Iconic Colorado artist Herbert Bayer gets his own museum in Aspen

Nothing elevates the reputation of an artist more than the presence of a museum dedicated solely to his or her legacy, and few of those operations do that quite as effectively — or with such velocity — as the Bayer Center, which opened this summer on the lush grounds of the Aspen Institute.

Technically, the place is called the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies, though that academic name belies the fact that the museum offers a number of easy-to-consume thrills in its first iteration, with an eye-popping exhibition of Bayer’s colorful paintings filling both of its floors.

The show, simply titled “Herbert Bayer: An Introduction,” does much to expand Bayer’s standing as a creative force, and that alone is quite an accomplishment.

Bayer is already an icon in Colorado, where his work is visible in multiple public settings, ranging from his mastermind of the sprawling Aspen Institute campus, heralded for its architecture and landscape design, to large-scale outdoor artworks that decorate the region. Denverites probably know him best for his twisting yellow “Articulated Wall,” the 85-foot-tall stack of concrete slabs that sits in the center of the Denver Design Center but is visible at points across the city.

But Austrian-born Bayer, who died in 1985 at the age of 85, is a cultural figure of international renown, with a pedigree enriched by his time at the Bauhaus, the legendary German school that was perhaps the greatest influence on 20th-century modernist thinking.

One mission of the Bauhaus was to integrate all of the art forms, both the visual arts and design, into a single discipline, and no student manifested that idea better than Bayer. He is known for making buildings, for his sculpture, photography and, most of all, graphic design. Bayer’s ground-breaking posters advertising the early ski industry are in the collections of multiple major museums.

Still, he is not widely known as a painter, and the inaugural exhibition at the Bayer Center aims to change that. It features dozens of studio paintings, many borrowed from public and private collections, made by the artist over seven decades.

The exhibition’s message: “If you think you know Herbert Bayer’s work, think again,” said curator Bernard Jazzar.

As the exhibition shows, Bayer painted in a wide array of styles, stretching from watercolor on paper, made in 1920, all the way to acrylics on canvas  completed in the early 1980s. In between, there are works reflecting nearly every major notion of abstract art during his time. Bayer explored collage, surrealism, color field, cubism, op art, geometric abstraction and various color-saturated scenes influenced by his travels to Mexico. He even did a series of owl portraits at one point.

If that sounds like more styles of painting than one artist might have been able to pull off at a world-class level, the exhibition does little to argue against it. Every painting in the show is exquisitely rendered, though not all of them suggest Bayer was the first, or even one of the best, at what he attempted.

But Jazzar believes it offers crucial insights into one of our most creative minds and how it evolved over time. Of course, Bayer experimented with many forms and techniques; that is what the Bauhaus taught him to do.

Plus, Jazzar says, it all comes together cohesively in the way Bayer played with different motifs and ideas over time, repeating, reinterpreting, refining. It’s all there in the show. “He’s not dabbling, but growing,” said Jazzar.

And how good a painter Bayer was or was not is beside the point, because the exhibition proves he was something else we all admire: an extremely prolific renaissance man, unafraid to try his hand at anything and certainly talented enough to make work that deserves revisiting.

“There was not a day that Herbert did not sit and draw or paint, because that was his passion,” said Jazzar.

The exhibition also serves as a primer on Bayer’s life and career, focusing heavily on his ties to Walter Paepcke, the mega-wealthy industrialist who founded the Aspen Institute and who brought Bayer to the United States in the first place in 1946 to help promote the business he had recently started, the Aspen Skiing Company. The town, the industry and the state would never be the same after they were done.

In that way, the museum has the potential to lift the cultural cache of not just Bayer but also the institute itself, which bears so many of his best moves. That was one goal of Linda and Stewart Resnick, the billionaire philanthropists who donated $10 million to get the center off the ground. The Resnicks — who made their fortune in well-known businesses like Fiji Water and POM fruit juice and have given substantial sums to art, medical and educational institutions — are also Bayer collectors. Jazzar, who has long curated their personal holdings, included several of their pieces in the show.

Moreover, the museum contributes another stellar building to the Aspen Institute’s grounds. The two-story structure maintains the campus’ low-rise profile while adding something it needed: a flexible, open space to show contemporary art. The building unfolds as a series of sunlight-friendly galleries that circle a glass elevator, and it is topped off by a flat roof that pops up in the center. Designed by Jeffrey Berkus, who considered deeply Bayer’s own tastes and habits as an architect, the center is all symmetry and simplicity.