A Bauhaus-trained graphic designer who immigrated to New York City in 1938, Bayer was known for his innovative work in advertising and book publishing. Although never formally connected with Surrealism, he was fascinated by dream imagery and embraced photomontage as a means of visualizing the psychological realities of modernity. In 1931 he began a series of photomontages illustrating his own dreams, which included this emblematic image in which the artist’s eyes stare from the palms of his hands, cut off at the wrists and floating mysteriously in the courtyard of a Berlin apartment block.
