Herbert Bayer
 Section Allemande, 1930 
Reproducción del cartel

Having shown an early interest in drawing, in 1919 Herbert Bayer (Haag, Austria, 1900 – Montecito, United States, 1985) joined the studio of the architect Emanuel Josef Margold, who was a member of the artists’ colony in Darmstadt. Bayer’s interest was aroused by his reading of the Bauhaus manifesto, signed by Walter Gropius and issued that year. He moved to Weimar and enrolled at the recently founded school of art and design in 1921. There, first as a student and later as a teacher, Bayer was an outstanding graphic designer, adopting an approach similar to the work of Jan Tschichold. In 1925 he designed the catalogue of samples (Katalog der Muster) of the objects designed and produced in the school’s various workshops, and he also made his first typographic designs – alphabets of sans-serif lowercase letters – and took part in designing the Bauhaus’s stationery, a field in which he worked with Joost Schmidt, who also taught at the school in Dessau. Bayer changed the name of the workshop in which he was the master – Printing and Advertising – to Typography and Advertising Design, thus indicating the possibilities of the subjects that were taught and their professional dimension.
In 1928 he left the Bauhaus, moved to Berlin and took over as director of the German edition of Vogue and of Dorland Studio, an international advertising agency. That year he had started practising photography, a medium that he incorporated in his work and projects. Another facet in which Bayer was outstanding was as a designer of exhibitions and pavilions for fairs and salons, putting into practice a radically new approach to the idea of installation that expanded the possibilities of the exhibition space and of the circulation and field of vision of the visitors. One of the notable projects in which he participated was the section of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen) in the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs (Paris, 1930). He worked on it with Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, who had also left the school in 1928, and to some extent it helped to make the work carried out in the Bauhaus workshops known outside Germany. The same team was in charge of designing the Baugewerkschafts Ausstellung (Building Workers’ Union Exhibition, Berlin, 1931).
Bayer was also responsible for the poster and the catalogue of the exhibition in Paris; the catalogue was a complete novelty in comparison with other publications of that kind, and with its contents and its design it proclaimed what became known years later as “visual communication”. Although he did not overlook the basic aspects (introduction, texts, plans, list of exhibitors and products, and illustrations), Bayer presented photographs of the installations as if they were the products and objects exhibited. Moreover, as he thought of the page as space rather than merely as a surface, he applied to the catalogue the same principle as was adopted in the exhibition: the circulation of the visitors in the rooms was echoed by the recognition of the possibility of expanding the field of vision beyond the middle horizontal line, activating the principle of a moving eye (and vision). In the catalogue, Bayer reproduced his famous diagram of a viewer whose giant eye was directing its gaze at many different devices that broke up the two-dimensional flatness of the wall.
In the Section Allemande poster for the exhibition of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs, Bayer uses principles similar to those of the catalogue, such as treating the poster as a flexible, inhabitable space, or using the same reduced palette of colours – white, black, red and grey – that was so common among the Constructivist designers and typographers of the time. In this case he adds the colour blue, accentuating the notion of infinite space and the possible ways of occupying it by means of two intersecting rectangles projected diagonally. However, he also uses ideas conceived and developed in his years at the Bauhaus which were immediately identified with him. One example is the use of the condensed bold universal typeface, an alphabet consisting of unornamented lowercase letters which aimed at economy in terms of design and production. The variety of the sizes and shadings is used to establish an internal order in the composition of the poster, here following the principles that Tschichold set out in his article “Elementare Typografie” (Elemental Typography, 1925). Geometrical figures, spheres and rectangular planes (abstract language), are combined with a photographic image of a man seen from behind (figuration and a combination of technical devices). The very small size of the human figure enables Bayer to convey his idea of the exhibition space as a purely visual and spatial experience perceived by a dynamic eye.
Bayer emigrated to the United States in 1938 and was put in charge of planning the design and installation of the exhibition that the MoMA in New York devoted to the Bauhaus that year. In it he took his diagram to its ultimate consequences, breaking up the static wall and conceiving the exhibition in terms of circulation, an idea that he emphasised by placing footprints on the carpet that was laid over the route that the visitor was intended to follow. A new field of experimentation, once again at the MoMA, was the exhibition Road to Victory. A Procession of Photographs of the Nation at War (1942), with an effective design dominated by a rhythm of emotion and identification created by means of devices arranged from floor to ceiling which held the photographic reproductions.

References
Paul Overy: “Visions of the Future and the Immediate Past: The Werkbund Exhibition, Paris 1930”, in Journal of Design History, vol. 17, no. 4, 2004,pp. 337–357.
Arthur A. Cohen: Herbert Bayer. The Complete Work. MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), 1984.