Herbert Bayer
Austrian-American Visual Artist, Sculptor, Designer, and Architect
Haag, Austria-Hungary
Montecito, California
Summary of Herbert Bayer
Bayer was one of the most influential commercial artists of the twentieth century, and one of the leading figures in delivering Bauhaus ideas and aesthetics into American culture. In a career that covered two distinct periods - German and American - Bayer opened up new areas of graphic possibilities by combining the fields of typography, painting, photography, sculpture, architecture, environmental design, and exhibition design. Indeed, Bayer's whole career was devoted to creating the "total work of art" (gesamtkunstwerk, as it was called in the Bauhaus). Having fallen foul of the rise of Nazism, Bayer, like other Bauhaus pioneers, made his way to the United States. Following an unhappy spell in New York, he moved to Aspen, Colorado, where, over a period of nearly 30 years, he helped revitalize the town, largely through his directorship of the Aspen Institute and its acclaimed arts and culture programs. Failing health saw Bayer relocate to warmer climes of California in the final years of his life. But his name has helped define the legacies of the Bauhaus and Aspen, Colorado.
Accomplishments
- Bayer brought a uniquely modern cultural identity to Aspen, Colorado. Under the patronage of businessman Walter Paepcke, Bayer designed the original Aspen Institute and directed its visual arts programs. Through his creative vision, Bayer helped transform the abandoned silver mining town into one of the country's most popular culture and leisure destinations. Moreover, the Aspen Institute has grown into an international non-profit, non-partisan organization, dedicated to humanistic teachings.
- Bayer designed the Universal Alphabet. It was a total rejection of the "archaic and complicated gothic alphabet" which dominated German typography in the early twentieth century. In his design, upper and lowercase characters were presented in a single character set, and all forms of serif eradicated. Bayer's radical alphabet not only signified modernity in 1930s commercial design, it also pre-empted the minimalist Swiss Style, formulated during the 1950s and 1960s, and which is today considered the basis of modern graphic design.
- From the very beginnings of his long career, Bayer pursued the Bauhaus ideal of "gesamtkunstwerk", or the "total work of art". He sought the integration of different art and design forms to stimulate the human senses and to enrich human experience. This philosophy gave impetus, for instance, to his early (and lasting) interest in exhibition design which he described as "an apex of all media and powers of communication and of collective efforts and effects [and the] total application of all plastic and psychological means".
- Although never a member of the Surrealist movement, many of Bayer's photocollages have attracted the label "landscapes of the mind". This is especially evident in a series he called Man and Dream (1929-32). Iconic images from the series, including Lonely Metropolitan and Humanly Impossible, play on the surrealistic arrangement of photographic fragments, and effectively turned photocollage into an authentic and commercially viable style in the 1930s.
Progression of Art
Design for Trade Fair Stand of a Toothpaste Producer
In the fall of 1924, Bayer returned to his studies at the Bauhaus(following an 18 month jaunt through Italy) where he conceived of a small series of multimedia collages for an "open waiting room" at an imagined trade fair. Bayer felt he was working in a dynamic modernist arena. He stated, "Exhibition design has evolved as a new discipline, as an apex of all media and powers of communication and of collective efforts and effects. The combined means of visual communication constitutes a remarkable complexity: language as visible printing or as sound, pictures as symbols, paintings, and photographs, sculptural media, materials and surfaces, color, light, movement (of the display as well as the visitor), films, diagrams, and charts. The total application of all plastic and psychological means (more than anything else) makes exhibition design an intensified and new language".
This image - one of four exhibition designs, for a cigarette vendor, an advertising sculpture for the electric industry, and a newspaper stand - was for a toothpaste kiosk. It shows a loudspeaker on the left which announces the company name, "Regina", and smoke rising from a chimney that also forms into the word "Regina". On the right is the photographic image of a young woman's smiling face (revealing her gleaming teeth). Formally, Bayer's cuboid design and dynamic color contrasts reflect the influence of the Dutch De Stijl movement. However, his use of photomontage was still in its infancy, while the written text, featuring lower and upper case characters and serif features (on the "g"), predates by a year or so his Universal Alphabet (which used a single-case, sans-serif, alphabet based on basic geometric principles).
