Herbert Bayer

Herbert Bayer – Training and management at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau

Herbert Bayer was born in Haag am Hausruck in Austria on 5 April 1900. The second of four children of a tax officer, he was creative from a young age, with his artistic talent probably due to his mother’s influence. His father died of tuberculosis in 1917 and Herbert Bayer left school that same year. Short-time employment with the railway was followed by 18-months of military service before completing an apprenticeship with the architect and designer Georg Schmidhammer at the age of 19. During this period, Bayer created his first typographic works. He left a subsequent position as assistant to the Darmstadt architect Emanuel Josef Margold in 1921 to study in Weimar at the state Bauhaus where he initially attended Johannes Itten’s foundation course, had tuition with Paul Klee and László Moholy-Nagy, and eventually belonged to the workshop for mural painting run by Wassily Kandinsky before completing his training at the Bauhaus with his journeyman’s examination in 1925. Immediately afterwards, Walter Gropius appointed him head of the newly established Bauhaus workshop for printing and advertising in Dessau. There, he had a significant influence on the style of the internal Bauhaus publications, enforced DIN standardisation and introduced the lower case.

Collaboration and discord with the National Socialists

Despite his personal successes, Herbert Bayer felt very constrained at the Bauhaus and thus decided in 1928 to take the step in a new direction. He joined Studio Dorland in Berlin, an advertising agency for which he worked as graphic designer and artistic director, supervised various exhibitions as a designer, and devoted himself to photography as well as painting. A highlight of this period was certainly his work as art director of the Berlin office of Vogue magazine. Herbert Bayer initially worked constructively with the National Socialist rulers, designing several Nazi propaganda exhibitions, including Deutsches Volk – Deutsche Arbeit under the patronage of the Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, in the catalogue of which Bayer presented National Socialist ideologised idylls with blond Valkyries and hunky warriors. The deceptive harmony was shattered when works by Herbert Bayer found themselves in the infamous exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in 1937. The artist emigrated to the USA the very next year. 

Successful artistic activity in American exile

Herbert Bayer was able to carry on his previous success whilst in exile with the exhibition Bauhaus 1919-1928 and quickly established himself as a graphic designer, architect and painter, and worked as an advisor for renowned companies and institutions including the Atlantic Richfield Company and the Container Corporation of America. A further triumph took the form of an atlas designed by Bayer which contemporary reviewers considered the best publication of its kind. Afte the war, Bayer recultivated old ties to Germany and participated in Documenta III in Kassel in 1964 and designed the 50th anniversary exhibition of the Bauhaus in Stuttgart, 50 Jahre Bauhaus, in 1968. Numerous awards testify to the great esteem in which Bayer the artist was held in both the old and new worlds, including the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art. 

Herbert Bayer died in Montecito in California on 30 September 1985.