THE CREATIVITY OF HERBERT BAYER

“Herbert Bayer: A Decade in Santa Barbara,” at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, today through Sept. 8, is intended to reveal “the high level of creativity in Herbert Bayer’s work during the years he has lived here,” states CAF Director Betty Klausner.

Bayer, the last surviving teaching master of the Bauhaus school and a veteran contributor to fine and applied arts of the past 60 years, exhibits representative examples from several hundred works created in the last decade. The show includes paintings, works on paper, sculpture and photographic documentation of large outdoor and environmental works.

Visitors will walk through his 10-foot “Chromatic Gates” to see exhibited works, a slide presentation of Bayer’s architecture and a sampling of tapestries, carpets and murals he designed.

According to Paul Mills, retired director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and CAF board member, who organized the exhibition, “Herbert Bayer is one of the few ‘total artists’ of the 20th Century. . . . He has been, since his immigration to the U.S. in 1938, one of the major design and advertising consultants to American industry, notably Container Corp. of America and Atlantic Richfield Co. No other designer currently practicing in America has had as much influence on design for industry.”

At the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through Sept. 8, “Tantra: A Cosmic Sign Language” features 50 paintings and small sculptures dating back 5,000 years. These visual interpretations of the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain religions seek to visually explain the relationship of the individual to the universe.

The exhibition, organized by Dr. Ajiot Mookerjee and Martha Longnecker, is drawn from a private collection in London and includes objects made in India, Tibet and Nepal during the 17th to 19th centuries.

The art suggests a multifaceted physical world through a multitude of simple intersecting abstract forms; the aim is to induce a mood of contemplation.

Part II of “Los Angeles Summer/ styrian autumn,” featuring work by contemporary Austrian artists, opens Tuesday at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park. Paintings and sculpture by Fritz Bergler, Doris Jauk-Hinz, Gerhard Lojen, Franz Motschnig, Norbert Nestler, Frederike Nestler Rebeau, Ingeborg Strobl, Gustav Troger, Josef Taucher, Lois Weinberger and Turi Werkner will be on view through Sept. 1. The show is part of a multimedia presentation at the Muni, featuring artists associated with the “Styrian Autumn,” an annual festival of contemporary art in all media, in Graz, Austria.

Reprieve: “Mimbres Pottery: Ancient Art of the American Southwest,” originally scheduled to close July 28 at the Southwest Museum, has been extended to Oct. 13.

Opening Thursday at the Southwest Museum’s annex downtown in the Arco Towers building is “Art of the Pueblo Potters, 1540-1940.” The show ends Sept. 19.

Just opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: “Extending the Perimeters of 20th-Century Photography,” consisting of more than 140 images that use the photograph as a basis for exploring new ideas with alternative techniques and materials.

The exhibition spans some 60 years, with emphasis on contemporary work. The show starts with avant-garde examples by Man Ray and Gyorgy Kepes made during the 1920s and 1930s, and goes on to mixed media works that surfaced in the 1970s and 1980s.

Photographic images by Rauschenberg, Judith Golden, Jerry Uelsman, Robert Fichter, Ellen Land-Weber and Nancy Burson demonstrate some of the experimental techniques.

According to Associate Curator of Photography Dorothy Vandersteel, “The photographs included are variations on the norm, having little in common with traditional photography. Their manipulation is blatant and deliberate, and their strength lies in the ways they broaden our perception of the limits of the photographic medium.” An illustrated catalogue with essay by Vandersteel accompanies the exhibition, which runs through Oct. 6.

A major research and design center will be established at the County Museum of Art with an $800,000 grant from the Doris Jones Stein Foundation.

To be completed later this year, the 1,200-square-foot facility will be named the Doris Stein Research and Design Center for Costumes and Textiles. It will house the museum’s collection of costumes and textiles, which covers 240 cultures and time periods and includes 35,000 works.

The center will feature compact art storage space and the museum’s 4,000 volume library, which is full of historical and technical resource materials, and rare books and manuscripts from the late 18th Century to the present. In addition, 3,800 square feet of added space will be designated, as a result of the grant, for special exhibitions taken from the museum’s collection and for touring costume and textile shows.

The grant is accompanied by the gift of Stein’s collection of hats dating from the 1930s to 1970. The 109-piece cache includes chapeau in gold leather and bird feathers. French and American designers such as Bes-Ben, Schiaparelli and Sally Victor are represented, adding to the museum’s existing 2,000-piece collection.