Eggheads meet cowboys in this story about Herbert Bayer’s journey from Austria to Aspen. Indelibly shaped by World War I and his studies at the German Bauhaus design school, circumstances chronicle Bayer’s hasty exit in 1938 to escape Adolf Hitler and settle in idyllic 1946 Aspen as Walter Paepcke’s go-to designer in the reinventing of the town.
Taking in the volume of multimedia work by Herbert Bayer (April 5, 1900-Sept. 30, 1985) in the world of graphic design, art, sculpture, photography, typography, architecture, earthworks and even philosophy is like trying to read too many novels at the same time. Although he occupies a niche in the pantheon of polymaths, wherein Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo are pillars, Bayer restyled the 20th century art/graphic world with the breadth of his creative genius and his infographic distillations of information into visual simplicity.
As a standout alumnus of the Bauhaus art, craft and design school where he studied and then taught between 1921 and 1928 in Germany, Bayer’s international popularization of the modernist style of the bare-bones Bauhaus brand became synonymous with his name. While living in Aspen between 1946 and 1975, he was the carte blanche designer of modern town shaper Walter Paepcke during the transition from mining and ranching to skiing, but few realize how Bayer’s pivotal contributions to midcourse Aspen shaped what town is today.
From litter and billboard blight to zoning, from yard-fence shapes to chromatically painted Victorians, from refurbishing the Hotel Jerome and Wheeler Opera House to modernizing birdhouses and creating the iconic Aspen leaf logo, much of Aspen still reflects his inspiration. But his crowning achievement was the synthesis of all his art forms into the comprehensive design of the Aspen Institute campus, based upon the German concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, meaning a “total work of art,” or a total aesthetic. In this way, Bayer’s design of the campus merged the small to the large without interrupting the horizon.
While the Chicago businessman Paepcke’s post-World War II neo-Greek ideal of developing body, mind and spirit in a backwater mountain community launched Aspen on an inadvertent course to the immoderate extreme that it is today, the hubris of his followers in the 1950s collided with the status quo of the original settlers who had already shaped a place to their liking since the mining days of the 1880s and 1890s. Denver newspaper wags followed the mutation of their cousin over the hill and dubbed the rub “town versus gown.”
Bayer’s diverse portfolio of modern, ruminating paintings still populates prestigious international galleries and exhibitions. His sculptures still punctuate cityscapes and his elegant 1966 U.S. Postal Service stamp depicting the Mississippi River basin is a collectible. Yet, one need not search further than the new Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies at the Aspen Institute and the Herbert Bayer Collection at the Denver Art Museum for a detailed glimpse of his enormity. In a continuing series of exhibitions at the Center for Bayer Studies different periods of his career are highlighted, including the most recent exhibition featuring his 1953 “World Geo-Graphic Atlas: A Composite of Man’s Environment,” which alchemized reductive clarity into cartographic presentation.
In a Feb. 4, 2020, Smithsonian Magazine story, “Pioneering work of Herbert Bayer,” Wendy Noonan recounted how in 1939 Bayer pondered his pursuit, asking, “Why is it difficult to be simple?” Chasing this lifelong leitmotif, he refined utility and visual spareness in his structures, while trying to find time for his true passion as an interpretive painter, which he called “the continuous link connecting all the facets of my work.”
During his Aspen residency, he kept a rigid daily schedule of work from 9 a.m. into the evening in his studio, wearing a pressed white shirt and ascot, said local painter Dick Carter, who apprenticed with him in the early 1970s. Throughout his Aspen years, Bayer completed more big projects than seem humanly possible, yet he also found time for whimsey.
Flight of fancy
Rewinding to his halcyon days at his first Aspen residence, a May 10, 1951, Aspen Times story on birdhouses designed by Bayer underscored the Bauhaus theme of art and function in the garden at his and his wife Joella’s Victorian on West Francis — formerly 1890s Colorado Gov. Davis Waite’s home. But what showcased Bayer’s genius is how he dovetailed motion into art by mounting the avian housing atop tall half-inch plumbing pipe, so their nests would sway treelike in the breeze.
Using the basic geometrics of circle, triangle and cube, painted with his preferred crisp primary colors, Bayer said the birdhouses would add color to the stark, early-spring gardens of Aspen, where flowers bloom late at altitude. One of the designs was a wasp-nest-looking abode made of paper mâché shell built around an inflated beach ball, which he removed from the inside. He then sealed and painted the roundhouse white and decorated it with abstract plant forms, adding a red perch. His secretary, Kathryn Puterbough, commented, “It’s the roomiest birdhouse I’ve ever been in,” the Aspen Times wrote.
Nearby, he built a wooden bow-tie duplex of two triangle birdhouses with painted aspen leaves and matching pink entryways. Another — a cube-shaped birdhouse colored blue, white, red and yellow — adjoined the backyard subdivision, which together illustrated an essential Bauhaus refrain: Form follows function.
