Ahoi Herbert!
Bayer and Modernism

A high point of the exhibition year 2009 at the Lentos is an extensive show, covering 12 rooms, about Herbert Bayer, the famous Bauhaus artist originally from Upper Austria.

This exhibition endeavors to spread out Herbert Bayer’s oeuvre in all its colorful diversity and to make it possible to experience the thematic lines crossing through his work over the course of decades, from photography, drawing, painting, all the way to designed landscape.

The development and the history of modern art will be illuminated with examples of work by Herbert Bayer and his prominent colleagues, friends and contemporaries. Many interconnections resulting from Bayer’s stirring biography will be shown for the first time: Bayer’s influence on Moroccan modernism, his universal work in New York, California, Paris, Japan and Mexico, and his contacts and friendships with many artists (Albers, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius) and various art scenes of the international avant-garde of the twentieth century.

Bayer’s work at Bauhaus from 1921 to 1928 is one of the focal points of the exhibition. In addition, the famous architecture room that was set up by Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer at the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Paris 1930 will be partially reconstructed.

Herbert Bayer was closely linked with the predecessor institution of Lentos, the New Gallery of the City of Linz, for decades. Following a generous donation from his widow Joella Bayer in 2006, Lentos now has 135 works from all the periods of his work, the biggest Bayer collection of any Austrian museum. Together with numerous loaned works from throughout Austria and abroad, these works form the core of the exhibition.

Herbert Bayer, who was born in 1900 in Upper Austria and died in 1985 in Santa Barbara, California, is regarded is one of the major artists of the development of international, modern art in the 20th century. In the course of his almost 60-year career, he created an extensive oeuvre that is almost unique among modern artists, comprising nearly all forms of expression of visual art and its related fields: drawing, painting, printmaking, tapestry; typography and graphic design; experimental and documentary photography. From 1946 on, he worked in his new home country, the USA, for decades as an architect and designer of landscapes and sculptures.

Team of curators and designers:

Dr. Elisabeth Nowak-Thaller, Lentos, Linz

DI Bernhard Widder, Vienna / Linz

Mag. Lucas Horvath, Vienna (Morocco)

Mag. Dominika Glogowski, Vienna (Japan)

DI Friedrich Schmidmair, Vienna / Upper Austria (Design).