HERBERT BAYER: THE COMPLETE WORK
Arthur A. Cohen
Arthur A. Cohen: HERBERT BAYER: THE COMPLETE WORK. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984. First edition. Folio. Cream cloth stamped in blue. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 430 pp. 350 black and white plates. 43 color plates. Arthur and Elaine Lustig Cohen-designed bookplate to front pastedown. Book design and typography art-directed by Bayer. Jacket with trivial wear, primarily rubbing to the rear panel and a sun faded spine: a nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
10 x 11.75 hardcover book with 430 pages and 350 black and white plates and 43 color plates, many of which are from Bayer's own archive and have never before appeared in print. Covers all aspects of Bayer's work as artist, architect, exhibition and industrial designer.
"Herbert Bayer is a triumphant presentation of the life and work of a rare creature, the total artist/designer." —Industrial Design
Contents include all aspects of Bayer's multifaceted approach to art, including visual communication (graphic design, typography, exhibition design, alphabet design); posters; typography; design for industry ; th world geo-graphic atlas; architcture and environmental art; aspen; painting and murals and more. Also includes an extraordinarily comprehensive bibliography.
"This book is without question the best volume on the work of Herbert Bayer ever written." —Richard Meier
From the book: “For over half a century Herbert Bayer (1900-1985), one of the original masters of the Bauhaus, did pioneering work in all of the fine and applied arts. This is the first book to present a comprehensive survey of Bayer's enormous oeuvre; Arthur A. Cohen traces the development of Bayer's visual ideas across six decades and as many genres, proving that Bayer—more than any of his Bauhaus colleagues -- produced an art that simultaneously expressed the needs of an industrial age and the impulse of the avant-garde.
“Bayer himself served as the art director of the hardcover edition of this elegantly produced volume. It is lavishly illustrated with 43 color and 350 black-and-white plates, many of which come from Bayer's own archive and have never before appeared in print. In accordance with Herbert Bayer's sixty-year commitment to the use of the lowercase alphabet, all 32 of his essays included here are set in miniscules.”
From the prospectus: “Arthur A. Cohen, novelist, essayist, theologian, has also written extensively on modern art. His monograph on Sonia Delauney and his edition of the writings of Sonia and Robert Delauney establish him as one of the foremost experts on the simultaneist painters. He has also written on Robert Motherwell, Italian and Russian Futurism, and edited the recent series, “The Avant-Garde in Print.” Mr. Cohen is the founder and proprietor of Ex Libris, dealer in rare printed and graphic documentation of 20th century art.”
From Elaine Lustig Cohen’s obituary in The New York Times, Oct. 7, 2016: “. . . Arthur A. Cohen, an author and the founder of Noonday Press and Meridian Books, was a client and close friend of the Lustigs. After Alvin Lustig’s death, Ms. Lustig and Mr. Cohen continued to work together; they were married in 1956 and had a daughter.
“In 1973 the couple founded Ex Libris, which sold antiquarian books and periodicals on the ground floor of their East 70th Street townhouse. But her new career had taken hold; when Mr. Cohen died in 1986, his obituary identified her as “the painter Elaine Lustig Cohen.”
Herbert Bayer (1900 – 1985) is one of the individuals most closely identified with the famous Bauhaus program in Weimar, Germany. Together with Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Wassily Kandinsky, Bayer helped shape a philosophy of functional design that extended across disciplines ranging from architecture to typography and graphic design. Endowed with enormous talent and energy, Bayer went on to produce an impressive body of work, including freelance graphics commissions, Modernist exhibition design, corporate identity programs, and architecture and environmental design.
He was born in Haag, Austria, and apprenticed in a local architectural design and graphic arts studio. By 1920 he was in Germany and a year later enrolled in a recently established, state-funded school of design called the Bauhaus. Then located in Weimar, the Bauhaus came to represent an almost utopian ideal that "modern art and architecture must be responsive to the needs and influence of the modern industrial world and that good designs must pass the test of both aesthetic standards and sound engineering."
Though Bayer came to the Bauhaus as a student, he stayed on to become one of its most prominent faculty members. His design for a new Sans-serif type called Universal helped to define the Bauhaus aesthetic.
He left in 1928 and moved to Berlin where he opened a graphic design firm whose clients included the trend-setting magazine Vogue. During this period, he also created or art-directed a number of memorable exhibitions. As with other designers of his generation, Bayer became alarmed over the increasingly repressive political situation in Germany and finally left in 1938 for New York. Within a short period of time, he was well-established as a designer and, among other achievements, had organized a comprehensive exhibition at MoMA on the early Bauhaus years. He also formed important connections with the publishers of Life and Fortune magazines, General Electric, and Container Corporation of America. CCA's chief executive, Walter Paepcke, became an important patron of Bayer's in the years to come, beginning with an invitation to move to Aspen, Colorado, to become a design consultant for the company. Bayer also supervised the architectural design of the new Aspen Institute, and then many of its program graphics. Bayer remained in Aspen until 1974, when he moved to California. There he worked on various environmental projects until his death in 1985. [bayer_2019]