Teutonic foundations
Born in 1900 in Austria, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bayer innovated beyond the previous century’s art and design — from the exactitude of realism to the new light and movement of impressionism — in his style of 20th century modernism.
As a boy, he liked to sketch alpine scenes while following his father, a tax collector, into the mountain villages. This led to his joining the Wandervögel (meaning wandering bird), a quasi-uniformed idealist German youth movement of students who hiked and camped in the mountains, eschewing urban life and advocating a return to simple folkways. While attending school, geometry was a favorite subject. These pursuits planted the seeds of preference for simplicity and geometric shapes in his later Bauhaus studies.
After apprenticing with different architects and hoping to enroll in the The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the death of his father in 1917 led to his enlistment in Austria’s 14th Infantry Regiment near the end of World War I. He served in the Medical Service, where lice, dysentery, bombardment, gas attacks and unimaginable carnage confronted medical attendants and the heroic stretcher bearers who fetched the wounded from the battlefield back to blood-soaked trench infirmaries. The trauma that the young Bayer experienced probably contributed to his search for order in design, along with trying to reduce the inexplicable into palpable form — what veterans of combat have always faced.
While attending the Bauhaus school, founded by visionary architect Walter Gropius, who premised equality of trade-craft skills alongside visual arts, whatever genre Bayer applied himself to generated his natural mastery. At the same time, he was inspired by modernist painter and theorist Wassily Kandinsky, who advocated that art should serve society. Bauhausians further preached that craft and art should improve people’s living conditions through modern design. As Bayer’s innate talents ripened, Gropius soon elevated him to teaching master — but not without incident.
In 1925, Bayer married American-born Irene Angela Hecht, a photographer documenting the Bauhaus. They had a daughter, Julia, in 1929, but separated in 1932 because of his infidelities. Yet, they didn’t divorce until 1944. According to a July 7, 2014, New York Times story by design critic Alice Rawsthorn, “Exhibition Traces Bauhaus Luminary’s Struggle With His Past,” Bayer was “an inveterate womanizer, who had had a string of affairs, including one with Isa Gropius, which had imperiled, but not ended, his friendship with her husband Walter.”
Gropius bore war baggage as well; he had seen 80 of 300 men in his cavalry unit killed in one hour of battle and “late in the war had been buried alive for three days,” the Times said. Yet, after those horrors and with the hopeful democratic socialism of the Weimar Republic following Imperial Germany’s defeat, a new idealism of starting from scratch trended among European youth — dubbed the “lost generation”— who came of age in the rubble of destruction.
A postwar meme then was “Starting from zero,” meaning that from the ruins something new rises. Pursuing this theme, the varied students who gathered around Gropius in 1919 when he started the new Bauhaus in the city of Weimar aimed to strip the bark off existing “bourgeois design” and create form without applied decoration. Into this setting, Bayer enrolled in 1921.
In 1923, at the age of 23, he designed new banknotes in denominations of millions of Papiermarks, or “Marks,” for the struggling Weimar Republic, Germany’s first attempt at democracy, then battling hyperinflation brought on by war debt needing to be paid in asset-backed currencies. Concurrently, persuasive nationalist and fascist opposition agitated that the war loss and 1919 Versailles surrender was a conspiratorial lie.
Bayer fashioned block-numbered notes in Bauhaus font devoid of any traditional heraldry and portraits, which became immediately valueless as the mark rocketed to 4 trillion marks per U.S. $1 in late 1923. (It was 4 marks per $1 in 1914). People burned wheelbarrows of bank-note blocks to keep warm because it was cheaper than buying wood. That same year, Hitler led a failed government coup and was jailed for treason, writing “Mein Kampf” while incarcerated. Getting out early, he demagogued his pro-strongman followers until succeeding in taking power in 1933. That same year, his Nazi party condemned modernism and shut down the Bauhaus school, which had migrated from rising oppression in Weimar to Dessau in 1925, and then from Dessau to Berlin in 1932.
Critique and propaganda
In his 1981 book, “From Bauhaus to Our House,” irreverent cultural writer and diction acrobat Tom Wolfe contrasted “coziness and color” versus the “leanness, cleanness, bareness and spareness” of modern architecture. So much subtraction made a home look like “an insecticide refinery,” he said. Blaming Bauhaus for spawning such austerity, he described the creative scene there in the 1920s as “a commune, a spiritual movement, a radical approach to art in all its forms, a philosophical center comparable to the Garden of Epicurus,” with Gropius as Epicurus.
