Herbert Bayer
Herbert Bayer
- An Austrian/American artist - a graphic designer, painter, sculptor, art director, photographer, interior designer and architect.
- He grew up influenced by the avant-garde movement and the fast changing environment of the revolutionary years. Taught under such teachers as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
- He followed the idea that artists have no restrictions.
- He believed in the power that design has in influencing society. Designers were "putting the chaos of life into retinal forms" (Armstrong, 2009, p. 13) and slowly were changing the world.
- He found inspiration in the functionality and efficiency of machines, working with order and clarity.
- He went to the famous Bauhaus, school of design, where he found his talent in typography, but also in photography. Influenced by Kandinsky and Maholy-Nagy, his interest in painting and photo-manipulation developed.
- Bayer's aim was to translate Constructivism and Surrealism into the pictorial language of advertising and, by the same token, into the aesthetics of everyday life.
- In 1926, under the influence of the Parisian school of Surrealism, he began to create dream pictures through the medium of photomontage.
- His series Man and Dream, originally planned as a story in pictures but never finished, was published in 1936 in a portfolio simply entitled 11 Photomontages.
- His Self-Portrait of 1932, the most famous photomontage of this series, shows the artist looking at his own reflection in a mirror and seeing himself turn to stone. A piece has broken away from his shoulder, revealing his petrified inside, holding the piece in his left hand, staring in amazement at the gap it has left. The narcissistic glance at the mirror has suddenly changed into a look of horror. Nightmare images, such as this, are in the tradition of photomontages - also known as "double portraits" of "joke portraits - which became very popular in amateur circles at this time, the turn of the century. They would show the portrayed subjects meeting themselves in the street, or sometimes carrying their own heads under their arms.
- Another famous montage of his was a cover for an issues of the Bauhaus's zeitschrifte magazine from 1928, and is among the first successful uses of type and image. Combining the tools of a graphic designer, basic geometrical forms and a page of type, he uses light in a dramatic and striking manner. Bayer makes use of a cube, ball and cone (solidifications of Kandinsky's iconic work) along with a sharpened pencil and transparent triangle, juxtaposed over the surface of a magazine's cover.
- An important things to note is the use of light he uses in this cover, the strong shadows and the contrast - they indicate the abstract vision that had started to take took in Bayer at this point in time. His later worlds with photomontage show the development of that unusual vision. A perfect example being his surrealistic self-portrait (above).
- Bayer created yet more famous montages from 1959 - for example, forests with eyes on trees (seen as a representation of paranoia - are further proof that the more he mastered the photomontage, the deeper the meanings of the works became.
- His unique style is easily recognised, often using eyes (the window to the soul).
- His works are considered timeless, never losing meaning, unrelated to any particular time period settings.
- Bayer still managed to preserve order in his worlds, yet started exploring more deeply into the human psyche in an attempt to catch and involve more of the viewer's attention.
- His travels and experiences enabled him to understand and successfully represent a multitude of human emotions through photomontage and it is through this way he opened the door of surrealism in photomontage.
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