"In Search of Time Past"

photo collage, gelatin silver print

signed, dated and numbered (pencil) on recto, title (pencil) in another hand on verso

Herbert Bayer's works pose fundamental questions about the mode of representation – representational or abstract – and lead beyond a mere depiction of reality. This also corresponds to Bayer's view that an artist "should not imitate nature, but create his own spiritual world alongside nature".¹ Herbert Bayer's artistic approach harks back to the 1920s and thus to his time as a student and teacher at the Bauhaus² in Weimar and later in Dessau. As a budding artist, he first immersed himself in Kandinsky's work Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art) and learned the basics of color theory in a preliminary course with Johannes Itten. This taught him the fundamentals of the structure and composition of forms and colors.
On stylistic influences of Bauhaus artists, he reports: "Most of us were filled with romantic expressionism. Dadaism corresponded to our rejection of any sanctified order. The work of the Stijl group, attractive in its purity, had brief formalist influence. Constructivism contributed its part to the artistic turmoil, but the world of machine production, with its own facts and functions, already determined the image of the future."³
Through his photographic experiments, which included photomontages, Bayer found a way out of purely pictorial representation. He used the camera as what he called a "subjective means of design"⁴. In the resulting "dynamic concepts,"⁵ the artist was able to depict an object in a "multitude of viewpoints."⁵
(Brigitte Reutner-Doneus, Lentos, Linz, read the original article in German here, translated with AI – deepl)

1 

1. Herbert Bayer, Visuelle Kommunikation, Architektur, Malerei. Das Werk des Künstlers in Europa und USA, Ravensburg 1967, p. 203.
2. 2
   Ibid., p. 10: „Die frühen Jahre am Bauhaus wurden das grundlegende Erlebnis für mein späteres Werk.“ (The early years at the Bauhaus became the fundamental experience for my later work.)
3. 3
4. Ibid.
5. 4
6. Ibid., p. 11.
7. 5
8. Ibid., p. 10.