of the utopian visions of a handful of artists. The
legacy of the Bauhaus continues in photography
today through the influence of Moholy-Nagy’s Insti-
tute of Design (New Bauhaus) and the dozens of
teachers who trained there in the mid and late twen-
tieth century.
LESLIEHUMMCormier
Seealso: Architectural Photography; Auerbach,
Ellen; Bayer, Herbert; Feininger, T. Lux; Formal-
ism; Futurism; Henri, Florence; History of Photo-
graphy: Twentieth-Century Developments; Institute
of Design; Lissitzky, El; Manipulation; Modernism;
Moholy-Nagy, La ́szlo ́; Photography in Europe: Ger-
many and AustriaFurther Reading
Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University Art Mu-
seums, Photography Collection, Bauhaus Archives and
Gropius Archives. For original images, documentation,
and works of Bauhaus design.
Mendelshohn, Harvey L., trans. Bauhaus Photography.
Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Press, 1985.HERBERT BAYER
Austrian
Herbert Bayer considered himself a painter, but he is
recognized as a prolific artist who worked success-
fully in a variety of media including sculpture, typo-
graphy, graphic design, and photography. During
his long, multifaceted career, he designed furniture
and tapestries, executed murals, and was an archi-
tect and photographer. Bayer discovered photogra-
phy in the 1920s while a student at the Bauhaus in
Germany. In an atmosphere of experimentation and
reverence for industrial society and the machine age,
Bayer embraced the camera as a means to create
imagery suitable for the modern era. He went on to
develop an innovative body of photographs includ-
ing a series photomontages in addition to a series he
calledfotoplastikenthat included still life and geo-
metric objects.
Herbert Bayer was born on April 5, 1900, in
Haag am Hausruck, a small village near Salzburg
in Northern Austria. As a child he developed an
interest in skiing, mountaineering, and drawing.
Bayer’s interest in art grew throughout his youth,
but plans for Bayer to attend art school in Vienna
were curtailed by the unexpected death of his father,
leaving his family few financial resources. After
serving in the military during the last years of
World War I, he became the apprentice of artist
Georg Schmidthammer of Linz, Austria, in 1920.
Bayer designed letterheads, posters, and advertise-
ments. He left Schmidthammer’s workshop and
settled in Darmstadt, Germany, where he worked
for Viennese architect Emmanuel Margold at the
Darmstadt Artists Colony.
In Darmstadt, Bayer was trained in the Art Nou-
veau styles. He became interested in the aesthetic
philosophies of Walter Gropius after reading his
bookBauhaus-Manifest. Gropius had founded the
Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany in 1919. He based its
curriculum around the principals of the Arts and
Crafts movement, specifically the incorporation of
art and industry. After an interview with Gropius,
Bayer was admitted to the Bauhaus school in 1921.
He left Darmstadt moving to Weimar, and for the
next four years studied with the school’s great pro-
fessors concentrating on design and typography. He
later joined Wassily Kandinsky’s mural workshop.
When Bayer completed his studies, he was ap-
pointed by Gropius to head the printing and ad-
vertising workshops for the school. He moved to
Dessau, Germany, where the school had relocated
in 1925. Bayer taught graphic design and typogra-
phy until 1928. He instituted the lowercase alphabet
as the style for all Bauhaus printing and founded the
now common type style variously called universal or
univers. He also designed the signage for the Bau-
haus’s new building complex, which has become an
icon of twentieth century design.
Bayer’s earliest exposure to photography was in
the 1920s while studying with Bauhaus instructor
La ́szlo ́Moholy-Nagy. Influenced by many of the
innovative visual techniques characteristic of
Moholy-Nagy’s work, Bayer shot with a hand-BAYER, HERBERT