Detail

You would probably expect a picture of a house to look very different. Where are the windows and doors, where is the façade, and where is the floor plan? What we see are crystalline shapes in subdued colors, long strips lying closely adjacent to one another like layers of stone. In the upper third of the painting a line is formed by a series of small bright rectangles, looking like sediments of paint that have separated out and are now tightly enclosed by the strips. The title of the painting reinforces the impression of layers of stone, as it concerns the house of a geometrician—a surveyor of land working with his compass and ruler to measure the three-dimensional world. Like surveyors, Austrian painter Herbert Bayer attempted in his paintings to find a new form for what he could see. When he painted this work in 1957 Bayer had already been living for more than ten years in a remote town in the Rocky Mountains. Aspen/Colorado is enclosed by mountains, and Bayer was confronted with formations of cliff and stone every day. He was also inspired by meteorological representations and scientific illustrations. He took the ideas for his art from many different areas. He worked as a painter, graphic artist, and exhibition designer, and he experimented with photography. In 1938 he had to leave Germany and emigrated to the U.S.A. He continued the teaching he had begun at the Bauhaus, working at numerous institutions including the Black Mountain College. He was a successful advertising artist and he set new standards in layout and font design that have shaped the graphic design of our environment to today. Herbert Bayer wrote: “I see myself primarily as a painter, and painting also often creates the connections between the different fields in which I work.”