Applicable to Wolfe’s deconstruction of Bauhaus rigidity is a term he coined at the annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities in 2006: “fiction-absolute,” wherein “an individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world — ordained by some almighty force — would make not that individual but his group … the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles.” A bit of this air of rediscovering original essence freighted the Bauhaus, Wolfe posited. As a concept, fiction-absolute can still help us see through ideologies and discern knowing from believing.
An April 22, 2019, New Yorker article by Dan Chiasson on the Bauhaus scene, “The Man Who Built the Bauhaus,” reported that Gropius’ first wife, Alma, a vivacious Viennese woman, was “repelled by the high-minded diet of ‘a mush of fresh vegetables,’” and saw the Bauhaus as not “refined by clean lines and materials, but by ‘garlic on the breath,’ coming out of ornate and overdone 19th century architecture.”
That said, Bayer honed his skills there, boldly designing the “universal alphabet” font. His new lowercase lettering threw overboard the ornate German Fraktur type — resembling monk-scribed, medieval papal bulls — and eliminated decorative flicks (called serifs) from the letters, thus siring the many serif-free fonts abundant today.
Suggesting that no one speaks in uppercase letters, his original geometric font could be drawn with a ruler and compass. Yet, this unadorned typeface sometimes appeared in all uppercase, when both became the official Bauhaus font on Bayer’s pictographic posters, brochures, prints, magazine covers and advertising illustrations. He refined this further in the 1930s using suggestive, visual messages, while minimizing or eliminating explanatory narrative.
Well before 21st century technology frog-walked us into the future and delivered messaging rat-a-tat onto every screen in every hand, Bayer’s succinctness was considered a leap forward in rapid communications. Back then, eye-grabbing pamphlets passed out on street corners, graphic-messaging poster art wheatpasted to city walls, hard newsprint and word-of-mouth spread promotional messages more slowly. After the Bauhaus, during his Berlin years between 1928 and 1938, he excelled at such infographics, while surrounded by the promiscuous cabaret scene that nettled the growing fascist sentiment, as Jewish musicians packed up their instruments and people greeted one another in the streets with Nazi salutes.
Though never a known Nazi sympathizer, his neo-bulletin skills still occupy a chapter in Bayer’s life that remain clouded by his Third Reich propaganda work. With a Jewish wife, relatives and friends, one view deduces that he protected himself and his family by taking the uncredited contract work from a third party to make a living and not attract controversy. Another interpretation asks why he chose to be apolitical and not take a stand against the inherent evil of genocide and Aryan eugenics and leave Germany earlier as Gropius and others did.
In any case, Bayer produced affecting graphic designs for Nazi Germany before World War II, including “German People, German Work” (1934), “The Miracle of Life” (1935) and “Germany” for the 1936 Berlin Olympics,” Timothy Brown summarized in an Aug. 1, 2019, Aspen Times Weekly story, “Contending with Herbert Bayer’s contributions to Nazi propaganda.”
Another 1936 brochure cited by Rawsthorn in the 2014 New York Times piece, titled “German Youth in a Changing World,” epitomized Nazi propaganda. The cover featured “a handsome blond-haired boy wearing a Hitler Youth uniform, smiling confidently as he gazed into the distance, one hand gripping a German swastika flag. … This paean to the Hitler Youth movement was designed by Herbert Bayer.”
Brown also reported that renowned Bayer expert and biographer Patrick Rössler, after examining Bayer’s personal papers and diaries, found “nothing that could be interpreted as an endorsement of Nazi racial or eugenic policies.”
While Bayer’s visually haunting agitprop for the Third Reich circulated unattributed to him, he and other modernist painters were condemned as a cosmopolitan pollution of German culture and scapegoated in 1937 to the Nazi’s “Degenerative Art Exhibition” in Berlin. Selected works, including Bayer’s, were purged from the museums along with several thousand “degenerative” paintings, then either destroyed or sold to feed the growing German war machine.
Suddenly spotlighted and out of favor, Bayer left Germany in 1938 for New York, where Gropius had been commissioned to do a Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and had asked Bayer to help. In whatever mutability of their separated arrangement, Irene stayed behind and gathered his portfolio for the show before joining him in New York with their daughter.
U.S. welcome mat
At the same time, numerous European painters — cubists and surrealists — and even Freudian psychoanalysts were immigrating to the U.S., as Hitler radicalized Germany, annexed Austria in 1938 and marched into Poland in 1939, triggering World War II. Along with Bayer, Gropius and a smattering of Bauhaus architects were among this welcome influx of European cultural elites who would influence modern U.S. art and architecture. Much of the sleek steel and glass architecture of skyscrapers in U.S. cities today can be traced to the Bauhaus brand.
