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Herbert Bayer

Austria, 1900 - 1985

BiographyHerbert Bayer was an American artist of Austrian birth. From 1921 to 1923 he attended the Bauhaus in Weimar, studying mural painting (with Kandinsky) and typography; it was at this time that he created the Universal alphabet, consisting only of lower-case letters. In 1925 he returned to the Bauhaus, then to Dessau, as a teacher of advertising, layout and typography. In 1938, Bayer emigrated to the USA. Until 1945 he worked in New York as a commercial artist, exhibition designer, painter, sculptor and maker of environments. His first one-man show in the USA took place at Black Mountain College, NC, in 1939. He was represented in a number of important exhibitions at MOMA, New York, including “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” (1936), “Bauhaus: 1919-28” (1938) and “Art and Advertising Art” (1943). In his constant belief in the need to integrate all aspects of artistic creativity into the modern industrial world, Bayer was a true spokesman for the Bauhaus ethos, as well as its last surviving master. (See Monica Bohm-Duchen, Grove Dictionary of Art.)

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