Art historian Dr. Anja Baumhoff writes, "Bayer continued to do variations on these designs throughout his life. [...] The proportions are quite remarkable. The oversized roof with its vertical surfaces was conceived for advertising purposes, and we might well regard it as a form of advertising architecture. Human figures appear very small in these ink drawings and are dwarfed by the dominant building structures. [...] It is quite obvious in all of these designs that the will to advertise overpowers everything else - including sensible architectural proportions. [...] We might refer to what the student Bayer was experimenting with as 'advertising with extremes'".
Opaque paint, charcoal, colored ink, pencil and collage on paper - Harvard University Art Museums, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, MA
Lonely Metropolitan
While at the Bauhaus, Bayer's photographic work was relatively limited. However, his future wife and fellow Bauhaus colleague, Irene Angela Hecht, was a dedicated photographer and it was she who encouraged Bayer to create his own pictures. This, in turn, led him to experiment with photocollage. Lonely Metropolitan, which blends dream imagery with human consciousness, was presented as one of a series of eleven. The thematically linked assemblages, called collectively, Man and Dream, were all produced ("post-Bauhaus") between 1929 and 1932. Lonely Metropolitan, with, perhaps, his "sliced arm" self-portrait, Humanly Impossible (1932), competes as Bayer's most iconic photocollage.
In this surrealistic image, two large hands, each with an eye embedded in the palm, are superimposed against a stark urban backdrop of building facades. The alignment of the hands and eyes within the architectural context challenges the viewer's perception of space and reality. Sotheby's Chris Mahoney described this work as "a fascinating departure from what photography does so well, which is represent reality. It's really a photographers' attempt to create an inner reality or a fictive reality". The work was made by Bayer while working in Berlin as a commercial artist. Created during the interwar period, and the rise of Nazism, it reflects something of the growing mood of disorientation and disquiet spreading throughout the city. The eyes in the palms of the hands might also point to an unease about the growing encroachment of state surveillance.
Baumhoff writes "As art director at the Dorland Agency in Berlin, [Bayer] developed a unique visual language that combined advertising and art in an unprecedented manner. He used montage techniques, new spray paint methods, and Surrealist motifs. By this time, Bayer had outgrown the Bauhaus, where rational design still took precedence. [...] Bayer confidently steered the viewer through new, unfamiliar visual worlds, whose clear composition and surprising associative effects exerted a fascinating appeal. He juxtaposed completely unrelated motifs in space and with unaccustomed logic, inspired by Moholy-Nagy's notion of a seemingly organic sur-reality".
Gelatin silver print - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Bayer-Type, Berthold Prospectus of Typefaces
In 1925, Bayer, who was still a student at the Bauhaus, designed his Universal Alphabet; a geometric script, based on a horizontal bar and circle (whereby letters could be written using a ruler and compass). It was a rejection of the "archaic and complicated gothic alphabet" which dominated German typography at the time. Indeed, Bayer called for the abolition of dual (lower and upper) case alphabets altogether and proposed that they should be replaced by a "universal" single case alphabet. Although it was never set as a font, Bayer thought that his alphabet - which demanded an end to serif and all other leanings towards calligraphy - was the perfect typographic model for a functional and efficient technological age.
Although Bayer's Universal Alphabet was lowercase, once he was employed in the commercial world, as he was between 1928 and 1938, he had to work with client briefs, and was compelled to compromise on his original design by incorporating both lower and uppercase characters. This version, an offset lithograph on white paper, was printed for the H. Berthold AG Type Prospectus, one of the largest type foundries in the world. "bayer-type BERTHOLD" is arranged in a pyramidical form, with each subsequent line increasing in size. The clean, purple font and the structured, geometric layout are true to the Universal Alphabet design. The repetition of the text in an increasing scale demonstrates the typeface's legibility as upper and lower case, and different font sizes, making it a practical choice for different design applications.
Over the years, Bayer developed multiple revisions and variations of/on the Universal Alphabet. It became a lettering blueprint for Bauhaus students after it first appeared in the Bauhaus publication, Offset No.7, in 1926, while Bayer himself adapted versions of the Alphabet for his commercial work, including the logo for lifestyle magazine, Die Neue Linie. Bayer also used a variant of the Universal Alphabet for the poster for, Section Allemande (German Section), of the Exposition of the Society of Artists and Decorators, at the Grand Palais, Paris in 1930. Much later, in 1959 while settled in Aspen, Colorado, Bayer designed a new sans-serif typeface, in lower case, called Fonetik Flfabet (Phonetic Alphabet). For his new alphabet, Bayer introduced special characters for the word endings -ed, -ion, -ory and -ing.