Gropius was so esteemed that he became head of Harvard University’s School of Architecture between 1938 and 1952. Meanwhile, Bayer’s artwork was exhibited in major galleries and his minimalist ad-style for the Wanamaker department store and J. Walter Thompson advertising agency attracted Paepcke, who convinced him to move to Aspen in 1946 by offering dual positions as designer for the new Aspen Ski Corp. and art consultant for Paepcke’s Container Corp. of America.
One of Bayer’s initial chores for Paepcke was to design the first Sundeck on top of Aspen Mountain in 1946. He fashioned an octagonal building with 360-degree views around a circular fireplace in the center that could warm wet-wooled skiers without blocking anyone’s view. Without a water source then, he designed a funnel-shaped roof to melt the fallen snow from the fire warmth into a water tank. But leaks developed and the wind blew the snow off the roof; so, they hauled water up the Midnight Mine Road in a tank behind a dozer that first year. After a stellar opening day on Jan. 11, 1947, featuring brand-new Lifts 1 and 2 and 20 inches of new snow, they replaced the roof that summer.
In 1956, Bayer redesigned the Sundeck with another circular lower-level area built around the original, adding an apartment and expanded food facilities. Wind-breaker windows were added to the outside deck. With upgrades in subsequent years, the original octagon lost its stand-alone distinction. The current Sundeck replaced the old structure in 2003.
Bayer also redesigned the lift shacks and ski patrol headquarters on top of the mountain — the latter built in the early 1950s next to the top terminal of the former Lift 2. He chose white and brown with red trim, with new siding for the buildings and blue lift towers with red chairs. Since the old ski patrol building on top represents the last of the Bayer design on Aspen Mountain, some say it deserves to remain.
Aspen facelift
When Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke arrived in the mid-1940s, mining pioneers, ranchers and second-generation Aspenites were carrying on in a small, self-sufficient town with local businesses, resident tradesmen and a sufficient workforce. As they set out to remodel Aspen, the Paepckes believed that a utopia of Americana and the intelligentsia could coexist. But hayseed status quo took a back seat to the allure of prosperity, causing some local resentment, as Aspen became an international ski resort coupled with a world-renowned think tank.
With money from his Container Corp. of America, Paepcke founded the Aspen Ski Corp., the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, the Aspen Music Festival and the International Design Conference (IDCA) — a cross-fertilization design swap headed by Bayer in 1951 that lasted until 2004. In 1949, to kick off the new era, Paepcke and his wingman Bayer conceived a festival celebrating the German philosopher-poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1842).
Goethe, a polymath and German literary giant, was known for the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) German literary movement that valued emotion and individualism in novels, while he explored how to reckon the whole with the parts, individual and community, into a working whole. Although a highfalutin dissection to bedrock Aspenites at the time, there’s irony in how that unresolved theme is still playing out in Aspen today.
Nevertheless, the Goethe committee recruited physician and theologian Albert Schweitzer to anchor the three-week festival of noted intellectuals, and even enlisted Herbert Hoover as the honorary chairman (he didn’t attend). Accounts say that Schweitzer was a difficult houseguest at Paepckes’ home because Schweitzer played the piano at all hours, and that renowned “Our Town” author Thornton Wilder held witty court in the Jerome bar from 5 to 7 p.m. daily.
With the Wheeler Opera House still boarded up from a 1912 arsonist fire, the Goethe organizers put up a used circus tent over a new cement-bowl amphitheater designed by Eero Saarinen — whose credits also include the Gateway Arch in St. Louis — to centralize the venue on the 120-acre Aspen Meadows property Paepcke had purchased, which included the town’s horse-racing track and rodeo grounds.
Time and Life magazines covered the three-week fest, which featured a Bayer roundtable on Goethe and art and wrapped up with a talk on “Goethe and world unity.” The Minneapolis Symphony and pianist Arthur Rubenstein played, along with Black opera singer Dorothy Maynor. About 2,000 attendees arrived from every state except Alabama and Mississippi, according to the Colorado Encyclopedia. That one-time gala blossomed into the Aspen Institute and annual Music Festival.
The Aspen Company
Meanwhile, Bayer had his hands full refurbishing Paepcke’s multiple Aspen real estate acquisitions, much bought on the stealth to avoid local alarm. Herbert and Joella recounted those early days in a transcribed 1980 interview by Erica Gruen, archived at the Aspen Historical Society.
Therein, Bayer intimated what many original locals resented about the Paepcke influx, by characterizing old Aspen with a lingering tint of patronage. “There was a community, but it was sort of a dead community. Only the old leftover miners and their families, only 650 people. … We developed skiing first because it was nearest at hand, and then developed the Aspen Company, who took up building accommodations.”
