New York
On the front cover of his 1967 autobiography, “Herbert Bayer: Visual Communication, Architecture, Painting,” is a life-size, black-and-white photograph of a man’s hand, as if Bayer himself had just reached in to shake hands with the reader. Yet carried in that open palm, which faces us, is a bit of Surrealist magic: Collaged there is another black-and-white photograph—a heart-shaped area of a human face with a bright blue eye that stares directly at us—a conflation of head, heart and hand.
A classic Bayer design, this spare, metaphoric book cover employs a minimal use of lowercase sans-serif type and is inviting, transformative and playful—like a child’s hand turned Thanksgiving turkey. Though unmistakably modernist, it conjures the numerous depictions throughout history of the all-seeing holy hand bestowing spiritual blessings and protection, as it nods, perhaps, to Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling—equating, in this modest self-portrait, the hand of the artist with the hand of Creation.
Unfortunately, that remarkable book-cover design was a last-minute cut from the Cooper Hewitt’s wonderful “Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus Master,” an exhibition of nearly 100 works of graphic design. But equally poetic and striking artworks abound in this boutique show, which—though just a taste of this artist’s remarkable genius and range—will surely whet appetites for Bayer’s work in every discipline.
Organized by the Cooper Hewitt’s senior curator of contemporary design, Ellen Lupton, the survey honors the 100th anniversary of the 1919 founding of the Bauhaus. It focuses almost exclusively on Bayer’s work as a graphic designer—for which the Austrian-born American artist is best known.
Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus Master
Cooper Hewitt
Through April 5
Bayer (1900-1985) was a comprehensive artist: painter, sculptor, photographer, architect, illustrator and graphic, industrial, furniture, textile and exhibition designer. Versatile and prolific, he rose from Bauhaus student, studying with Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, to Bauhaus master, teaching typography and overseeing the wall painting and printing workshops—the latter of which promoted the Bauhaus and disseminated its aesthetic principles beyond the school. Bayer designed his own lowercase typeface, “universal,” and advocated for lowercase’s efficiency and economy. In his dynamic and innovative designs, he employed typophoto (the integration of photography and type) and photomontage (a composite of collaged and multiple-exposed photographs), producing primarily Cubist- and Constructivist-inspired images. Yet his work was also at times neoclassical (the 1935 catalog design for “The Miracle of Life Exhibition at the Kaiserdamm”) and biomorphic (his 1950s Jean and Sophie Taeuber Arp-inspired advertisements for Noreen hair products).
He practiced the Bauhaus dictum that in architecture, painting, photography, design and sculpture, the hand and the machine should all be unified, but he had many stylistic voices. In 1938, Bayer left Germany for America, where he made abstract paintings, murals and enormous minimalist sculptures, designed graphics, landscapes and factories, and restored the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen, Colo. He oversaw the advertising campaign “Great Ideas of Western Man” for the Container Corporation of America and designed exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. Bayer always seemed to find the perfect, unique expression for each project; and he was a major proponent for Bauhaus thinking and European modernist art in the U.S.—especially graphic design.
Included in this exhibition are some iconic pieces of 20th-century graphic design. Small works organized chronologically and thematically are displayed in a handful of vitrines. Larger designs, such as posters, are mounted on the walls.
Here are gorgeous, innovative artworks in which the bare minimum of elements (Euclidean geometry, photographs, illustrations and letterforms) or complex collages incorporating multiple mediums are all naturally synthesized. In the book cover for “State Bauhaus in Weimar 1919-1923” (1923), Bayer’s blocks of alternating red and blue letterforms stack like bricks, yet they move like the flashing lights of Times Square signage. His blue, red and gray checkerboard poster “Exhibition of European Applied Arts” (1927) pulses like an abstract, magic-squares painting by Klee. And Bayer’s cover for “Bauhaus Magazine (Journal for Construction and Design) Year 2, No. 1” (1928)—a photograph of a still life of the graphic designer’s tools on top of the folded journal itself—brilliantly weds levels of perception, art, medium, process and reality as it blurs them.
Further on in this show, in Bayer’s abstract brochure “The Menstrual Cycle” (1939), a diagram of female anatomy becomes a mystical, cosmic chart, a blending of calendar, medieval manuscript and solar system—with the womb, surrounded by phases of the moon, as its sun. And in a page from the booklet “Electronics—A New Science for a New World” (1942), Bayer combines photographs, engravings and illustrations to create an enchanted collage suggesting the assemblages of Joseph Cornell.
“The total personality is involved in the creative process,” Bayer once wrote. “It is…a unified process in which ‘head, heart, and hand’ play a simultaneous role.” This compact exhibition, which presents only some aspects of Bayer’s total personality, reasons that a complete portrait is due this modern master.
—Mr. Esplund, the author of “The Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art” (Basic Books), writes about art for the Journal.
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‘Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus Master’ Review: Graphic Design, Poetic and Striking - Wall Street Journal
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