Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Burnett, Kathleen Marie

Titel

Word becomes image: Herbert Bayer, Pioneer of a new vision in book design

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

1989

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) was trained at the Bauhaus in Weimar and went on to become one of the most successful and versatile artists and designers of the twentieth century. In addition to his work in painting, sculpture, architecture, exhibition design, and commercial design, Bayer was an active and influential typographical designer and theoretician. Bayer's introduction to typographic theory and design came at the Weimar Bauhaus where he was a student from 1920-1923. From 1925-1928 he served as the master of the typographical workshop at the Dessau Bauhaus. From 1928-1938 he worked in the commercial sector in Berlin. From 1938-1946 he continued his work in this sector in New York. In 1946 he became affiliated with the Container Corporation of America and moved to Aspen, Colorado to oversee the development of that town and the Institute of Humanistic Studies. From 1948-1953 he was involved in the production of his masterwork, The World Geo-graphic Atlas, following which he designed approximately 100 books for such prestigious publishers as Knopf and Bollingen. Bayer was instrumental in formulating a theoretics of design appropriate to photo-offset printing. By the early twentieth century this new technology was being used to print magazines, posters and advertisements. It was not until the twenties and thirties however, when artist/designers such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, and Herbert Bayer, and typographers such as Jan Tschichold began to formulate--both in theoretical and practical terms--a structure and synthesis of these forms, that photo-offset became a viable alternative to letterpress printing for the book trade. Bayer's importance derives in part from his unusual background. An artist and a typographer, he bridged the gap between the artist/designer working in typographical design, but with no training in the craft of printing, and the pure typographer trained within the traditional apprenticeship structure. Because of this unique blending of backgrounds, Bayer was able to move comfortably in both worlds, as a practitioner of the arts in the first and, particularly after his appointment as master of the typographical workshop at the Dessau Bauhaus, as a consummate craftsman in the second.