With Paepcke securing a lease on the tattered Hotel Jerome in January 1946, he charged Bayer with the remodel, while their Aspen Company bought eighteen Bayer-chosen houses downtown for refurbishing, Bayer recounted. As Aspen’s first short-term rentals, the Jerome managed these houses to accommodate skiers and visitors. Bayer simplified the interiors and experimented with his brand of bright, chromatic-colored paint jobs. This led to controversy that touched local nerves further. In a bid to clean up the ramshackle town where people abandoned cars in empty lots and dumped their garbage, tin cans and coal ash in the alleys, the company promoted clean-up tasks that felt too many like when your mother tells you it’s time to tidy up your closet, right now.
The first stratagem — perhaps a bit tone-deaf — was to offer free house paint through a contest titled “Paint Up and Clean Up” to owners of unkempt homes — but only in approved colors off the Bayer palette, the May 23, 1946, Aspen Times Weekly explained. In probably Bayer-drawn ads of workmen in “painter’s whites,” looking more Norman Rockwell than Bayer, the Aspen Company offered prizes of $50, $40 and $30 for first, second and third prizes, respectively, with $10 prizes for most improved properties without new paint. The company even paid folks just to inspect the paint colors at Tompkins Hardware — with “Bayer blue” becoming his signature Aspen color.
Local saddle-sore anecdotist and Aspen Times columnist Tony Vagneur recalls his grandmother and her two sisters and brother (all born in 1880s Aspen), who lived in a large Victorian on Bleeker Street in the late 1940s, as not thinking much of the new highbrow folks taking over town. His great-uncle Tom declared in the kitchen loudly” “That goddamn Paepcke is going to ruin this town!” And his great-aunt Julia, who bossed the household, swore she would never paint the house, especially with Bayer paint.
But upscaling gained appeal as the ski and summer business pumped the economy and real estate sizzled. The May 10, 1951, Aspen Times emphasized Bayer’s pitch to landscape and clean up junk and road debris abandoned at the onetime old firehouse bell tower lot on Mill and Durant. Volunteers helped spiff up Wagner Park and spread landscape topsoil. And, the paper asked, “who dumped cans on the Aspen Institute Road to the Four Seasons Club?”
By July 1951, Bayer had completed the restoration of the Wheeler Opera House for a grand reopening, replacing the somber dark-velveted interior with “gilt and maroon décor and red highlighted with gold, white and green,” said the Times. At the same time, Paepcke’s summer events found traction with concerts under the tent and evening guest lectures on “Our American Heritage” at the retooled opera house.
Bronc versus baroque
As the Aspen upgrade progressed, tensions bulldogged the Aspen Institute’s weekend events and Sunday afternoon concerts when the Aspen Saddle and Bridle Club scheduled rodeos at what was the town’s traditional rodeo grounds — today’s big undeveloped meadow just south of the music tent. Although Paepcke had purchased that property along with his Aspen Meadows property, an agreement still allowed events there, but it all came to head in the summer of 1953.
With most of old Aspen in attendance, the cheering and public-address system of the rodeo ballyhoo overrode the harmonics inside the nearby music tent. By some accounts, “Walter had fits about it” — especially because the rodeo receipts outdrew the concert revenue during a time when the institute was struggling to get started. Both parties met at the Golden Horn to iron out the scheduling for the “Silver Stampede” weekend, the Aug. 6, 1953, Aspen Times reported.
Paepcke spoke to 40 citizens there, saying that having the two events at the same time “was unwise, splitting the crowd and consequently the box office receipts. Aspen would have to decide what was most important and stick to it 100%.” By Vagneur’s account, Paepcke even threatened to shut down the institute if the town didn’t help support his new branding. Without bucking tradition, the rodeo organizers compromised, rescheduling the rodeo and fireworks under floodlights on Saturday night and the finals after the concert Sunday afternoon.
This was when the Denver newspapers coined “music versus manure” in the mountains. But the unlikely arbitrator was Bayer, who, according to Henry Stein’s book “Frontiers Past,” told Paepcke, “Valter, you have your Institute for Humanistic Studies. You preach and admire the humanities. Valter, you now practice them.”
Adding to Paepcke’s vexation, the town quickly raised $12,000 to lease property from Art Pfister just west of the Castle Creek bridge to build a new rodeo ground and stands. Trucking in wild broncs from Meeker for the rodeos, The Silver Stampede took place every summer through the early 1960s, with a parade down Main Street. Numerous local horse riders wearing their best Western duds, along with the mounted Sheriff’s Department carrying flags and rifles, tittupped past judges atop the Hotel Jerome overlook. Competitive floats followed. This was a time when real cowpokes still lived in town.
A tale of change
Once the international spotlight shined on Aspen with the 1950 FIS races on Aspen Mountain, for which Bayer designed the timeless racing-skier poster, the sympatico of the working community and the wealthy influx Bayer anticipated would last a few more decades. But roll forward, as Aspen space became more valuable, and like slow-boiling frogs, those citizens whom he admired as the backbone of the community started feeling the heat in the 1980s and began exiting to alternative locales. This was the beginning of the end of the era when everybody lived in town.