Offset lithograph on white paper - Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Collection, New York
The Menstrual Cycle
In 1939, Bayer created The Menstrual Cycle lithograph for the Schering pharmaceutical company. Bayer was a pioneer in information design, producing advertisements, pamphlets, magazine and book layouts, that explained complex scientific concepts simply. Fascinated by bodily mechanisms, from the human eyeball to the female uterus, Bayer created this brochure shortly after arriving in the U.S., and at a time when pharmaceutical companies were beginning to commission modern graphic designers to produce their marketing materials.
This work was used to promote hormone-based drugs to doctors, who might then prescribe these medications to treat menstrual discomfort such as cramping and irregularity in bleeding, As curator Ellen Lupton describes, "The black background evokes the night sky, and tiny moons in each corner compare the female cycle to the lunar orbit. Thin lines radiate from the center of the womb, counting out the twenty-eight days of the menstrual cycle". As we see in many of his graphics, Bayer's advertising designs combine science, marketing, and metaphor to great effect. While the menstrual brochure illustrates a human biological process, other pieces address fantastic, utopian scenes, of technological progress. In all cases, however, Bayer's photocollages offered concise graphic diagrams that might not otherwise be easily grasped by the layman/woman.
Lithograph - Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York
Texas: Herbert Bayer's World Geo-Graphic Atlas and Information Design at Midcentury
Bayer's Geo-Graphic Atlas is considered one of best atlases ever produced in the United States. It was designed on behalf of the Container Corporation of America (CCA). Bayer has been asked to create an atlas by CCA chairman, Walter P. Paepcke, and in cooperation with design director Egbert Jacobson, to mark CCA's 25th anniversary. Paepcke wanted an updated version of their 1936 Atlas of the World, but Bayer decided that the atlas should be more than an update, and rather a whole new graphic narrative on humanity, science, and geography. Bayer created a "one of a kind" atlas with the maps (mostly produced by US and European cartographers) brought to graphic life with Bayer's smaller thematic maps and charts, and pictorial symbols and tables. 30,000 copies were printed yet none was available for purchase by the general public. Indeed, the atlas was only given as a gift to customers of CCA. At around $50,000 (roughly $16 per copy) the production costs were astronomical. Even so, Paepcke rejected future offers from commercial publishing companies to reprint the atlas.
Bayer found it impossible to work with existing scientific literature given, in his words, "a scientist would not think in terms in which I worked". He took the decision to undertake all his own research from scratch, and travelled throughout Europe in search of the best maps and data. It was a process that took him five-years, and one he later referred to as "a good adult education". Bayer created, with the assistance of fellow designers, Martin Rosenzweig, Henry Gardiner and Masato Nakagawa, and drawing on the color theories of Egbert Jacobsen, the statistical diagrams of Otto Neurath, and the design principles of his previous mentor, Moholy-Nagy, a modernist graphic language that had never before been applied to cartography. The final layouts were presented as double-page spreads that could be viewed as a single whole. In its unity of art, design, and technology, Bayer's World Geo-Graphic Atlas and Information Design at Midcentury was the closest, Bayer believed, he ever came to creating the ideal "gesamtkunstwerk", or the "total work of art".
Earth Mound
Beyar designed the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies along the lines of the Bauhaus model: a series of flat-roofed buildings serving the three main areas of the campus: housing, institute administration and activities, and affiliated institutes. To this he added two environmental sculptures, Earth Mound, and Marble Garden (1956) (the latter consisting of a marble platform and blocks of different shape and height positioned around a central pond). Earth Mound is a 42-foot-diameter ridge that encircles a grassy hill with a shallow depression and a white rock. It has an opening in the ridge that allows visitors to access the sculpture. It represents a human space in nature designed to explore artistic potential.
