Related Products

• 

  Details

  Herbert Bayer, Self Portrait, Gelatin silver print , 1932, printed later

  HERBERT BAYER (1900-1985) Austria

  Self portrait   1932 (printed later)

  Silver gelatin print

  Edition: 28/40

  Signed: bayer 32 (in ink on bottom right corner)

  Provenance: Kennedy Gallery, New York

  H: 13 7/16” x W: 9 ½”

  Framed size: H: 21 ½” x W: 17 ½”

  Price: $16,000

  Herbert Bayer (1900 – 1985) was an Austrian graphic designer, painter, photographer, and architect. Bayer apprenticed under the artist Georg Schmidthammer in Linz. Leaving the workshop to study at the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony, he became interested in Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus manifesto. After Bayer had studied for four years at the Bauhaus under such teachers as Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy, Gropius appointed Bayer director of printing and advertising. In the spirit of reductive minimalism, Bayer developed a crisp visual style and adopted use of all-lowercase, sans serif typefaces for most Bauhaus publications. Bayer is one of several typographers of the period including Kurt Schwitters and Jan Tschichold who experimented with the creation of a simplified more phonetic-based alphabet. Bayer designed the 1925 geometric sans-serif typeface, universal, now issued in digital form as Architype Bayer that bears comparison with the stylistically related typeface Architype Schwitters.

   In 1928, Bayer left the Bauhaus to become art director of Vogue magazine’s Berlin office. He remained in Germany far later than most other progressives. In 1936 he designed a brochure for the Deutschland Ausstellung, an exhibition for tourists in Berlin during the 1936 Olympic Games. In 1938 he left Germany and settled in New York City where he had a long and distinguished career in nearly every aspect of the graphic arts. In 1946 Bayer relocated again. Hired by industrialist and visionary Walter Paepcke, Bayer moved to Aspen, Colorado as Paepcke promoted skiing as a popular sport. Bayer’s architectural work in the town included co-designing the Aspen Institute and restoring the Wheeler Opera House, but his production of promotional posters identified skiing with wit, excitement, and glamour. Bayer would remain associated with Aspen until the mid-1970s. Bayer gave the Denver Art Museum a collection of around 8,000 of his works. In 1959, he designed his “fonetik alfabet”, a phonetic alphabet, for English. It was sans-serif and without capital letters. He had special symbols for the endings -ed, -ory, -ing, and -ion, as well as the digraphs “ch”, “sh”, and “ng”. An underline indicated the doubling of a consonant in traditional orthography.

• 

  Details

  Keizo Kitajima, “New York” 1982

  KEIZO KITAJIMA (1954-) Tokyo, Japan

  “New York” 1982

  Inscribed by the photographer in Japanese.

  Published by Byakuya, Tokyo.

   

  Dimensions:

  Book: H: 12” x W: 8 5/8”

  Custom leather box: H: 13 5/8” x W: 9 3/4” x D: 1 7/8”

  Custom cloth case: H: 14 11/16” x W: 10 7/16” x D: 2 9/16”

  These days, the Japanese photographer Keizo Kitajima, born in 1954, lives in Tokyo and specializes in urban photography. But in 1981, he spent about six months in New York, hanging out in New Wave clubs or roaming the streets, taking pictures — often by simply pointing and shooting. More than three dozen of these gritty black-and-white images form his robust New York gallery debut. The lush blacks of Mr. Kitajima’s images, which were initially published in a book and only recently printed, bring to mind his friend and mentor Daido Moriyama. But Mr. Kitajima’s aesthetic, at least here, is all about round edges and people who are anything but average. Some are hard-working immigrants whose faces loomed close to Mr. Kitajima’s lens as they hurried along the street. Others are celebrities (Mick Jagger) or soon-to-be celebrities (the young Madonna, when her face still had pores), drag queens or denizens of the Mudd Club or CBGB’s. Some are simply people waiting for something to happen, like the rogues’ gallery of five men behind a police barrier on Fifth Avenue.