Herbert Bayer
(1900 – 1985) was an Austrian graphic designer, painter,
photographer, and architect.
Bayer apprenticed
under the artist Georg Schmidthammer in Linz. Leaving the workshop
to study at the Darmstadt Artists' Colony, he became interested in
Walter Gropius's Bauhaus manifesto. After Bayer had studied for four
years at the Bauhaus under such teachers as Wassily Kandinsky and
László Moholy-Nagy, Gropius appointed Bayer director of printing and
advertising.
In the spirit of
reductive minimalism, Bayer developed a crisp visual style and
adopted use of all-lowercase, sans serif typefaces for most Bauhaus
publications. Bayer is one of several typographers of the period
including Kurt Schwitters and Jan Tschichold who experimented with
the creation of a simplified more phonetic-based alphabet. Bayer
designed the 1925 geometric sans-serif typeface called universal,
now issued in digital form as Bayer Universal. The design also
inspired ITC Bauhaus and Architype Bayer, which bears comparison
with the stylistically related typeface Architype Schwitters.
In 1928, Bayer left
the Bauhaus to become art director of Vogue magazine's Berlin
office. He remained in Germany far later than most other
progressives, and did work for the Nazi Party. 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. In 1938 he
left Germany and settled in New York City 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.
In 1946 the Bayers
relocated. Hired by industrialist and visionary Walter Paepcke,
Bayer moved to Aspen, Colorado as Paepcke promoted skiing as a
popular sport. Bayer's architectural work in the town included
co-designing the Aspen Institute and restoring the Wheeler Opera
House, but his production of promotional posters identified skiing
with wit, excitement, and glamour. Bayer would remain associated
with Aspen until the mid-1970s. Bayer gave the Denver Art Museum a
collection of around 8,000 of his works.
In 1959, he
designed his "fonetik alfabet", a phonetic alphabet, 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 digraphs
"ch", "sh", and "ng". An underline indicated the doubling of a
consonant in traditional orthography.
Bayer's works
appear in prominent public and private collections including the MIT
List Visual Arts Center.
