PRESS RELEASE

Kent Gallery is pleased to present a centennial celebration of the birth of Herbert Bayer. Spanning more than sixty years, the exhibition will include paintings, drawings, photography and photomontages from Bayer’s years with the Bauhaus, followed by Berlin and his residence in the United States. In the tradition of the Bauhaus, Bayer believed that art, technology, and nature should share a unity. For more than six decades, Bauhaus ideals stood at the core of his artistic approach. The ability of Bayer, as well as his contemporaries (Kurt Schwitters, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodshenko), to move between private, autonomous expression and public projects made them unique in their creative depth and scope.

From an early age, Bayer was clearly aware of the power of art to produce intense emotion. Pure painting is what first brought Bayer to the Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany. The catalyst for this major change in Bayer’s outlook was the discovery of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Believing that Kandinsky was teaching at the Bauhaus, and without money, Bayer hiked from Darmstadt to Weimar. Meeting with Walter Gropius in the fall of 1921, Bayer was accepted to the Bauhaus. By 1925, Bayer accompanied the Bauhaus in its move from Weimar to Dessau, and Bayer was invited by Gropius to become one of its directors. During his time at the Bauhaus, Bayer developed the constructive ideals and socially conscious methods that would become the trademark for his entire career. Bayer’s devotion to the Bauhaus was not one-sided, however. The identity of the Bauhaus embraced Bayer’s innovative ideals, creating a symbiotic relationship that allowed both contributors to flourish.

"I remember the Bauhaus of the past with great feeling, but one must live in one’s own time—my attachments are therefore to the Bauhaus of the present as the essence once evolved has become part of myself."

Moving to Berlin in 1928, Bayer focused on photomontage and graphic design. In 1934, Bayer played a major role in the development of a large exhibition in Berlin based on "health" entitled Das Wunder des Lebens from which a number of works are exhibited here. During his time in Berlin, he also worked as art director for Vogue Magazine and explored the emerging creative possibilities of photography, completing the series entitled Man and Dream and a second series called Fotoplastiken (after Moholy-Nagy). Berlin offered Bayer an environment of innovative artistic discovery, until times became grim under increasing Nazi domination.

Bayer’s major role in the presentation of Bauhaus: 1919-1928 at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938 paved the way for his immigration to the United States. He continued to act as an exhibitions consultant designing such seminal shows such as Road to Victory (curated by Edward Steichen), Airways to Peace and Art In Progress. After a first visit in 1943 at the urging of Walter Paepcke, Bayer was urged to move to Aspen and help oversee the development of the mining town into a major resort and cultural center. Along with numerous cultural activities, Bayer became the architect for the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies in 1946. Living in Aspen allowed Bayer to rediscover a childhood passion for hiking, skiing and the flowing motion of mountainous landscapes which resulted in another major period of creative development known as the Aspen Years. After suffering from a heart attack in 1970, Bayer and his wife, Joella, moved their residence from the high elevation of Aspen to Santa Barbara. Here the artist focused exclusively on painting, producing a series of work entitled Anthologies. In the last years of his life, Bayer revisited the artistic motifs and themes he had created during his distinguished career. These late paintings encapsulate Bayer’s career-long objective to combine the personal, the expressive and the curious.

During his lifetime, Bayer had seven traveling museum retrospectives and over 150 one-man exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. In addition, there have been over 100 books, articles, essays, museum catalogues and films dealing exclusively with Bayer’s creative oeuvre. Works by Bayer are included in over 40 public collections including the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, the Busch Reisinger Museum at Harvard University, Whitney Museum, Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.