Born: Irene Angelica Hecht, October 28, 1898, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Died: 1991, Santa Monica, California, USA
Joined: 1924
Locations: Germany, France, Switzerland, Czech Republic, USA
One of the Bauhaus’s most iconic image-makers was a Bauhäusler despite herself, the nearly forgotten American photographer and designer Irene Bayer, born Hecht. She was already a trained artist before she arrived at the Bauhaus, an institution to which she—like so many women—was initially denied admission. The school’s leaders feared that too many female students would cause the Bauhaus to be perceived as unserious, and they rejected women’s applications at much higher rates than those of men. While Irene Bayer never formally joined the Bauhaus’s ranks, she exerted a tremendous influence on the work of one of its most talented students, the graphic design pioneer who would become her husband, Herbert Bayer. At the Dessau Bauhaus he would achieve the status of young master—a student who had risen through the ranks to become a teacher or “master”—and would go on to become a star of Berlin’s burgeoning advertising world. Devoting herself to this ultimately tragic relationship, Irene Bayer placed her artistic skills in the service of her husband’s work and his career always before her own. Her fate is typical of many Bauhaus women, and her biography yields insights to how even the most progressive of these women faced personal and professional challenges that thwarted their careers and denied them the fame of their male colleagues. An examination of her work, however, reveals the power of her innovative modern vision.
Irene Angelica Hecht, born October 28, 1898 in Chicago, grew up in a cosmopolitan Jewish family. Soon after her birth her father took a job in Hungary, where she spent most of her childhood. Upon graduating from high school, she enrolled in Berlin’s Academy of the Arts in Charlottenburg. It is often erroneously claimed that Irene Bayer visited the famed Staatliches Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar in the fall of 1923. Instead, documents reveal her first contact with the school already in the spring of that year, when she applied to begin the Bauhaus preliminary course (Vorkurs) in the 1923–1924 winter semester. Her application file, held in the governmental records in Weimar, is a tragic document. It mistakenly lists her as a Romanian citizen and presents her reception among the Bauhaus Masters’ Council as almost uniformly negative: only Josef Hartwig, the master of craft in the sculpture workshop, advocated a trial admission. Paul Klee and Walter Gropius were strictly opposed; the latter wrote of the young Miss Hecht that she “is weak, wants to work with enamel, not an option for us.” Likely a victim of the hidden agenda of the Masters’ Council to reduce the high number of female students, this verdict kept Hecht from entering the Bauhaus as a regular student.
Hecht’s first meeting with Herbert Bayer was during a June 1923 visit to her Hungarian friend and his fellow student Farkas Ferenc Molnár. Bayer soon left for a year in Italy, but Hecht’s passionate letters to him reveal that their summer encounter, although brief, was intense; in October 1923 she writes, “You I love – You – … die / love / kill / hate / love / love / Irene,” poetry that uncannily anticipates their future rocky relationship. Early in 1924 Hecht moved to Paris looking for work as a lithographer. She quickly immersed herself in the intellectual and avant-garde life of the city and later recalled attending lectures at the Sorbonne and the École des Beaux-Arts, meeting artists such as Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso. She earned her living, however, in a traditional women’s job of the time, sewing hats in a Parisian fashion house for a small salary of 600 francs per month. She returned to Weimar in December of the same year, full of desire for Herbert, and they married on November 11, 1925, with Irene’s brother Bondi and Bayer’s friend Xanti Schawinsky as their witnesses. As Irene’s letters in the Bayer estate at the Denver Art Museum reveal, the decision to marry was the result of a pregnancy; she would be expecting a further two times before the birth of their only child, their much-beloved daughter Julia, nicknamed “Muci,” in June 1929. By then, the couple was already estranged in a relationship that had long been under strain. The good-looking Herbert was notoriously attracted to other women, and Irene suffered from poor health but also from a lingering antagonism towards the Bauhaus and to many of Bayer’s friends. Her letters are evidence of her view of László Moholy-Nagy as Herbert’s fiercest enemy, and her dislike of Gropius, his wife Ise Gropius, and the inner circle at the school. While Irene Bayer-Hecht was very much a Bauhäusler through her years at the school and her contributions to her husband’s work—images often made in the service of representing the school—she counts as a Bauhäusler almost against her own will.
“[She] is weak, wants to work with enamel, not an option for us.”
Walter Gropius
Still, she adored her husband and his work, and she did her best to support his ambitions as a graphic designer. During the 1926–1927 academic year she attended evening classes in nearby Leipzig at the photomechanical workshop of the local academy of the arts, just as Lucia Moholy had done a year earlier; the Bauhaus itself still offered no formal training in photography. Although the Leipzig course was likely only a condensed introduction to basic photographic techniques, the impact was substantial, as Irene Bayer obtained the necessary training to provide made-to-order photographs for her husband’s illustrations. Herbert’s “ordered” motifs include the cover photograph for his famous 1926 Bauhaus brochure, with a view of the Prellerhaus balconies taken dramatically from below. Likely from the same series is a never-before-published, highly-structural photograph of the Bauhaus hallway and windows shot from the interior that Bayer sent to her husband along with a letter. This snapshot shows her avant-garde work in the style of the so-called “New Vision” which embraced photography as a means not to imitate painting or other old forms of representation, but rather to create truly new, machine-based views of the modern world. In another photograph from 1926—a portrait of her debonair-looking husband at the montage table preparing a brochure for the city of Dessau—she created an iconic depiction of a profession yet to come: the “art director” who selects and mounts his materials into an integrated lay-out. Herbert Bayer would use this as his official working portrait.