In a 1980 interview archived at the Aspen Historical Society, Bayer recalled how his original vision of an Aspen community that had its own livelihoods, “grocers, carpenters, and plumbers eking out a living,” coexisted with the Aspen Institute programs and incoming wealth. In what might be viewed now as elite, woke engineering, he reflected, “We wanted writers and artists, professors to vacation here. And bring quality into the population. We did not cater to the movie stars … except the good kind, like Gary Cooper.”
Bayer recounted how the original music-tent ropes sometimes busted loose when the wind kicked up, luffing the canvas and scaring people. By 1965, he — with advice from his brother-in-law Fritz Benedict — redesigned a new music tent and added other institute buildings, marble sculptures and earth mounds with contemplative grounds to surround the original seminar building. Built in 1953, and now called the Koch building, an exterior, topo-looking sgraffito mural by Bayer on the southwest wall of that original seminar building juxtaposes the contours of Red Mountain behind it.
Some visitors and newer Aspenites see outdatedness in the austerity of the campus buildings in comparison to the ultra-luxury resorts they expect. Most, however, appreciate the posterity of the Bauhaus-inspired architecture and grounds and Bayer’s timeless design of the understated in a contemplative setting.
With Aspen becoming an international attraction, Gene Cervi in his Mile High column in the July 2, 1958, Cervi’s Rocky Mountain Journal, took stock. He credited Bayer and described him as “a shy, retiring, gentle and gifted designer,” while Aspen had become the place where “tycoons discovered the kingdom of eggheads.”
Quintessential local
Bayer was a mountaineer and one of only a handful of locals then who climbed the nearby fourteeners. In 1949, he was custodian of the early Tagert hut up Montezuma Basin. As a diehard skier and volunteer gate keeper for the 1950 FIS and other races, he was a stylish Aspen Mountain regular who hung with the Paepcke ski gang and Gary Cooper. Bayer was an elk hunter with his own meat locker at Beck and Bishop’s Grocery, yet he campaigned against too many smoke-belching “Tote Goats” around Aspen— a noisy, two-wheeled forerunner of ATVs for transporting game.
In 1960, when Aspen had a “motel inspector” and only one police car, he promoted a rule while head of the planning and zoning board to plant a tree for every one taken down in town. He served on the library board, and moved the cramped library from the Wheeler Opera House into a new, modest-profile brick building designed by Fritz Benedict on Main Street, opposite Paepcke Park. The building cost $155,000 to build, the Jan. 8, 1965, Aspen Times said, and averted plans to place a Mennonite mission there on Main Street.
While lamenting the loss of old buildings and historical memorabilia about town, Bayer wrote a letter to the Times in the early 1960s suggesting a local historical society, Mary Eshbaugh Hayes noted in a June 23, 1983, Aspen Times article. He offered to store Aspen artifacts and photos in the new library basement. Soon, others came to the cause and formed a historical board. Ultimately, his initiative planted a seed that, decades later, resulted in Aspen voters’ approval of a fractional levy of property taxes in 2006 to stabilize support for the current Aspen Historical Society on West Bleeker.
He helped wean local businesses from flashing neon signs by encouraging smaller locally designed signs in front of businesses. For these numerous contributions, he received little recognition, other than mention in around-town notes in the Aspen Times. Yet, the crusade to clean up billboards between Glenwood Springs and Aspen along Highway 82 merited historical accounting in the March 2, 1958, New York Times, in an article titled “Aspen’s Billboard Miracle,” which acknowledged Bayer.
Although Dr. Robert “Bugsy” Barnard (mayor from 1966 to 1970) is celebrated for chainsawing Highway 82 billboards in the mid-1960s, Bayer was an early vocal advocate of not obstructing the mountain views along the highway. During that time, when master planning was a hot potato, the two sides were clearly divided: old-school no restrictions versus Bayer’s thematic preservation of Victorian and low-profile-chalet style, and aversion to horizon-blocking building heights. These days, it’s fair to surmise, he would be shocked to see how the town’s architectural hodgepodge has become a collection of random monuments as thematically lacking as Miley Cyrus’ many tattoos.
In 1955, a proposal by business promoters was afoot to build an 18-foot-tall cowboy on skis at the entrance to Aspen, The New York Times said. This rallied the anti-sign group in Aspen, an ally of Bayer’s quest to get rid of the “51 assorted billboards on State 82, extolling beer, gas stations, restaurants, motels and bars” in town. As “Paepcke’s top-flight painter and designer,” charged with giving “artistic unity to the town,” Bayer and the new coalition tried to steer away from “the road to a honkytonk economy,” the New York Times said.
