[ ON SHOW: ASPEN ] The peak of his powers This year, Aspen is honouring Bauhaus artist and architect Herbert Bayer, who helped transform the town into a ski resort and cultural hub. By Claire Wrathall
Left, Herbert Bayer skiiing in Aspen, 1947. Opposite, a poster he designed in 1946
ast summer, with funding from Melony and living and profit from healthy physical recreation, Adam Lewis, the Aspen Institute acquired a major with facilities at hand for the enjoyment of art’. sculpture, Anaconda – an arrangement of seven Who better to build it than Herbert Bayer? A substantial geometrical shapes carved from Carrara keen skier and mountaineer who had grown up in marble by the Bauhaus artist, architect and the foothills of the Austrian Alps, he initially trained all-round polymath Herbert Bayer. Its unveiling was as an architect and, at 21, enrolled at the Bauhaus a foretaste of this year’s centenary celebrations of in Weimar, where Wassily Kandinsky was one the Bauhaus and, specifically, of Bayer’s contribution of his teachers. He moved to Dessau to continue to the transformation of the then-failing Colorado his studies with Walter Gropius, after which he silver-mining town into a fabled mountain resort. became director of the Bauhaus’s new printing Anaconda stands on the sylvan campus of the and advertising workshop, eventually establishing institute, an influential think tank and arts centre his own graphic design studio in Berlin. In 1938, founded by Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke. In 1939, however, he went to the USA with an invitation from Elizabeth had come to Aspen to ski. She loved its Alfred H Barr to design the installation of the first setting and the challenging Rocky Mountain slopes Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and prevailed upon her husband, a wealthy Chicago in New York, of which Barr was the founding director. industrialist, to visit. He, too, was entranced, not Bayer’s first wife, the Chicago-born photographer least by its potential for development. Irene Bayer-Hecht, and daughter were Jewish; there They established the Aspen Skiing Company, was little incentive to return to Germany. So he which still operates the town’s winter-sports stayed, finding work in magazine publishing and infrastructure; then it occurred to them that they advertising, and creating a new corporate identity might build what Walter called a ‘utopian community for Paepcke’s company, the Container Corporation
of the mind and body’ where one could ‘earn a of America. Although Bayer had hitherto worked » Opposite, This page, photo: Aspen photo: Historical Aspen Historical 2019 Society; Society. Collection. Artwork: Bayer © DACS
[ 044 ] [ 045 ] [ ON SHOW: ASPEN ]
A 1973 performance at the Aspen Music Festival, in a tent designed by Bayer. Below, Aspen Meadows Resort. Opposite, four of Bayer’s promotional postcards, 1947–49
He whitewashed the façade of the Hotel Jerome, picking out the lintels in a cerulean known locally as Bayer Blue
almost exclusively as a graphic artist, Paepcke – and, by extension, ideas. The sgraffito mural (1953) something of a visionary patron – saw his potential on the wall of that building is Bayer’s too, as is the to create more enduring works. Marble Garden (1955), an arrangement of abandoned Not all of Bayer’s architectural contributions to white slabs from the quarry that supplied the stone Aspen survive. The restaurant at the top of the Silver for the Lincoln Memorial; the earth sculpture known Queen, the gondola that ascends to the summit of as the Grass Mound (Bayer was arguably the father Aspen Mountain, is gone. As, sadly, is his outlandish of land art); and the freestanding, primary-coloured transformation of the 19th-century Hotel Jerome, kinetic work Kaleidoscreen (1957). whose red-brick façade he whitewashed, picking out This year, organisations including the Aspen the arched lintels in a distinctive cerulean known Institute, Aspen Art Museum and Anderson Ranch locally as Bayer Blue. But the houses he designed Arts Center will celebrate Bayer’s legacy with on Lake Avenue and North Street are still there. a programme of events under the umbrella ‘bauhaus Visit the Aspen Institute, however, and Bayer’s 100: aspen’ (as a typographer, Bayer disdained legacy is everywhere: in the austere, utilitarian capital letters; the sans-serif Universal alphabet accommodation blocks of what is now the Aspen he designed in 1925 had no upper case). That he Meadows Resort and adjacent Health Center; wound up in Aspen may explain why he is less in the Aspen Center for Physics; the Walter celebrated than his teachers or contemporaries, Paepcke Memorial Building; the hexagonal Koch but he was no less of an innovator, as is evident Seminar Building and hexagonal tables within it, from his now sought-after surrealist photographs, the equilateral polygonal shapes removing any op-art tapestries, posters and paintings. ◆
suggestion of hierarchy, thus stimulating debate bauhaus100aspen.org Museum, Gift of Josef Albers. Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Harvard x 18cm. 14.3 printed Photolithographs inks on paper, in coloured postcards a set advertising of eight), Aspen 1947–49. (from Opposite, Herbert Bayer, Bayer Images.© Dan II/NationalPhoto: This page, Geographic/Getty Durrance photo: Dick 2019. College. Artworks: © DACS of Harvard and Fellows © President Photos:
[ 046 ] [ 047 ]