For Bayer, true artistic agency was the capacity to mobilize human potential. His humanistic approach critiqued biocentric notions of agency as poor understandings of the boundaries between humans and the environment. Unlike the ecologically minded architects and artists of the 1970s, Bayer adhered to a strictly anthropocentric approach. As he explained, "in respecting nature, the artist will not imitate nature but create a spiritual world of itself side-by-side with nature, [since] both natural environment and man-made environment can exist with each other if their boundaries are understood". This philosophy aligned Bayer's design with the work of Austrian-American architect, Richard Neutra, who had visited his compatriot in Aspen to discuss architecture and environmental psychology.
The pioneering gallerist, Virginia Dwan (her New York gallery was well known for its exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism, Nouveau Réalisme, and Pop Art, and also for helping shape the discourse on Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Land Art) included a photograph of Earth Mound in her 1968 Earthworks exhibition. It brought Bayer to the attention of current Land Art artists. Later, in his 1977 book, Herbert Bayer: from type to landscape: designs, projects & proposals, 1923-73 (published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Dartmouth College Museum and galleries), the esteemed art historian and curator, Jan van der Marck cited Earh Mound as "the first instance on record of landscape as sculpture". Bayer created Aspen's Anderson Park in 1973. It incorporated elements from Earth Mound and Marble Garden in order to create paths around the park's geometric grassy berms, divots, and rings. North America's Cultural Landscape Foundation said of the three Aspen works, "As early Modernist earthworks, they are precedent-setting for both their treatment of the ground plane as a medium itself and for their context, juxtaposing the contemporary mission of the Aspen Institute with the ancient typology of mounds and monoliths".
Environmental sculpture - Anderson Park, Aspen
Four Chromatic Gates Maquette
At the end of 1974, Bayer left Aspen for health reasons (he had suffered two heart attacks). He relocated to Montecito, California, where he continued to work as a consultant for the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) oil and gas company. During this period of convalescence, Bayer devoted much of his time to painting and creating sculptural models in wood, plastic, and metal. He produced a series of sculptures called Chromatic Gates which were inspired by gates he had passed through while traveling through the deserts of Morocco. His choice of bold primary colors, meanwhile, took him back to early days at the Bauhaus and his interest in the De Stijl movement. Most of the models were never realized as large-scale sculptures. However, Four Chromatic Gates, was commissioned by ARCO, and installed as a 16-foot-tall outdoor artwork at their Oil and Gas Division offices in Dallas, Texas, in 1984. In 2010, the original scale model was later acquired by the Kirkland Museum, Denver. Collaborating with Denver development company, D4Urban, and the Herbert Bayer Estate at Aspen, the Museum photographed and measured the Four Chromatic Gates maquette with the aim of transforming it into a full-sized public sculpture.
This sculpture was installed at Cherokee Street and Alaska Place in Denver's Design District in 2021. According to Bayer's step-granddaughter, artist Koko Bayer, there had been a significant resurgence in interest in Bayer's work after the unveiling of his public sculpture, Anaconda, in 2018. Four Chromatic Gates helped introduce Bayer's art to a wider audience. D4 Urban Development Partner, Dan Cohen, stated, "The more we have come to appreciate Bayer, to understand the depth and breadth of his work, and recognize his mastery across so many types of media, we have realized that he is, in fact, the perfect artist to draw inspiration from for the myriad of design challenges that are inherent within the mixed-use urban redevelopment of the nature that we [in Denver] are undertaking". Cohen concluded, "the aesthetic vision that once led Aspen's leaders to commission Bayer for their postwar utopia now attracts people to the Four Chromatic Gates [in Denver] for Instagram photos".
The Alameda light rail station, Denver
Biography of Herbert Bayer
Childhood
Herbert Bayer was born in 1900, in the small mountainous region of Haag am Hausruck, Austria, a village northeast of Salzburg. He was the second son of Maximilian Bayer, a tax official from Passau, Germany, and Rosa Simmer, the daughter of an innkeeper from Upper Austria. Bayer had good relations with his siblings, but his older brother, Theo, would be a supportive presence throughout his life (especially during the political turbulence of 1930s Germany). From a young age, Bayer fostered a deep love for nature and would accompany his father on long walks to remote villages from where he collected taxes. He also developed a passion for winter sports, particularly skiing, and often embarking on extensive ski tours. On his mother's side, Bayer cherished memories of the family inn on the edge of a dark forest, his sister's singing, and the telling of grim folktales rooted in the seventeenth-century Peasants' Wars.
