Herbert Bayer was an Austrian American graphic design

Graphic design

Graphic design is a creative process – most often involving a client and a designer and usually completed in conjunction with producers of form – undertaken in order to convey a specific message to a targeted audience...

er, painter, photographer, sculptor, art director, environmental & interior designer, and architect

Architect

An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...

, who was widely recognized as the last living member of the Bauhaus

Bauhaus

', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...

 and was instrumental in the development of the Atlantic Richfield Company's corporate art collection until his death in 1985.

Training and Bauhaus Years

Bayer apprenticed under the artist Georg Schmidthammer in Linz

Linz

Linz is the third-largest city of Austria and capital of the state of Upper Austria . It is located in the north centre of Austria, approximately south of the Czech border, on both sides of the river Danube. The population of the city is , and that of the Greater Linz conurbation is about...

. Leaving the workshop to study at the Darmstadt Artists' Colony

Darmstadt Artists' Colony

The Darmstadt Artists’ Colony refers both to a group of artists as well as to the buildings in Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt in which these artists lived and worked...

, he became interested in Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School who, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture....

's Bauhaus manifesto. After Bayer had studied for four years at the Bauhaus under such teachers as Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...

, Paul Klee

Paul Klee

Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism...

 and László Moholy-Nagy

László Moholy-Nagy

László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.-Early life:...

, Gropius appointed Bayer director of printing

Printing

Printing is a process for reproducing text and image, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. It is often carried out as a large-scale industrial process, and is an essential part of publishing and transaction printing....

 and advertising

Advertising

Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...

.

In the spirit of reductive minimalism, Bayer developed a crisp visual style and adopted use of all-lowercase, sans serif typeface

Typeface

In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....

s for most Bauhaus publications. Bayer is one of several typographers of the period including Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German painter who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as...

 and Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold was a typographer, book designer, teacher and writer.-Life:Tschichold was the son of a provincial signwriter, and he was trained in calligraphy...

 who experimented with the creation of a simplified more phonetic-based alphabet. From 1925 to 1930 Bayer designed a geometric sans-serif Proposal for a Universal Typefacehttp://www.papress.com/thinkingwithtype/teachers/type_lecture/history_bayer.htm that existed only as a design and was never actually cast into real type. These designs are now issued in digital form as Bayer Universal.http://www.p22.com/products/bauhaus.html The design also inspired ITC Bauhaus and Architype Bayer

Architype Bayer

Architype Bayer is a geometric sans-serif typeface based upon the 1927 experimentation of Herbert Bayer. Bayer reacted to the Germanic use of capitalization for all nouns by abandoning uppercase. His new case combined characters based on the Carolingian minuscule with uppercase K rescaled to...

, which bears comparison with the stylistically related typeface Architype Schwitters

Architype Schwitters

Architype Schwitters is a geometric sans-serif typeface based upon a 1927 phonetic alphabet designed by Kurt Schwitters . The digital revival, shown at right, was produced by Freda Sack and David Quay of The Foundry....

.

Post-Bauhaus Years in Germany

In 1928, Bayer left the Bauhaus to become art director

Art director

The art director is a person who supervise the creative process of a design.The term 'art director' is a blanket title for a variety of similar job functions in advertising, publishing, film and television, the Internet, and video games....

 of Vogue magazine's Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 office. He remained in Germany far later than most other progressives. In 1936 he designed a brochure for the Deutschland Ausstellung, an exhibition for tourists in Berlin during the 1936 Olympic Games - the brochure celebrated life in the Third Reich, and the authority of Hitler. However, in 1937, works of Bayer's were included in the Nazi propaganda exhibition "Degenerate Art", upon which he left Germany. Upon fleeing Germany, he traveled in Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

.

Exile in the United States

In 1938 Bayer settled in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 where he had a long and distinguished career in nearly every aspect of the graphic arts.

In 1944 Bayer married Joella Syrara Haweis, the daughter of poet Mina Loy

Mina Loy

Mina Loy born Mina Gertrude Löwry was an artist, poet, playwright, novelist, Futurist, actress, Christian Scientist, designer of lamps, and bohemian. She was one of the last of the first generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S...

. The same year, he became a U.S. citizen.

In 1946 the Bayers relocated. Hired by industrialist and visionary Walter Paepcke

Walter Paepcke

Walter Paepcke was a U.S. industrialist and philanthropist prominent in the middle-20th century.-Biography:A longtime executive of the Chicago-based Container Corporation of America, Paepcke is best noted for his founding of the Aspen Institute and the Aspen Skiing Company in the early 1950s, both...

