poster 'kandinsky 60th birthday'

Herbert Bayer designed the poster for the Kandinsky exhibition in Dessau in 1926. The combination of type with photography and red bars, the slightly tilted arrangement: typical graphic elements of the 1920s are skillfully staged here. The photo used is by portrait photographer Hugo Erfurth.

In 1925, Bayer began photographing. At the same time, he started incorporating photographs into graphic design. Initially, the photos were treated like a geometric shape – as in this poster or the "Catalog of Patterns" of the Bauhaus. Later, Bayer perfected this into a combination of typography, symbols (like dots or arrows), drawing, photography, and photomontage.

The poster was probably printed in 1926 on salmon-colored paper. An original copy owned by Herbert Bayer, now with heavily faded colors, is held in the Bauhaus Archive Berlin.
In 1968, on the occasion of the major Bauhaus exhibition, Herbert Bayer had a reprint of the poster produced. The type was reset, and it was printed on bright yellow paper.

Since the paper color of the original 1926 print can no longer be determined with certainty, we have supplemented the poster with the old typography and the yellow background of the 1968 reprint.