poster 'kandinsky 60th birthday'

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

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

The poster was probably printed on salmon-colored paper in 1926. An original copy from Herbert Bayer's collection, with now heavily faded colors, is located in the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin.
In 1968, on the occasion of the major Bauhaus exhibition, Herbert Bayer commissioned a reprint of the poster. The typeface was redesigned and printed on bright yellow paper.

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