Herbert Bayer

Biography

In 1925 the Bauhaus, the German school of art and design, moved from Weimar to Dessau, and its new workshop for printing and advertising acquired a head who had himself only recently been a student. This was Herbert Bayer.

He was born on 5 April 1900 in Haag am Hausruck, in Upper Austria, the second of four children of a tax official. His father died in 1917. Bayer finished secondary school in Linz, worked briefly for the railway directorate and served eighteen months in the army. Then came training in an applied-arts studio under the architect Georg Schmidthammer (the name is also spelled Schmidhammer) and work in Darmstadt for the architect Emanuel Josef Margold.

From 1921 to 1925 he studied at the State Bauhaus in Weimar. He took Johannes Itten’s preliminary course, attended classes given by Paul Klee, and in 1922–23 and 1924–25 worked in the wall-painting workshop under Wassily Kandinsky. For the volume “Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar 1919–1923” he drew the lettered cover. In 1923, at the first large Bauhaus exhibition, he met the photographer Irene Hecht; they married in 1925.

After passing his journeyman’s examination, Bayer was given charge of the printing and advertising workshop in Dessau. He introduced the DIN standard (the German industrial standard for paper sizes) across the school’s publications and insisted on lowercase setting. Between 1925 and 1930 he worked on a typeface called Universal, without capital letters, geometric and sans serif; it was never cast in metal and remained a design. All the Bauhaus printed matter was produced in this workshop from his sketches or those of students. Out of this practice grew a new line of work, graphic design.

In 1928 he left the school and moved to Berlin. There he ran the advertising agency Studio Dorland, designed exhibitions, painted, took photographs and became art director of Vogue. Of his photographs, the ones most often recalled are the self-portrait of 1932 and “Lonely Metropolitan” (1932). After 1933 his studio also took commissions from National Socialist exhibition organisers: the catalogues for “Die Kamera” (1933) and “Deutsches Volk – Deutsche Arbeit” (1934), and the brochure “Deutschland” for the 1936 Olympic Games. He worked for these clients until he emigrated. In 1937 three of his works, among them a watercolour sketch and the drawing “Woman from Behind”, were confiscated in the “Degenerate Art” campaign. That same year he visited the United States for the first time.

In 1938 he moved there permanently. With Walter Gropius and Ise Gropius he designed the exhibition “Bauhaus 1919–1928” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1944 he divorced Irene Bayer, married Joella Haweis and became a US citizen.

From 1946 he lived in Aspen, Colorado, where the businessman Walter Paepcke had invited him. Bayer took part in designing the buildings of the Aspen Institute, restored the Wheeler Opera House and made promotional posters for the ski resort. At the same time he was a design consultant to the Container Corporation of America (1946–1965) and then, from 1966, to the oil company Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) in Los Angeles. For the first he compiled the “World Geo-graphic Atlas” in 1953. For ARCO he made the logo and corporate identity and oversaw acquisitions for the company’s art collection, which grew to nearly 30,000 works. For the two 51-storey towers of ARCO Plaza (1972) he designed the sculpture-fountain “Double Ascension”; it now stands in City National Plaza. In 2003, three years after ARCO was taken over by BP, the collection was sold off through auction houses.

In 1955 he made the earthwork “Grass Mound” in Aspen; in 1959 he devised a “fonetik alfabet” for English, again without capital letters. Five of his oil paintings were shown at the Fourth São Paulo Biennial (1957); in 1964 he took part in documenta III in Kassel; in 1968 he designed the exhibition “50 Years of Bauhaus” in Stuttgart. Among his later works that survive are the fountain sculpture outside the Lentos Art Museum in Linz and “Articulated Wall” in the Denver Design District, his last completed commission. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1979), inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame (1975), and received the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art (1977) and an honorary doctorate from the Graz University of Technology.

To my mind, it is hard to speak of Bayer as a single kind of artist: from book to atlas to fountain he did the same job everywhere, subordinating form to a system. This is my impression, and there is no documentary way to confirm it.

In 1974, after a severe heart attack, he settled in Montecito, California. He died there on 30 September 1985. Several thousand of his works are held by the Denver Art Museum, many of them given by his widow.