An education in zoning
In his 1980 interview, Bayer said, “I worked 10 years on planning and zoning and got nowhere.” During that stretch, he was head of planning and zoning for both city and county between 1958 and 1962, but he resigned in 1963 because “everyone talked about setting standards and seldom did anything about it.” As a genteel gadfly working on many committees, he raised billboard awareness along Highway 82, and even spearheaded placing “No littering in Pitkin County” signs at Pitkin County access points on the top of Independence Pass, the Redstone Road and Frying Pan Road.
The anti-big-sign coalition — which in addition to Bayer included Fred Gliddon (who was also known as writer Luke Short), architect Fritz Benedict, ranch owner Henry Stein, and architect and bagpiper Sam Caudill — brought in Traften Bean, a former B-29-over-Tokyo pilot with an Massachusetts Institute of Technology degree in city planning to jawbone the officials about zoning, the New York Times said.
Bayer complained in his interview about how “Every city council started a different zoning law. A different plan, ideas … In the beginning it was simply ignorance. The mayor [A.O. “Gene” Robison, from 1943-1960] had never heard of zoning. He had never been farther than Denver. Only when someone built a restaurant across the street from him, there was noise, and he understood what zoning was.”
During that period, Bayer also brought in architects Victor Gruen and Gropius to pitch architectural planning, but “the information went in one ear and out the other,” he said in his interview. He described his efforts to assuage the old-school town fathers in nonflattering terms. “The community needed a master plan. They needed zoning laws. They needed architectural growth laws, which were never accepted. The city council was just not educated enough to understand these things.”
But with “new people” infiltering the City Council and more sympathetic county commissioners in the 1960s, things began to bend toward regulation. The commissioners finally appointed a planning and zoning board, and adopted a master plan in 1966, while the city started a “board of adjustments.”
On the sign front, the City Council passed new rules requiring that signs be no larger than 3 square feet and “could not blink or be a nuisance at night to any adjacent sleeper.” Local businesses began setting examples of compliance and even Chevron Oil and Adolph Coors III agreed to modify their signs. By the mid-1960s, billboards were phased out along Highway 82 through Pitkin County, and town businesses posted smaller signs in aggregate under a large triangular display at a roadside pullover in front of the airport.
Credit should go to Bayer for starting the ball rolling, and then to those who took up the baton to rein in growth — for better or for worse — in the city and county in the years ahead. As runaway growth became apparent, the famed trio of county commissioners in the early 1970s — Joe Edwards, Dight Shellman and Michael Kinsley (back then, there were only three on the board) — rolled out a countywide growth-management plan that controlled the pace and location of development. Resentment for their actions resonated forward for years.
As for the city of Aspen, the reactionary pendulum swing of zoning and regulation to address popular sentiment and political timing — going back 60 years — is summarized in a March 6, 2016, Aspen Daily News story titled “Report charts history of Aspen zoning,” by Curtis Wackerle. Still, both the city and county, despite persistent criticism, have been working to preserve Aspen’s and the county’s heritage since Bayer first launched his vision.
Concept of a visualist
During this period of integrating the dual cultures and evolving the Aspen Institute campus between the late 1940s and mid-1960s, Bayer completed his masterwork of global informational distillation between 1947 and the 1953 publication of his “World Geo-Graphic Atlas: A Composite of Man’s Environment.” Instead of just presenting maps of the world, he studied and condensed knowledge about geography, geology, demography, climatology and economics into a tome that he called the “concept of a visualist.”
By adding “geo-graphic” info-visuals that exploded off detailed maps, Bayer elevated the atlas world by assembling facts into intriguing pictorial charts. Some of the illustrations depict the observable universe from our miniscule point of view, atmospheric layers, the nitrogen cycle, how an atoll forms, and original native American territories overlaying a U.S. map. Other examples are the distribution of races among nations, world languages, population, merchant fleets, natural resources and world trade. Eye-catching 1950 tidbits are tabulated, including populace per passenger vehicle (3.4 in U.S., 64 in Soviet Russia, 8,300 in China); swine and horses per country; newsprint per country; and world asbestos production (50,000 metric tons). This massive trove of information is all searchable through the 88-page index.
What is remarkable is how such extensive work was done in the bygone analog tradition of snail mail and phone calls in communication with experts around the world, while Bayer researched science treatises and myriad data. Plus, the graphics were drawn and pasted onto pages for photo reproduction, well before click-and-done technology was even a concept.
Considering how the encyclopedic content of the book was so informative, it’s surprising that the limited print run financed by the Container Corp. of America as gifts to corporate clients and friends never went on sale to the public. But Bayer and Paepcke’s thinking was to bathe CEOs, corporate movers, government leaders, artists and authors in world data via the gifted atlas and contemplative retreats at the Aspen Institute. Feasibly, this insightfulness would trickle down into the elites working the levers of change, who might then act on behalf of the greater good and sustenance of the world. Looking at environmental and geopolitical struggles of today, that premise leaves questions on the table.
