Poster No. 31 | Kandinsky 60th Birthday

Herbert Bayer designed the poster for the Kandinsky exhibition in Dessau in 1926. The combination of typography with photography and red calves, the slightly tilted arrangement: typical graphic elements of the 1920s are skillfully showcased here. The photo used is by the 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 geometric shapes—such as in this poster or the "Pattern Catalog" of the Bauhaus. Later, Bayer perfected this into a combination of typography, drawing (like dots or arrows), illustration, photography, and photomontage.
The poster was probably printed in 1926 on salmon-colored paper. An original copy from Herbert Bayer’s collection, now with heavily faded colors, is held at the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin.
In 1968, on the occasion of the major Bauhaus exhibition, Herbert Bayer had a reprint of the poster made. 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 combined the old typography with the yellow background of the 1968 reprint for the poster.

Standard format A1 [59.4 × 84.1 cm]