Cover of the 1926 Bauhaus brochure designed by Herbert Bayer with photography by Irene Bayer
Irene Bayer, Bauhaus building interiors, c. 1927
Portrait of Herbert Bayer while designing at the Dessau Bauhaus, 1926. Photograph by Irene Bayer
Documents from the time indicate that Irene Bayer’s artistic ambitions went well beyond photography. A letter to Herbert from September 1926 was accompanied by a large cross-section sketch of an ashtray for potential production in the Bauhaus workshops. Her 1:1 scale drawing shows a rounded base similar to designs by Marianne Brandt and others in the Bauhaus’s metal workshop, but hers was on a much larger scale and intended to stand alone and to collect larger quantities of ash—suitable for use in public buildings. In her letter, Bayer advises her husband to share it only with Dr. Haas, the Bauhaus’s corporate legal counsel, who was responsible for commercial business. “Do not under any circumstances show it to anyone from the metal workshop,” she insisted, highlighting once more her deep mistrust of the Bauhaus community. Although this drawing is singular in what survives of her oeuvre, it indicates that she was interested in product design as both a potential field of artistic expression and a career path independent from her husband who, by contrast, was never accomplished in any form of object design.
Largely unrecognized during her lifetime, after her death Irene Bayer would come to be seen as a major figure in avant-garde photography and a leader in the “New Vision.” Significantly, she contributed five photographs to the legendary spring 1929 Film and Photo exhibition—dubbed FiFo for short—that was organized by the German Werkbund and shown in Stuttgart. Among these were two portraits of Bayer, which indicate her close relationship to the Bauhaus, while the others, including her portrait of Bauhaus student Andor Weininger dressed as a clown and dramatically lit from below, illustrate her success in developing an individual approach to the language of modern photography. Other photographs from this period documented Bauhaus life, such as several spectacular views of the new Dessau Bauhaus building populated with Bauhäusler. Her dynamic shot of a bobbed-haired female student shot from below, scantily clad in modern swimwear and jewelry and frozen as she has just thrown a beach ball captures the exuberance of the times. Other motifs originated from a 1928 summer vacation on the Côte d’Azur that the Bayers took with Xanti, and Marcel Breuer after all had resigned from the Bauhaus along with their mentor Gropius, who had decided to leave the hostile atmosphere of Dessau in the spring of 1928.
Irene Bayer, design for a standing ashtray, 1926
Irene Bayer, portrait of Andor Weininger as a clown, c. 1926–1928
The Bayers moved to Berlin, happily, for her, away from the Bauhaus but still part of the Gropius circle whose members had headed for the vibrant national capital to open their new studios and offices. With the birth of their daughter in 1929, all of Irene Bayer’s artistic ambitions came to an end. Herbert now headed the creative department of the Berlin branch of the prestigious Dorland advertising agency and was no longer dependent on her photographs for his work, a factor that may have reinforced her feeling that she had lost his heart forever. A more difficult blow was the romantic affair that he began in 1930 with Ise Gropius, the wife of his mentor who had served as a father figure to him for almost a decade. During this turmoil, his wife tried to earn an independent living first in the Swiss resort of Ascona and later in the Czechoslovakia, where she gave beauty treatments to spa guests. But she was not able to make ends meet as a single mother, and their young daughter lived in Berlin with Herbert for almost a year, from June 1933. While he was not the ideal husband in many respects, Herbert always supported his wife and child financially and even paid the rent on Irene Bayer’s separate apartment. To offer a bit of family life for Julia, her father still came over for family dinners in the evening.
Irene Bayer, female student with beach ball, c. 1925
Indeed, while the Bayers lived apart, the break between them was never finalized, and ironically it would again be that Irene Bayer was the most decisive factor in her husband’s career in the late 1930s. Bayer, an Austrian citizen who was strictly apolitical, long hoped that the Nazi regime would prove a passing phase in Germany. Only in 1938 did he finally decide to immigrate to the United States of America, again following the trail of his Bauhaus colleagues. Gropius had organized a position for him at New York’s Museum of Modern Art to curate the Bauhaus 1919–1928 exhibition, and Moholy-Nagy had offered him a teaching post at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Yet it was the father of his American-born wife who signed the affidavit required for immigration to the USA. Further, Irene Bayer was the one who stayed in Germany to wrap up Herbert’s business at Dorland and safeguard his revenues from his copyrighted font designs. Navigating multiple layers of complex business negotiations and Nazi bureaucracy, she saved Herbert’s artwork, archive, and papers from destruction by the Nazis and arranged trans-Atlantic shipping for all of their belongings, which arrived safely in New York late in 1938. She did all of this at great personal risk; Irene and Muci were among the last people of Jewish descent permitted to safely leave Nazi Germany.
“In my long life I loved only two people with all of my heart, Herbert and Julia.”
Irene Bayer
Both life and history were not fair to Irene Bayer, but her most lasting legacy is as the silent collaborator of her widely-recognized husband. Indeed, it was she who secured his legacy by saving his Bauhaus works from destruction, a dedication to his work that she seems not to have had for her own, for her surviving oeuvre is clearly incomplete. Yet what remains is still a substantial body of work that has come to rest in the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, in the country in which she was born. After her return to the USA with Muci, they stayed in New York, first for several weeks in the apartment of Muci’s godfather, Xanti Schawinsky, and then in their own apartment in Queens. With her divorce from Herbert finalized in August of 1944, Irene largely disappeared from public life, though after the war she returned to Germany for two years and worked for the American military administration. Only the sudden death of daughter Muci on October 6, 1963—an event which devastated both her and Herbert and led to a long-lasting depression for Herbert—briefly united the couple a last time in their grief. In her last surviving letter to him, from 1975, she wrote: “My dear Herbert, just sending you a little love. If I were closer could help in the work you have.” Shortly before her death in 1991, she concluded in a letter to Bayer’s brother Theo, that “In my long life I loved only two people with all of my heart, Herbert and Julia.”