169 - Herbert Bayer

Herbert Bayer Bone and Fruit 1930 Oil on canvas. 31 x 24.2 cm. Framed in original artist's frame. Signed 'bayer' in white lower right. Dated, titled and inscribed on the stretcher ‘1930-12 Obst u. Knochenstück’, handwritten inscriptions "OIL" and "varnished with ACRITEX", as well as inscribed by another hand "B-I-2-C [?]" and "collection joella bayer". - In very good condition. Weak craquelure, minimal retouch lower left in the white area. Provenance Estate of the artist; Collection Joella Bayer; Martin Suppan Galerie, Vienna (directly from the artist's estate); Jill Wiltse & Kirk Brown Collection, USA (acquired there in the late 1990s) Exhibitions Probably Colorado Springs 1962 (Fine Arts Center), Paintings, Architecture, Graphics, no. 50 (label on stretcher, there titled "Bone&Fruit Piece"); Milano 1962 (Galleria del Levante), no. 66 (label verso on canvas) Literature Herbert Bayer, Visuelle Kommunikation Architektur Malerei. Das Werk des Künstlers in Europa und USA, Ravensburg 1967, p. 160 with ill. “I regard myself first and foremost as a painter, and painting consistently serves as the link between the various aspects of my creative work. If you are born to paint, then you simply have to paint [...] The background to my paintings from the 1930s is the realisation of the supernatural as a force present in our everyday lives: these paintings deal with inner experiences, the invisible and the subconscious” (Herbert Bayer, in: Visuelle Kommunikation, op. cit., p. 11). As one of the most significant figures of the Bauhaus, Herbert Bayer combined painting, typography, photography and graphic design into a comprehensive artistic concept. After completing his studies at the Bauhaus, he took over as head of the newly established Workshop for Printing and Advertising at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1925, before leaving the institution in 1928. In 1930, together with Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, he designed the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Paris. This painting was created in the same year and illustrates Bayer’s interest in the boundaries between visible reality and the inner world of experience. Against a brilliant blue sky and a deep blue, still ocean – clearly separated by a precise horizon line – an enigmatic, surreal-seeming scene unfolds. A large, ring-shaped bone floats freely in space; in the lower part of the picture, it is overlaid by half a pear, the interior of which reveals a blurred red heart shape in place of a core. In the upper half of the picture, a storm cloud drifts in front of the bone. The opposite rotation of the bone and the pear creates the impression of a floating movement, as if the organic forms, taking on the lightness and transience of the clouds, were gliding past one another, allowing concrete form and atmospheric effect to merge.