By 1912, the Bayers had moved to Linz (following short spells in Windischgarten and Ried). Bayer, who was already a keen hiker, joined the Wandervogel, a progressive youth group founded around the turn of the century. The Wandervogel's hiking and camping trips were filled with recitals of German poetry, and songs and stories of self-reliance, adventure, and romantic freedom. These trips sparked Herbert's interest in rural dialect and folklore and helped sharpen his musical skills. "The guitar was my constant companion, and we hiked to distant places to write down old songs", he remembered. Bayer also enjoyed sketching landscapes, trees, and houses, and he excelled in freehand drawing at school.
Early Training and Work
Bayer had hoped to attend the Art Academy in Vienna but his daydreams were dashed when his father passed away suddenly in 1917. Between 1919 and 1920, and after having served in World War I, Bayer joined the architect firm of Georg Schmidthammer in Linz. In 1921, he worked for architect Emanuel Josef Margold at the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt, before enrolling at the Bauhaus School in October of the same year. Bayer later cited Wassily Kandinsky's seminal book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), in which Kandinsky argued that the arts had a duty to serve society, as one of his most important early influences. At the Bauhaus, Bayer studied with several of the most influential and innovative artists of the era, including Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy. Art critic, Wendy Moonan, writes, "Bayer studied mural painting under Kandinsky, who became his mentor. The young artist adopted Kandinsky's favorite primary colors - red, blue and yellow, and primary forms - circle, square and triangle. This explains why the bold murals Bayer designed in 1923 for the stairwells of the Bauhaus's classroom building in Weimar feature a blue circle on the ground level, a red square on the second level and a yellow triangle on the third".
In 1923, Bayer and a fellow student left the Bauhaus for an eighteen-month journey through Rome, Naples, and Sicily. They supported themselves by taking odd jobs such as house painting. This adventure, as Bayer later reflected, left a more lasting impression on him than his subsequent travels because it introduced him to the richness of ancient civilizations and helped foster his appreciation of Classical art and architecture. On his return to Germany, Bayer set up a mural painting studio in Berchtesgaden but soon decided to complete his studies at the Bauhaus, which had relocated (or was in the process of relocating) from Weimar to Dassau. Recognizing his talent, Bauhaus director, Walter Gropius appointed Bayer to the position of Junior Master in the new print and advertising workshop. In his new role at the Bauhaus, Bayer developed a geometric typeface he titled, Proposal for a Universal Typeface. This design, reflecting his commitment to reductive minimalism, featured a clean visual style, single character, sans-serif, typefaces. In 1925, Bayer married Irene Bayer-Hecht, a fellow Bauhaus student and photographer with whom he had a daughter. However, their relationship was tumultuous, marked by emotional strain and eventual separation (due to Bayer's affair with Ise Frank, the second wife of Gropius).
In 1928, the same year Gropius resigned from the Bauhaus due to mounting political and financial pressures, Bayer moved to Berlin, where he established a design studio from where produced advertisements that featured in prestigious magazines like Vogue and Die neue Linie (The New Line). This period also saw him become more influenced by Surrealism which was most evident in his Man and Dream series (1929-32) of 11 photocollages. In 1930, Bayer also co-designed the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) exhibition in Paris with Gropius and Moholy-Nagy.
Bayer downplayed his involvement with Nazi propaganda, despite his work on publications for key exhibitions like Deutsches Volk, Deutsche Arbeit (1934), Das Wunder des Lebens (1935), and Deutschland (1936) (all of which were pro-Nazi). He is said to have focused strictly on the stylistic elements of his designs, choosing to ignore any political overtones altogether. Bayer did not support the Nazi Party, and privately criticized the regime, but his contributions lent an aspect of modernity and progress to its propaganda. Despite being a former Bauhaus member, and his wife having Jewish heritage, Bayer's situation did not initially prove especially problematic. However, in 1937, Bayer fell out of political favor in Germany, leading to a loss of work and income, after some of his works were included in the notorious Nazi "Degenerate Art" exhibition. Bayer later expressed regret over the situation, stating he had been "appalled at how blind" he had been to the rise of Nazism, and referred to this period of his life as "purgatory". Despite these challenges, Bayer continued to work in Berlin as the artistic director of the Dorland advertising agency until 1938.
