Herbert Bayer, Notgeld, 1923. Hyper-inflation bank notes from Weimar Germany. Bayer attended t
Herbert Bayer, Notgeld, 1923. Hyper-inflation bank notes from Weimar Germany. Bayer attended the Weimar Bauhaus as a pupil from 1921 to 1923, at the time the economic crisis in post-WW1 Weimar was reaching its dramatic peak. He initially took Johannes Itten’s revolutionary Preliminary Course on colour and form, then moved on to study mural painting with Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Schlemmer. It was at this time that he created the Universal alphabet; the lower-case only typography now synonymous with the Bauhaus and its powerful legacy.In 1923 he was also commissioned by the Thuringian State in Weimar to design the new high value banknotes. The impoverished Weimer Republic government was desperately producing emergency money - in increasingly high single note denominations - in an attempt to combat acute hyper-inflation.Bayer returned to the Bauhaus in 1925 - now located at Dessau - as teacher, to lead a new course in advertising and typography. He remained a tutor there until 1928, the same year Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius departed. Source Room 606 -- source link
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