Image of Gallery in South Kensington
Request to view at the Prints & Drawings Study Room, level F , Case X, Shelf 905

Hands Act

Photograph
1932 (made), 1969 (made)
Artist/Maker
Place of origin

Herbert Bayer was one of the leading figures in the Bauhaus movement in Germany and throughout his career was a highly influential graphic designer and artist. Bayer produced some straight photographs, highlighting the abstract structures and sculptural qualities of things, but was never interested in the technical side of photography and so his exploration of straight photography was limited. He left the Bauhaus in 1928 and established himself as a leading designer. It was at this stage that he took and interest in photomontage. He was partly responsible for establishing photomontage as a key commercial visual style in the 1930s.


Object details

Categories
Object type
Titles
  • Hands Act (assigned by artist)
  • Handlung (assigned by artist)
Materials and techniques
Gelatin-silver print and photomontage
Brief description
Photograph by Herbert Bayer, 'Handlung', gelatin silver print, 1932
Physical description
Black and white photo-montage of gesturing hands juxtaposed with a map.
Dimensions
  • Height: 34cm
  • Width: 24.6cm
Styles
Gallery label
The meaning of this image is not clear but the shapes and shadows cast by the hands echo the mountain ranges on the map. Austrian-born Herbert Bayer, a Bauhaus typographer and graphic designer, helped established photomontage as a commercial style in the 1930s.(2007)
Credit line
Acquired from Marlborough Fine Art, London in 1969.
Historical context
Herbert Bayer was one of the leading figures in the Bauhaus movement in Germany and throughout his career was a highly influential graphic designer and artist. Bayer began to experiment with photography while he was teaching advertising, typography and layout at the Bauhaus school in Dessau. He produced some straight photographs, highlighting the abstract structures and sculptural qualities of things, but was never interested in the technical side of photography and so his exploration of straight photography was limited. He left the Bauhaus in 1928 and established himself as a leading designer. It was at this stage that he took and interest in photomontage. He used the technique for his own artistic work but also in advertising work, where he was partly responsible for establishing photomontage as a key commercial visual style in the 1930s. His main body of photographic work was produced in the late 1920s and the 1930s, after which he continued to develop other areas of visual design.
Production
Attribution note: ‘Montage…is the combination of diverse photographic images to produce a new work. The combination is often achieved by re-photographing the mounted elements or by multiple darkroom exposures. In the finished work the actual physical edges become inconspicuous. The artistic result often tends towards the surreal rather than the abstract.’

Gordon Baldwin, Looking at Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum, 1991
Subjects depicted
Summary
Herbert Bayer was one of the leading figures in the Bauhaus movement in Germany and throughout his career was a highly influential graphic designer and artist. Bayer produced some straight photographs, highlighting the abstract structures and sculptural qualities of things, but was never interested in the technical side of photography and so his exploration of straight photography was limited. He left the Bauhaus in 1928 and established himself as a leading designer. It was at this stage that he took and interest in photomontage. He was partly responsible for establishing photomontage as a key commercial visual style in the 1930s.
Collection
Accession number
CIRC.650-1969

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Record createdFebruary 23, 2004
Record URL
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