Mature Period
In 1938 Bayer was invited to design the landmark exhibition "Bauhaus 1919-1928" for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Opportunities such as this, coupled with the onset of World War II and difficult personal circumstances, convinced him to relocate to the United States. The MoMA exhibition was a great success and toured the country. However, in February 1939 Bayer was hospitalized due to a combination of the stress of preparing for the MoMA show, homesickness, and his estrangement from his daughter (who was living in Chicago with Bayer-Hecht).
During this time, he was supported by his lover, Joella Haweis Levy. The daughter of the famed poet, playwright, novelist, artist and actress, Mina Loy, and her first husband Stephen Haweis, she was a renowned hostess, arts patron and co-founder, with husband Julien Levy (with whom she was unhappily married), of the Julien Levy Gallery. The Levys were credited with introducing Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Frida Kahlo, René Magritte, and Man Ray to the New York art world during the 1930s and early 1940s. Bayer recalled, "God knows how I would have survived these weeks if Joella had not been there. There was a true mixture of our two sufferings, and a great friendship, a person who will surely remain with me for the rest of my life".
Bayer would spend a total of eight years in New York. He designed his interactive "outside-in globe" - the Bayer Globe - for MoMA's Airways to Peace exhibition in 1943. The exhibition's press release stated, "The purpose of the new exhibition will be to explain to the layman, in dramatic and lucid sequence, the basic factors of air-age geography, the understanding of which is essential to winning the war and making a successful peace. The most striking and unusual feature of the exhibition, which is divided into sections, will be an immense sphere into which the visitor can walk, enabling him to view at a glance the strategic areas of the war and the flight distances between them". (The globe would be of great importance in Bayer's preparation of his monumental World Geo-Graphic Atlas a decade later.) In 1944 he and Joella were married (following their respective divorces.) While in New York, Bayer produced covers for prestige publications including Harper's Bazaar and Fortune.
Bayer was by now a fluent English speaker. He said, "I made it a rule from the first day [in America] that I would not speak any German. [...] There were all those German immigrants here ... and they all wanted to speak German. I always spoke in English". However, Bayer who already felt alienated, found it difficult to adjust to the over-crowded streets, and what he saw as an excessive overconfidence amongst many New Yorkers. He once said, "I am not living. I only drag myself along, unhappy, sad, and unsmiling. There is no joy in anything ... here I feel completely uprooted".
Late Period
Walter Paepcke was the head of a wooden crate and paperboard empire. The Container Corporation of America (CCA) had suffered through the Great Depression and the decision was taken that the best way to bolster the company's profile was to invest in advertising. Walter's wife, Elizabeth, a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago and a theater and store designer, suggested to her husband that they consider avant-garde designers, rather than established commercial artists, to create CCA's new image. Elizabeth had closely followed the careers of Bauhaus luminaries, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Moholy-Nagy, after they arrived in Chicago during the 1930s. After learning that Bayer was living in New York, she implored her husband, and his art director Egbert Jacobson, to approach him with the offer of the position of design consultant for CCA.
In 1949, Walter Paepcke, initiated an event in Aspen, Colorado, to honor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The event was such a success it set the stage for the establishment of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. The Paeckpes convinced the Bayers to move to Aspen where Herbert would become an artist-in-residence. Indeed, Aspen became Bayer's home for nearly thirty years. He later recalled, "what the future of Aspen promised then was the participation in shaping an environment. This was one of my motives in choosing Aspen as a place to live and work". Although primary responsible for the planning and design of the Institute's campus, Bayer was also at the center of the Paepcke's plan to transform the abandoned silver mining town into one of the world's most popular destinations for skiing, arts, and culture .
Speaking of Bayer's contribution to this utopian vision, Aspen journalist Andrew Travers writes, "Bayer used art to market Aspen as a destination. He designed Aspen Ski Corp.'s original aspen-leaf logo, pins, and event programs to promote tourism and crafted the first posters championing the town's ski hills, including the now-iconic 'Ski in Aspen' designs that collaged alluring photos and illustrations of skiers and fixated on the interconnecting 'S' and '8' lines carved in the snow as they link turns. While championing historic preservation and serving as a planning commissioner in Aspen [Bayer renovated two of the town's most historic buildings, the Hotel Jerom and the Wheeler Opera House, and built the original Sundeck Warming Hut that sat atop Aspen Mountain] Bayer also placed his stamp on the traditional white picket fence. The 'Bayer fence,' with its crenelated tops in the style of castle battlements, was once commonplace in Aspen's West End, enclosing the yards of restored Victorians like Bayer's home on West Francis Street, where a restored Bayer fence still stands".
