held camera and favored unusual cropping and
composition techniques, including extreme close-
ups and angles as well as presenting scenes from
unusually high or low vantage points. His work
set him at the forefront of avant-garde photography
in the early twentieth century.
In 1929 Bayer left the Bauhaus and became the
art director ofVoguemagazine in Berlin. The per-
iod marked a distinct change in his approach to
photography. Influenced by the surrealist move-
ment and fascinated by the human subconscious,
Bayer used the technique of photomontage to create
psychologically compelling and fantastic images. In
one of his signature images from this period,Self
Portrait, 1932, Bayer looks into a mirror while re-
moving his arm at the shoulder to his own amaze-
ment. This photograph was one of a series for use in
a picture story calledMan and Dream, which was
never completed.
Although Bayer’s photomontages were reminis-
cent of work by other surrealist artists, his photo-
graphs demonstrated a refined sense of design as a
result of his training at the Bauhaus. Through skill-
ful arrangement of objects, composition, and light-
ing, Bayer exploited the illusionary aspects of the
photographic medium recreating otherworldly sce-
narios for his 1936 series of photographs he called
fotoplastiken. One of the works,Metamorphosis,is
regarded as Bayer’s most successful treatment of
spatial manipulation and symbolism. In the fore-
ground, he arranged basic geometric forms—the
sphere, the cone, and the square—that appear to
converge upon a distant horizon of sky, clouds, and
forest to suggest the sublime contrast of culture and
nature or more deeply, the confrontation of reason
and emotion.
Bayer fled Nazi Germany and immigrated to the
United States in 1938. His career in the arts contin-
ued to proliferate. He designed exhibitions at the
Museum of Modern Art includingBauhaus 1919–
1928 ,Road to Victory,Airways to Peace, andArt In
Progress. Following the end of World War II, Bayer
was a consultant for the Container Corporation of
America, whose president was the visionary execu-
tive Walter Paepcke, who had funded the Chicago
manifestation of the Bauhaus, and later chaired the
corporation’s design department. Relocating to
Aspen, Colorado in 1946, Bayer became the design
consultant for the development of Aspen as a ski
resort and cultural center, and was appointed archi-
tect for the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies,
also funded by Paepcke, who had a second resi-
dence in the mountain town. Bayer also completed
the first recorded ‘‘earthwork’’ environment en-
titledGrass Moundin 1955. From 1966 until his
death, Bayer was a design consultant for the Atlan-
tic Richfield Company.
After suffering a heart attack in 1970, Bayer and
his wife, Joella, moved their residence from the high
elevation of Aspen to Santa Barbara, California,
where the artist maintained an active studio until
his death in 1985. Herbert Bayer’s contributions to
the world of art and design are unique and are
demonstrated in an outstanding career that touched
nearly every field of the arts from architecture to the
fine arts, as well as photography and graphic design.
During his lifetime, he had over 150 one-man exhibi-
tions and seven traveling museum retrospectives
throughout the United States and Europe. Over
100 books, articles, and films exist that deal exclu-
sively with Bayer’s extensive creative oeuvre. His
work is included in major museums throughout
worldwide. In addition, there are substantial
archives of his work in the Bauhaus archive in Ber-
lin, Germany, and the Bayer archive at the Denver
Art Museum in Colorado.NANCYBarr
Seealso:Bauhaus; Moholy-Nagy, La ́szlo ́; Montage;
Museum of Modern Art; Photography in Europe:
Germany and Austria; SurrealismBiography
Born in Haag, Austria, 5 April 1900. Apprenticeship in ar-
chitecture with G. Schmidthammer, Linz, Austria, 1919.
Studied in Darmstadt with Emanuel Margold, 1920. Stu-
dent at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, 1921–1923.
Also studied mural painting with Wassily Kandinsky,- Master at the Bauhaus in Dessau teaching typo-
graphy, 1925–1928. Art Director at the Dorland Studio,
1928–1938 and atVogue, 1929–1930 in Berlin. Consul-
tant at the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies, 1949.
Chairman of the department of design of the Container
Corporation of America, 1956–1965. Recipient of
numerous awards including: the Ambassador’s Award
for Excellence in London in 1968; the Kulturpreis for
photography in Cologne in 1969; and Adalbert Stifter
Preis fu ̈r Bildende Kunste in Austria in 1971. Employed
as a consultant in architecture, art, and design by Atlan-
tic Richfield Company, 1965–1985. Appointed Honorary
Fellow of the Royal Academy of Fine Art in The Hague
in 1975 and of the Hochschule fu ̈r Kunstlerische und
Industrelle Gestalung of Linz, Austria in 1978. Recipient
of the Austrian Honor Cross for Art and Science in 1978.
Awarded an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the Art
Center College of Design in Pasadena, California in 1979.
Died in Montecito, California, 30 September 1985.
Individual Exhibitions
1929 Kunstlerbund Marz; Linz, Austria Galerie Povolozky;
Paris, France
1931 Bauhaus; Dessau, GermanyBAYER, HERBERT