While based upon dated information, Bayer’s calculations underprojected world population growth by year 2000 to be 3.1 billion, when it was actually 6.1 billion — and almost 8 billion today. He projected 36.5 billion by year 2500 and 44.2 billion by 3000. As his parting shot, the final page of the atlas’ illustrations presented a prescient warning, which by Bayer’s 1950 math was already in a Malthusian deficit. He had calculated that 2.5 acres were needed per person to feed and clothe an individual “adequately,” yet, he concluded there were only 1.77 acres available then per person for the 2.3 billion population.
Recollected anecdotes
Nonetheless, Bayer walked his talk. According to the August 15, 1974, Aspen Times Weekly, Bayer donated “10.3 acres on Smuggler Mountain to be used as open parkland for recreational and aesthetic enjoyment by the public.”
Tim Cottrell, and former Aspen Fireman, unapologetic onetime hippie and former Sub Shoppe owner (where Dior is now opposite the Thrift Shop), recounted how he parked his Volkswagen bus on Bayer’s Smuggler land in the early 1970s and set up residency. Bayer discovered him and, after an onsite interview, asked him to stay and be his caregiver. Cottrell called him a “kindly aristocrat.”
On the other hand, Vagneur, the Aspen Times columnist, whose side hustle in the 1960s was trash removal, recalled how Bayer complained about missed trash pickup at his Red Mountain house and studio. When informed that he was putting out his trash too late, Bayer “chewed my ass for a good five minutes in his sharp accent, explaining how people who didn’t know any better shouldn’t be telling him why his trash was missed, while his wife watched from the porch.”
Aspen Hall of Fame inductee and former Aspen Historical Society director Georgia Hanson, who had an office next door to Bayer’s supplementary downtown Aspen studio in the early 1970s, recalled how “Bayer was always immaculate and mostly noncommunicative,” while his wife, Joella, “was prim and proper, not demure. She was a pillar of strength and his business partner behind the scenes.” After Bayer’s death in 1985, Hanson recalled that chatter among cognoscenti wondered why his wife donated his work to the Denver Art Museum rather than the Aspen Institute.
In a recent talk at the Aspen Institute, artist Dick Carter reminisced further of his time studying with Bayer. Despite being a workaholic, Bayer took a leisurely “Mediterranean lunch,” which involved good food and a nap. When angry, he liked to exclaim, “Sacramento!” But above all, said Carter, “Bayer cultivated a lifestyle that promoted inspiration, with a goal to continue the Bauhaus concept for as long as possible.”
In the early 1970s, Bayer sold his tasteful low-profile, glassed-walled house and studio on Red Mountain that overlooked the valley to singer/starlet Claudine Longet, Carter said, before her scandal involving the death of ski racer Spider Sabich. She tore the place down and rebuilt a luxury residence — quite modest by today’s standards.
In “Herbert,” a review of a Bayer show at the Denver Art Museum for the Nov. 4, 1973, Empire Magazine, Joanne Ditmer wrote, “His hair is silver-gray, the eyes a piercing blue that can be warm and friendly or steely.” He kept a tan year-round, much of it maintained from trips to his house in Tangier, Morocco. “He was no mere decorator, but a vital participant in the search for beauty in life.”
Bayer died in 1985. In keeping with his lifelong geometric preference, his and Joella’s shared gravestone is a low-profile extended triangle — like a gable roof. Those of his first wife, Irene, and their daughter Julia, second-wife Joella’s son and her mother are stacked flat circles and squares. The extended Bayer family can be found at the Aspen Grove cemetery in the same wrought-iron fence enclosure with Joella’s sister Fabienne and “Fabi’s” husband Fritz Benedict, whose rough stone is an upright granite quarried from Independence Pass.
If Bayer strolled downtown today, he would be surprised to see so many unessential businesses. Who would have thought in 1960 that along Galena Street the Eagles Club would become Prada; Bill Bullock’s western store would become Gucci; Stan’s Auto body Ermenegildo Zegna men’s boutique; and that on Mill Street Sardy’s Hardware would morph into Zadig Voltaire?
Although Bayer had already moved to Montecito, California, in 1975, after having heart problems, he reflected in 1980 in his archived interview on what he and Paepcke had ushered in: “The first 15 years in Aspen were wonderful … a new idea-developing community with skiing, with culture, with this and that, bringing interesting people here … nice people, soldiers in the Mountain Division, young people wanting a better community… small, where one could make a modest living. But it became commercial before we knew it. Speculators and then real estate people sensed money. Because we had such a hard time developing Aspen into something, we never thought, ‘What would happen if it was successful?’”
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