Austria - Thanks to the latest generous bequest by Herbert Bayer’s recently deceased widow Joella to the Lentos Museum of Modern Art Linz comprising 50 works – paintings, sculptures, drawings and posters – the Linz Museum is now the proud owner of 130 works by this internationally renowned artist.  This is the largest and most important Bayer collection in any Austrian museum.

Taking all aspects of his wide-ranging oeuvre into account, one must judge Herbert Bayer – alongside Alfred Kubin – the most significant artist of the 20^th century from Upper Austria (he was born in Haag am Hausruck in 1900).  He trained at the Bauhaus, where he later taught, and his international carrier took him from Linz via Germany to the USA, where he died in Santa Barbara, California, in 1985.  In the United States Bayer took an influential place among leading designers and landscapers, while also setting new standards there as a painter, photographer and sculptor.

Bayer had been on cordial terms with the Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz since the 1960s. In 1976 Peter Baum, its director, staged the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of Herbert Bayer’s work.  On the centenary of Bayer’s birth, in the year 2000, three exhibitions in Upper Austria paid tribute to him simultaneously: in the Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz, in the Upper Austrian Landesgalerie and in Bayer’s birthplace, Haag am Hausruck.

The close and long-standing links between Prof. Peter Baum and the Neue Galerie on the one hand and Herbert and Joella Bayer on the other resulted in an extensive collection of Bayer’s works passing to the Lentos Museum of Modern Art (70 exhibits, documented in a special catalogue at the beginning of the year 2000).  A purchase in May 2000 added another ten travel photographs dating from 1934 and until then in the family's possession to the Bayer collection.

The Lentos Museum of Modern Art, which, thanks to generous gifts by the artist and his wife owns the largest and most important collection of Bayer’s works in any Austrian museum, has now acquired a further 50 works (paintings, sculptures, drawings and posters) as a most generous bequest following Joella Bayer’s death.  As a result, Lentos now possesses around 130 of this artist’s works from all periods of his career: the most significant and extensive array of Bayer’s works anywhere in Austria.

In her will dated 2 April 2004 Joella Bayer, who has since died, bequeathed works by her husband to – amongst other institutions – the Bauhaus Archiv, the Denver Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Lentos Museum of Modern Art Linz.  It is planned to present Lentos’ recent Bayer acquisitions to the general public in a special exhibition in the near future.

Visit the Lentos Museum of Modern Art at : http://www.lentos.at/en/