Herbert Bayer
50 Jahre Bauhaus
(50 Years of the Bauhaus)
1968
16 ½ x 23 in. (42 x 57 cm)
Offset color lithograph
Condition: There is some very minor creasing around the edges and within the blue circle.
Austrian-born Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) studied at the Bauhaus in Germany and later returned to the school to teach advertising, design, and typography. He emigrated to the United States in 1938, where he built an influential career as an artist and graphic designer.
Bayer designed this poster for a 1968 Bauhaus exhibition held in honor of the school’s 50th anniversary. The image celebrates the color and shape exercises famously used by Wassily Kandinsky in his teaching at the Bauhaus. Kandinsky established through a simple questionnaire that most people associate the color yellow with a triangle, red with a square and blue with a circle. These shape and color combinations, explored extensively by students in Kandinsky’s drawing and painting courses, have since become synonymous with the Bauhaus.
