Across the Line

Most modern artists draw a sharp line between fine arts and commercial art, and would never think of crossing it. One modern artist who pays no attention to such arbitrary distinctions is Austrian-born Designer Herbert Bayer, 52. For 25 years he has successfully combined his job as art consultant for such companies as Container Corp. of America with a career as a painter of abstractions.

A product of Germany's famed Bauhaus in the '20s, Bayer got a practical artistic background as a wall painter, a designer of type, a consultant of industrial exhibits and a photographer. He feels each is an equally fruitful field for training the modern artist. Of painting walls at the Bauhaus, for example, Bayer says: "We had to rediscover the plain wall, plain color, the psychology of color, of color and space. Finally we progressed to murals."

When he left to become an advertising artist, Bayer took his Bauhaus ideas with him. He approached each poster as a modern painting, tried to evoke certain broad sensations instead of presenting explicit information. "It isn't necessary," he argues, "to tell people how boxes are made. Advertising is just to remind them that there is an industry making boxes." In Berlin, Bayer used surrealistic drawings and photomontages to tell people about cigarettes, magazines, furniture, medicine, art exhibits, museums, the Olympic games. By the time he left Germany for the U.S. in 1938, Bayer's strikingly designed pictures had won him a reputation as one of Europe's topnotch modern artists and most original advertising men.

Bayer has done just as well in the U.S. At Container Corp., he set out to make its ads "more visual, simpler, more pictorial," for 14 years has turned out some of the best to appear in U.S. magazines. Among the most famous: an uncluttered drawing of a flimsy house of cards in one corner, joined by radiating lines to a strong cardboard carton in the other, with the caption "Weakness into Strength."

Today, living in Aspen, Colo., Bayer still keeps a close check on Container ads, but he is turning more & more to his own painting. Last week 36 of his pictures were on display in a Manhattan gallery, and it was clear that Bayer was still aiming at simple, visual sensations. Painting the Rockies, he turns the sharp-toothed peaks into abstract designs, suggests wooded slopes, clear lakes, jagged rocks with cool lines of grey, green and blue. Like his advertising posters, each picture tries to get across a broad story. One of his favorites is Old Scars, a marbled, grey abstraction of a weathered mountainside crumbling in ruin after an age of wind and rain. Says Bayer: "It's like the face of an old man."

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