Irene Bayer

Irene Bayer , nee Hecht, (born October 28, 1898 in Chicago , † 1991 in Santa Monica , USA) was an American photographer.

Life

Irene Bayer grew up in a Jewish family. Shortly after she was born, her father took her to Hungary, where he started a job. After graduating from high school, she studied at the Academy of Arts in Berlin . It is often said that she first came into contact with the Bauhaus while visiting the Bauhaus exhibition in 1923 . Existing application documents show that she had applied to the Bauhaus in spring 1923 and was rejected. Walter Gropius considered them unsuitable because they wanted to work with enamel . It was probably rejected because the master craftsman's council wanted to keep the number of female students low. She met her future husband Herbert Bayer in the summer of 1923 during a visit to the Bauhaus. In 1924 Irene Bayer moved to Paris, where she attended lectures at the Sorbonne and the École des Beaux-Arts as a guest student . In Paris she soon belonged to the avant-garde and intellectual scene. She earned her living as a seamstress for a Paris fashion house.

In 1925 she took part in the preliminary course at the Bauhaus in Weimar without matriculating and married Herbert Bayer at the end of the year. In 1926, she and her husband followed the move of the Bauhaus from Weimar to Dessau and completed a photographic training at the Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Trade in Leipzig . At the Bauhaus, Irene Bayer took photos with which she supported her husband's graphic work and which were used in Bauhaus publications. Her recordings show her avant-garde way of working in the style of New Seeing .

In 1928 Irene Bayer and her husband left the Bauhaus and went to Berlin. Their daughter Julia was born in 1929 and died in 1963. When the child was born, the couple had already drifted apart, and Herbert Bayer had an extramarital relationship with Ise Gropius . The Bayer couple lived separately since the early 1930s. Irene Bayer actively supported the emigration of her husband to the USA in 1938, following a call from Walter Gropius, and followed him to New York in the same year . There she gave up professional photography and worked as a translator. In 1944 she divorced her husband and in 1945 went to Germany for two years to work for the American military administration in Munich . After that she lived in Santa Monica, California . She is buried on the Aspen Grove Cemetary in Aspen next to her daughter's grave and near the graves of Herbert Bayer and his second wife Joella.

literature

• Irene Bayer . In: Patrick Rössler , Elizabeth Otto : Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists. Knesebeck, Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 . Pp. 72-77.

Web links

• Irene Bayer. 1924–1928 photographer at bauhaus100.de
• Photos by Irene Bayer at the J. Paul Getty Museum