One of his most remarkable achievements from this period was the World Geo-Graphic Atlas, which Bayer designed in 1953. This landmark work combines detailed cartography with striking graphic elements to emphasize environmental conservation and resource management. Such was its exclusivity, the 30,000 copies were only given as gifts to CAA customers. Bayer himself considered the World Geo-Graphic Atlas the very pinnacle of his career. Travers adds, meanwhile, that "Bayer's devotion to functionality and his sense of whimsy" could be seen in his 1957 Kaleidoscreen. As he describes, the Kaleidoscreen was "a seven-foot-tall, 12-foot-wide aluminum sculpture with seven multi-colored adjustable panels that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle and are meant to open and close with a hand crank [and] provided shade for sunbathers at an Aspen Meadows Resort swimming pool".
In 1959, Bayer created his fonetik alfabet, a phonetic alphabet for English that featured a sans-serif design that omitted capital letters. This alphabet included special symbols for endings such as -ed, -ory, -ing, and -ion, as well as digraphs like "ch", "sh", and "ng". To indicate the doubling of a consonant, an underline was used. By the 1960s, Bayer was exploring new mediums, translating some of his paintings into tapestries, his Bauhaus training in mural painting informing his appreciation for large-scale works. Bayer emphasized the richness and depth of color achieved through the natural dyeing of yarn, which he found superior to painted pigments.
While residing in Aspen, Bayer was introduced to the visionary ecologist Robert O. Anderson. Their meeting marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship and Anderson's intense interest in contemporary art. Indeed, when Anderson established the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), his personal art collection was so extensive it outgrew his New Mexico ranch (and his other homes). In his role as ARCO's Art and Design Consultant, moreover, Bayer helped the company amass the world's largest corporate art collection. Bayer was also responsible for designing the iconic ARCO logo, related corporate branding, and a monumental sculpture-fountain for ARCO Plaza in Los Angeles.
Having suffered twin heart attacks, Bayer left Aspen for warmer climes in 1974. With the assistance of Anderson, Bayer and Joella (who would play an active role in the art world in Montecito and Los Angeles) relocated to Montecito, near Santa Barbara. After 1976, Bayer dedicated much of his creative energy to his Anthology series, a compilation of geometric forms, images, letters, and numbers reflecting his career-spanning exploration of diverse artistic disciplines and ideas. In late 1982, Bayer suffered a severe injury to his right hand after being struck by a car. Despite months of intense rehabilitation, he managed to complete the series and continued to explore themes from his earlier works. Indeed, despite his health challenges, Bayer's final decade was remarkably productive. He continued his projects with ARCO across the U.S., exhibited extensively, created public art, gave lectures, and painted daily until his passing in 1985.
The Legacy of Herbert Bayer
Herbert Bayer was one of the celebrated Bauhaus emigres. He was instrumental in Aspen's postwar regeneration and, as the town's "artist in residence", was the key in the establishment of the Aspen Institute. The non-partisan Institute has grown into a global nonprofit organization committed to "driving change through dialogue, leadership, and action to help solve the most important challenges facing the United States and the world". As curator Joanne Ditmer writes, "Bayer believed in the Bauhaus concept of designing the total human environment, that art should be incorporated into all areas of life, and he designed logos and posters as well as landscapes and buildings that brought high modernism to Aspen". In 2022, The Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies, an institution dedicated to preserving and promoting Bayer's legacy, opened on the Aspen Institute campus.
Yet despite Bayer's enormous impact on Aspen's cultural identity, it is perhaps his contribution to graphic design that has come to best define his legacy in art history. Indeed, many of the tenets of Bayer's Universal Alphabet were carried forward in the grid-based principles - "cleanliness readability and objectivity" - that came to define the dominant (since the 1950s/'60s) Swiss Style of graphic design. And although less well known, his environmental artworks and earthworks were nothing short of revolutionary in the way they anticipated, by about a decade, the Land art movement which gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s.