Herbert Bayer was one of the most extraordinary artists associated with the Bauhaus school. A true multimedia artist, he united graphic design, art, and architecture in a unique style that came to represent the bold aesthetic approach of the movement. A teacher with the school until 1928, Bayer went on to become a highly successful graphic designer in Germany, and later one of the most prominent figures in the 20th-century art scene of the United States.
This broad biographical account, which presents previously unseen archival photographs and episodes from the life of Bayer and other influential Bauhaus artists such as Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy, follows Bayer through the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and finally to his exile in the United States. Shining a light on Bayer's time in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, and his route out of the Nazi state, Rössler provides rich new insights into how Bauhaus artists navigated a protracted period of social upheaval and dictatorship, where commercial success was fraught with a deep hostility towards the regime and the temptations of emigration.
Revealing the tensions of an avant-garde artist struggling to practice during a period of repression, Herbert Bayer, Graphic Designer speaks to both the memory of those who left Nazi Germany, but also the perseverance of artists and intellectuals throughout history who have worked under authoritarian regimes. Drawing on never before interpreted documents, letters and archival material, Rössler tells Bayer's compelling story – documenting the life of a unique artist and offering a valuable contribution to research in émigré experiences.
Patrick Rössler is Chair of Media & Communication Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He has published extensively on the history of magazines, including Viewing our Life and Times (2006), The Bauhaus at the Newsstand (2009), Iconic Magazines (2016) and Illustrated Magazine of the Times (2019). He has curated exhibitions on magazine design in Germany, the U.S., Japan, and France.
Deborah Ascher Barnstone is Professor and Head of Architecture at the University of Sydney, Australia. Barnstone is a licensed architect in Germany, holds a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University, and holds a PhD from TU Delft. Her recent monograph works include Beyond the Bauhaus: Cultural Modernity in Breslau, 1918-1933 (2016), Art and Resistance in Germany (2018), and The Break with the Past: Avant-garde Architecture in Germany, 1910-1925 (2019). She co-edits Bloomsbury's Visual Cultures and German Contexts book series.
Thomas O. Haakenson is Associate Professor in Critical Studies and Visual Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, USA. He is coeditor of the book series Visual Cultures and German Contexts and has been published widely, including in New German Critique, Cabinet, Rutgers Art Review, German Studies Review, and the anthologies Legacies of Modernism, Spectacle, Representations of German Identity, as well as Memorialization in Germany Since 1945. He has received awards and fellowships from the United States Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies.
