Herbert Bayer

He was also instrumental in the development of the Atlantic Richfield Company's corporate art collection until his death in 1985.

Bayer apprenticed under the artist Georg Schmidthammer in Linz. Leaving the workshop to study at the Darmstadt Artists' Colony, he became interested in Walter Gropius's Bauhaus manifesto. After Bayer had studied for four years at the Bauhaus under such teachers as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and László Moholy-Nagy, Gropius appointed Bayer director of printing and advertising. In the spirit of reductive minimalism, Bayer developed a crisp visual style and adopted use of all-lowercase, sans serif typefaces for most Bauhaus publications. Bayer is one of several typographers of the period including Kurt Schwitters and Jan Tschichold who experimented with the creation of a simplified more phonetic-based alphabet. From 1925 to 1930, Bayer designed a geometric sans-serif titled Proposal for a Universal Typeface (Herbert Bayer, universal) that existed only as a design and was never actually cast into real type. These designs are now issued in digital form as Bayer Universal (P22 Type Foundry Bauhaus Set). The design also inspired ITC Bauhaus and Architype Bayer, which bears comparison with the stylistically related typeface Architype Schwitters. Something important to note about Bayers proposed "Universal Typeface" is that the reason he abandoned uppercase letters when designing this typeface was because he aimed to make the writing process more efficient. While designing his universal typeface, the first sketches revealed that he was focusing on geometric forms. In 1923 Bayer met the photographer Irene Bayer-Hecht at the first large Bauhaus exhibit in Weimar. They married in 1925, separated in 1928, had a daughter, Julia Alexandra, in 1929, and divorced in 1944.

In 1928, Bayer left the Bauhaus to become art director of Vogue magazine's Berlin office. He remained in Germany far later than most other progressives. In 1936 he designed a brochure for the Deutschland Ausstellung, an exhibition for tourists in Berlin during the 1936 Olympic Games – the brochure celebrated life in Nazi Germany, and the authority of Hitler. However, in 1937, works of Bayer's were included in the Nazi propaganda exhibition "Degenerate Art", upon which he left Germany. Upon fleeing Germany, he traveled in Italy.

In 1938, Bayer came to the United States and remained until his death in 1985. With Walter Gropius, Bayer designed the landmark Bauhaus 1918–1928 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938. In 1944, he married Joella Synara Haweis, the daughter of poet and Dada artist Mina Loy. The same year, he became a U.S. citizen.

In 1946, the Bayers relocated from New York to Aspen, Colorado. Hired by businessman and philanthropist Walter Paepcke, Bayer moved to Aspen, Colorado as Paepcke promoted skiing as a popular sport. Bayer's architectural work in the town included co-designing the Aspen Institute and restoring the Wheeler Opera House, but his production of promotional posters identified skiing with wit, excitement, and glamour. In 1959, he designed his "fonetik alfabet", a phonetic alphabet, for English. It was sans-serif and without capital letters. He had specialized symbols for the endings -ed, -ory, -ing, and -ion, as well as the digraphs "ch", "sh", and "ng". An underline indicated the doubling of a consonant in traditional orthography. While living in Aspen, Bayer met oilman and ecologist Robert O. Anderson and Bayer designed several buildings for Anderson. The two men maintained a close relationship for decades, and Anderson subsequently began collecting contemporary art. Following Anderson's formation of the Atlantic Richfield Company in 1966, ARCO developed a large corporate art collections, with Bayer serving as the company's Art and Design Consultant. Overseeing acquisitions for ARCO Plaza, the newly built (1972) twin 51-story office towers in Los Angeles that served as the new company's corporate headquarters, Bayer was also responsible for the ARCO logo and designing all corporate branding related to the company. Prior to the completion of ARCO Plaza, Anderson commissioned Bayer to design a sculpture-fountain, titled Double Ascension, to be installed between the towers. Under Bayer's direction, ARCO's art collection grew to nearly 30,000 works nationwide, managed by Atlantic Richfield Company Art Collection staff. ARCO's collection was consisted of an extremely wide range of media and styles; ranging from contemporary and earlier paintings, sculpture, works on paper (including drawings, watercolors and signed original lithographs, etchings and serigraphs) and signed photographs to tribal and ethnic art from many cultures, as well as historic prints and artifacts, all displayed throughout ARCO's buildings in Los Angeles and several other cities. Three years after ARCO was taken over by BP in 2000, that company's then-chairman, Lord Brown, personally ordered ARCO's art collection liquidated. It was sold through Christie's and LA Modern Auctions. Bayer made provisions to donate, after his death, a collection of his works which had been housed in ARCO's conference center in Santa Barbara to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The works have been loaned previously to the Denver Art Museum. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979.

Proposal for a Universal Type (1925–1930), this typeface existed only as designs. Bayer Type (Berthold Type Foundry, 1933) Works include: German banknotes; die Neue linie magazine; Universal typeface.

Cohen, Arthur A. (1984). Herbert Bayer: The Complete Work. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-53075-0. Retrieved 23 October 2020. Chanzit, Gwen Finkel; Libeskind, Daniel (2005). From Bauhaus to Aspen: Herbert Bayer and Modernist Design in America. Denver, Colorado: Johnson Books. ISBN 978-1-55566-329-2. Retrieved 23 October 2020. Lupton, Ellen (2020). Herbert Bayer: Inspiration and Process in Design. Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 978-1-61689-953-0. Retrieved 23 October 2020. Macmillan, Neil (2006). An A-Z of Type Designers. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-11151-4. Retrieved 23 October 2020. "Herbert Bayer: Kunst Universell. Vienna, Austria: Edition". www.suppanfinearts.com. 1997.