Earth, Moved
How the early work of Herbert Bayer became human-scale environments of positive or negative volumes in the landscape…
Artist and designer Herbert Bayer is perhaps best known for being a Master at the Bauhaus design school, in charge of graphic design, advertising, and typography. In the early-1920s, he’d studied large-scale painting and murals under Wassily Kandinsky at their Weimar campus, where he also devised the Universal typeface by combining aspects of upper and lower case lettering into a single consistent design. On graduation, he was kept on, teaching at both their Weimar and Dessau campuses from 1925–1928 whilst pursuing his own artistic vision.
In its heyday, the Bauhaus was a hotbed of innovation in all aspects of art and design and Bayer was collaborating with influential colleagues including László Moholy-Nagy, with whom he progressed the graphic uses of photomontage and photograms. Whilst based at Dessau, he also designed most of the distinctive typefaces used on Bauhaus signage and official literature.
Parallel to this period, his personal work was already multidisciplinary and his earlier training as an architect was evident. His sketch work demonstrated a fascination with the interplay of planes and the balancing of volumes. Biomorphic soft forms suggesting ‘everyday objects’…
