Bauhaus Weimar 1923 - Gallery Wall Set of 3 Exhibition Posters (Bayer, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy)

Three Bauhaus posters sold together as a gallery wall set of three same-size prints: Herbert Bayer's and Wassily Kandinsky's designs for the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar, and an exhibition poster for László Moholy-Nagy's photographs of the 1930s.

The Bauhaus Ausstellung of 1923, announced for July to September and open from 15 August to 30 September, was the school's first public account of itself, mounted under pressure from the Thuringian government to show results. Gropius used it to announce the shift from craft to industry ('Art and Technology: A New Unity'), and the masters and students produced a set of twenty postcards to publicise it, each a small manifesto of the new graphic language. Bayer, still a student, designed his around a blue triangle, black circle and red square, with the date set in the hand-drawn geometric capitals that anticipate his Universal alphabet of 1925. Kandinsky, who had joined the staff the year before, drew a construction of crossing diagonals, a checkered flag and a red arc, lettering 'Bauhaus Ausstellung Weimar' in a loose hand across it.

Moholy-Nagy arrived at the Bauhaus in 1923, the year of the exhibition, and went on to run the preliminary course and the metal workshop. His photographs of the late 1920s and early 1930s, taken from balconies and radio towers looking straight down, turned pavements and shadows into abstract compositions. The third poster presents one of these, a street seen from above with a cyclist and two walkers casting long shadows, as an exhibition of photographic works at Wilson Watson Fine Art, London, in the summer of 1978, set in the tightly condensed sans-serif a Mayfair gallery would have used that decade.

The three hang together because they share a palette, cream paper with red, blue and black, and a graphic logic of line and geometry that runs from the 1923 postcards to the 1930 photograph without a join. Bayer and Kandinsky give the wall its colour; Moholy-Nagy gives it its depth.

The Bayer and Kandinsky are reproductions of the 1923 postcards. The Moholy-Nagy is a designed poster, not a historical reproduction, created as part of Art Poster Archive, a project focused on period-accurate exhibition graphics for artists and movements.