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About
Bayer was born in Haag, a village near Salzburg in Northern Austria. At nineteen, he took an apprenticeship with the designer and architect Georg Schmidthamer in the Upper Austrian capital of Linz. There he created typographical letterheads, posters and advertisements. The following year, Bayer left for Darmstadt, Germany, where worked at the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony to work as an assistant in the studio of Viennese architect Emmanuel Margold. At Darmstadt, Bayer studied the Art Nouveau and developed an interest in the Bauhaus movement led by Walter Gropius. In 1921, Bayer left Darmstadt and was interviewed in Weimar, Germany by Gropius, who accepted him into the Bauhaus, at the time Germany’s premiere design school. At Bauhaus, Bayer who had initially studied as an architect, began to study typography and mural painting under the tutelage of professor/artists like Johannes Itten, László Moholy-Nagy and Wassily Kandinsky. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, Germany in 1925, and upon passing his final journeyman’s exam, Bayer was appointed both director of the new "Druck und Reklame" (printing and advertising) department at the Bauhaus by Gropius and as an art director for the American fashion magazine “Vogue.” As director of the Bauhaus’s printing and advertising department, Bayer adopted the all lower-case alphabet characterized by the Bauhaus style. His “Universal”- geometric sans serif font, now known as “Bayer Universal” was developed during his Bauhaus tenure in 1925. On a trip to Paris the same year, Bayer gained an appreciation of photography and began to implement photographic elements into his work. Bayer left the Bauhaus in 1928 to take a position as the art director at the Berlin office of “Vogue” magazine. He also worked for the German publication "Die neue Linie” or “The New Line,” a women’s lifestyle magazine published in Leipzig, Germany that was loyal to the Bauhaus style. Bayer’s 1936 Deutschland Austellung Brochure, which promoted an exhibition of art for tourists visiting Berlin for the 1936 Olympics glorified life Nazi Germany and the regime of Adolf Hitler. But, a year later, Bayer’s works were featured in an exhibition called “Degenerate Art,” which was sponsored by the Nazi Party. Bayer left Germany shortly thereafter, settling in New York City in 1938. Once settled in the U.S., Bayer met up with his old friend and mentor Walter Gropius to create "Bauhaus 1918-28," an exposition at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Bayer married Joella Syrara Haweis on December 3, 1944, she was the daughter of the English bohemian poet Mina Loy. In 1946, the couple moved to Aspen, Colorado where they lived in one of the town‘s elegant Victorian homes where Bayer and his staff produced many of their works. Bayer was made chairman of the department of design of the Container Corporation of America in 1946 by the industrialist Walter Paepcke, and later an artistic consultant for the Atlantic Richfield Company. That same year he became a design consultant for Aspen Development, which stages annual art events in Aspen and a member of the art board for the United States Information Bureau. While in Aspen, Bayer designed the “Marble Garden” and “Beyond the Wall,” both environmental sculptures as well as the Music Tent; co-designed the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies and helped to restore the Wheeler Opera House. Contact
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