ART REVIEW : BAYER: AN ARTIST AS BIG AS LIFE

“Herbert Bayer: A Decade in Santa Barbara 1975-1985” is a subject too big to be corraled in one gallery, as it is at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, but then Bayer isn’t one to be circumscribed by space, time or prevailing attitudes. At 85, this legendary artist is the last surviving master teacher of the Bauhaus, a German school (1919-1933) whose name is synonymous with interdisciplinary adventure.

Like the Russian Avant-Garde and De Stijl in the Netherlands, the Bauhaus attracted artists of utopian vision. In their fervor to merge art and life, they embraced everything from typography and stage design to furniture, architecture, sculpture and painting. Often appearing to be purists, they stripped down art to the bare essentials of geometric abstraction, but they also enriched the modern world by daring to think that aesthetics had a seminal place in life.

Bayer is an industrial, environmental and graphic designer, as well as an architect, painter, sculptor and photographer. To write about his work is to assemble lists of accomplishments. Since he immigrated to the United States in 1938, he has been an advertising and design consultant for the Container Corp. of America and the Atlantic Richfield Co. During his 10 years in Santa Barbara, he has created hundreds of artworks including several of enormous proportions: 21 tapestries, 10 large sculptures, nine major murals in the United States and Mexico and an earthwork at Kent, Wash. In the same decade, he has had 11 solo exhibitions and participated in 29 group shows.

That’s not all, but you get the idea. According to his friend and assistant Paul Hobson (who played a major role in organizing the Santa Barbara exhibition), the man never slowed until he fell gravely ill a few months ago. And although Bayer hasn’t been able to see the show, it pulses with the youthful energy of clean design and bright color.

The show surveys work done during Bayer’s Santa Barbara residence. Its centerpiece is a 13-foot-tall sculpture called “Four Chromatic Gates,” a slightly scaled-down replica of a work installed between two Dallas high-rises. I can’t testify to the success of the original, but the gallery version is an engaging walk-through construction. The four gates, in graduated sizes, are painted solid yellow, red-orange, blue and white. As if cut out and expanded from a flat shape, they are set at angles to break up space and strike formal relationships with smaller artworks in the gallery. As entrances that lead nowhere in particular, the gates also appear as metaphors for beginning.

The visual suggestion is appropriate, for even as Bayer’s art has become predictable and mechanical in its designerly perfection, it retains the optimistic freshness of the period that spawned him. Maquettes and photographs on display reveal such liberating concepts as a “Walk-in Space Painting” at Arco Breakers, an executive training center in Montecito. This “painting” is a colorful, multipart sculpture installed with steppingstones in a round pond. Visitors can traverse the pool through glazed-brick gates that look like a three-dimensional painting.

Bayer’s solution to a Washington state land-reclamation project was a rolling environment of earth mounds and rings that serve as dams and water conduits. When commissioned to work on glossy, corporate buildings, he introduced visual excitement and human scale to massive walls by building modular sculptures of painted tubes or twisted metal. Such creative designs, done on a massive scale, are represented here by pictures or models, but they appear to be among the artist’s most successful projects.

What can be seen firsthand in Santa Barbara are about a dozen paintings--large ones on canvas and small ones on paper. All are Kandinsky-esque compositions, featuring geometric shapes or unfolding volumes floating in misty atmospheres. As paintings, they are thin and dry; they look more designed or constructed than painted. Yet, despite physical constraints, they seem surprisingly unfettered. There’s a buoyancy about these paintings that speaks of mystical faith and Space-Age wonder. This work may have been done in the last decade but it comes from a time when people believed that art could help make the world new again.

The exhibition continues through Sept. 8. Hours: Wednesdays-Sundays, noon-5 p.m.