Printed at the Kelpra Studio, London. Tate P04031.

Herbert Bayer was an American artist of Austrian birth. From 1921 to 1923 he attended the Bauhaus in Weimar, studying mural painting (with Kandinsky) and typography; it was at this time that he created the Universal alphabet, consisting only of lower-case letters. In 1925 he returned to the Bauhaus, then to Dessau, as a teacher of advertising, layout and typography. In 1938, Bayer emigrated to the USA. Until 1945 he worked in New York as a commercial artist, exhibition designer, painter, sculptor and maker of environments. His first one-man show in the USA took place at Black Mountain College, NC, in 1939. He was represented in a number of important exhibitions at MOMA, New York, including “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” (1936), “Bauhaus: 1919-28” (1938) and “Art and Advertising Art” (1943). In his constant belief in the need to integrate all aspects of artistic creativity into the modern industrial world, Bayer was a true spokesman for the Bauhaus ethos, as well as its last surviving master. (See Monica Bohm-Duchen, Grove Dictionary of Art.)