Colorado & Regional Art

herbert bayer was born in Austria and apprenticed in architecture in the city of Linz. He then apprenticed at an architecture firm in Darmstadt, Germany before studying at the Bauhaus art and design school in Weimar, where he was particularly influenced by his painting teacher, Wassily Kandinsky. bayer promoted the Bauhaus philosophy of unity between function and design, becoming an architect, painter, photographer, sculptor and designer of exhibitions and typefaces. From 1925 to 1928 he taught and directed typography at the Bauhaus in Dessau. bayer believed in and designed idealized, universal typefaces without serifs and using only lowercase letters (his name and titles are left lowercase in homage to him). After a decade working in Berlin at Vogue and as director of the Dorland advertising agency, he immigrated to New York in 1938 and became a US citizen in 1944. In New York he worked on exhibition design for the Museum of Modern Art and completed graphic design commissions. He moved to Aspen, Colorado, in 1946, invited by Walter Paepcke to serve as the design consultant for the Aspen Institute. His work in Aspen also included design consulting for Paepcke’s Container Corporation and then for Robert O. Anderson’s Atlantic Richfield Company. In 1948 he created lithographs with master printmaker Lawrence Barrett at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center. Health concerns forced bayer to move to Santa Barbara, California, in 1975 where he continued consulting for Atlantic Richfield. His yellow, 85-foot-high articulated wall sculpture (1985) is a fixture of public art in Denver. bayer died in 1985 and is buried in Aspen.