, Bayer moved to Aspen, Colorado

Aspen, Colorado

The City of Aspen is a Home Rule Municipality that is the county seat and the most populous city of Pitkin County, Colorado, United States. The United States Census Bureau estimates that the city population was 5,804 in 2005...

 as Paepcke promoted skiing as a popular sport. Bayer's architectural work in the town included co-designing the Aspen Institute

Aspen Institute

The Aspen Institute is an international nonprofit organization founded in 1950 as the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies. The organization is dedicated to "fostering enlightened leadership, the appreciation of timeless ideas and values, and open-minded dialogue on contemporary issues." The...

 and restoring the Wheeler Opera House

Wheeler Opera House

The Wheeler Opera House is located at the corner of East Hyman Avenue and South Mill Street in Aspen, Colorado, United States. It is a stone building erected during the 1890s, from a design by Willoughby J. Edbrooke...

, but his production of promotional posters identified skiing with wit, excitement, and glamour.

In 1959, he designed his "fonetik alfabet", a phonetic alphabet

Phonetic alphabet

Phonetic alphabet can mean:* phonetic transcription system: a system for transcribing the precise sounds of human speech into writing.** International Phonetic Alphabet : the most widespread such system...

, for English. It was sans-serif and without capital letters. He had special symbols for the endings -ed, -ory, -ing, and -ion, as well as the digraph

Digraph (orthography)

A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...

s "ch", "sh", and "ng". An underline indicated the doubling of a consonant in traditional orthography.

While living in Aspen, Bayer had a chance meeting with the eccentric oilman, outdoorsman and (to those who knew him) visionary ecologist, Robert O. Anderson

Robert O. Anderson

Robert Orville Anderson was an American business leader, legendary wildcatter and philanthropist who founded Atlantic Richfield Oil Co. through the 1966 merger of the Atlantic and Richfield oil companies and was Arco's chairman for two decades...

. When Anderson saw the ultra-modern, Bauhaus-inspired home that Bayer had designed & built in Aspen, he walked up to the front door and introduced himself. It was the beginning of a life-long friendship between the two men and instigated Anderson's insatiable passion for compulsively collecting contemporary art.

With Anderson's eventual formation of the Atlantic Richfield Company, and as his personal art collection quickly overflowed out of his New Mexico ranch and other homes, ARCO

ARCO

Atlantic Richfield Company is an oil company with operations in the United States as well as in Indonesia, the North Sea, and the South China Sea. It has more than 1,300 gas stations in the western part of the United States. ARCO was originally formed by the merger of East Coast-based Atlantic...

 soon held the unique distinction of possessing the world's largest corporate Art Collection, under the critical eye and sharp direction of Bayer as Arco's Design Consultant.

Overseeing acquisitions from within Arco Plaza, the newly-built twin 51 story office towers in Los Angeles, Bayer was also responsible for the Arco logo and designing all corporate "branding" related to the company. Prior to the completion of Arco Plaza, Anderson commissioned Bayer to design a monumental sculpture-fountain to be installed between the dark green granite towers. Double Ascension still stands between the twin skyscrapers to this day.

Under Bayer's and Corporate Art Curator Leila Mehle's direction & supervision, Arco's Collection grew to nearly 30,000 Artworks nationwide. Arco's collection was quite eclectic, and consisted of an extremely wide range of media & styles; ranging from large resin sculptures by Dewain Valentine

DeWain Valentine

De Wain Valentine is an American minimalist sculptor who was born in Fort Collins, Colorado in 1936. He is best known for his translucent glass, fiberglass and cast polyester resin sculptures having slick surfaces suggestive of machine made objects....

 to original signed photographs by Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park....

. The vast majority of the collection consisted of original "signed" prints & "artist's proofs" of hand-pulled prints. Major works were reserved for lobbies, reception areas and executive & upper management offices.

Bayer and Mehle instigated a unique program for the collection in that large paintings and sculptures were often "circulated" within the company and transported from one Arco building to another, often making the journey from LA to New York and back again.

With the purchase of Anaconda Copper

Anaconda Copper

Anaconda Copper Mining Company was one of the largest trusts of the early 20th century. The Anaconda was purchased by Atlantic Richfield Company on January 12, 1977...

, Arco built an office tower in downtown Denver, and again, Anderson commissioned Bayer to oversee Anaconda's Art Collection for the new company. Eventually, Bayer gave the Denver Art Museum

Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum is an art museum in Denver, Colorado located in Denver's Civic Center.It is known for its collection of American Indian art,and has a comprehensive collection numbering more than 68,000 works from across the world....

 a collection of around 8,000 of his works. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

 in 1979.

Legacy and Influence

Bayer's works appear in prominent public and private collections including the MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Bayer designed Earthworks an environmental sculpture located in Kent, Washington. http://www.ci.kent.wa.us/arts/earthworks/

Fonts Designed by Herbert Bayer

• Proposal for a Universal Type (1925-1930), this face existed only as designs.
• Bayer Type (Berthold Type Foundry, 1935)

External links

• Art Directors Club bio and portrait of Herbert Bayer