.  Lengthy texts were out; clean copy was in.  Advertising was seen as good public relations with consumers and buyers at other corporations.  Bayer used collage and photomontage, elements from his fine art, in his early advertisements.  He became chairman of Container Corporation’s Department of Design in 1956.  He was more than just an art director, contributing in management decisions, including the design of buildings and interiors.
    
 The Great Ideas of Western Man was a Herbert Bayer advertising campaign of the 1950’s and 60’s.  These ads had no sales message, again working on the concept that a good corporate image was also good for business.  The ad concept was an out- growth of discussions at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies.
 
The Institute worked to bring business executives and managers together to discuss ideas in a relaxed setting and a cultural environment.  The Aspen Institute was as responsible for putting Aspen on the world map as was skiing.  It was also a great concept for expanding the year past ski season, with many of its programs in the summer months.

It was through connections at the Aspen Institute that Bayer met Robert O Anderson, founder of Atlantic Richfield Oil Company.  In the early 1950’s they became friends; Anderson bought Bayer’s house in town when Herbert moved his studio onto Red Mountain, overlooking Aspen.  Along with the house, Anderson also began to buy artwork by Bayer, providing the beginning of a relationship of patron and friend that would last until the end of Bayer’s life.  After Walter Paepcke’s death in 1960, Bayer began working for ARCO as an art and design consultant, beginning in 1966.

Bayer oversaw the design of corporate offices in New York and Philadelphia, as well as Los Angeles when the corporate headquarters moved there.  He designed the artwork for ARCO Plaza in Los Angeles: double ascension, two linked staircases in a pool of water.  He also advised ARCO on the development of its large corporate art collection and the performing arts programs it sponsored.  He designed carpets and tapestries for the corporate offices.
          
He designed a sculpture for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.  A similar sculpture resides at the Design Center in Denver, Colorado.  He also developed a series of sculptures for ARCO that were designed to hide/beautify the Philadelphia refinery area.  These were among a number of sculptural projects that were never created and exist only in the form of maquettes.  Currently the Bayer family is working to try to realize some of his models as larger works in Denver and other cities.
 
Bayer moved from Aspen to the Santa Barbara, California area in 1976.  He would live there for the last ten years of his life.  A fine collection of his work can be found in the Santa Barbara Museum.  The Herbert Bayer Archive is at the Denver Art Museum, with over 9000 artifacts in the collection.

During the last four decades of his life, Herbert Bayer was well employed in design positions with the Container Corporation and ARCO.  In addition to his corporate responsibilities he developed a significant fine art portfolio during these years.  Artistically Bayer is probably better known for his earlier photomontages from the Berlin years (1928-1938).  Having two significant patrons in Walter Paepcke and Robert O. Anderson, there was little need for Herbert Bayer the fine artist to go through the normal routine of gallery exhibitions and reviews necessary for artwork to find its way into important private and public collections.  The town of Aspen is full of Herbert Bayer paintings that moved directly from studio to private hands.  To a certain degree his reputation as a painter, printmaker and sculptor never received the critical acclaim that exhibitions and reviews would have allowed.  He suffered a bit from being too successful.
          
In his later years Bayer used his graphic skills to create fine art prints, using lithography and silkscreen, the same mediums used in his commercial work.  A skill learned in one area is used in another.  In these graphic images, as in his later paintings, he returns to geometric design and abstraction in a series of works he called  “anthologies”.  In these works the Bauhaus artist has returned to basics: color, geometry and design.  The sculpture he produced during these same years still maintains a freshness today, thanks to his combination of clean design and primary colors.  His surrealist photomontages from the 1920’s hold as much shock value today as they did then.

The success and legacy of Herbert Bayer are the combination of Bauhaus ideas and American optimism from the post WWII period applied to a work ethic and career which lasted until his death in 1985.  It is the combination of clean design and a fresh palette of primary colors that explain the continuing appeal of his artwork.  His work is optimistic and easy to live with, the result of his lifelong adherence to good design.  More than any of his contemporaries, Herbert Bayer stayed true to his Bauhaus ideals through his sixty-year career.

By Hugo Anderson, 2008
Hugo Anderson is the Director of Emil Nelson Gallery, which represents the works of Herbert Bayer from the Bayer Family Collection.