This spoiled print, featuring a design by Herbert Bayer, is a fragment of a brochure Bayer produced for the General Electric Company in 1942. This information booklet was designed to inform readers about the functions, the impact and the future applications of electronic technology, using a combination of graphic and photographic representations. The left third of this print – which featured x-rays of a hand, a skull and a spine, alongside an image of a microscope – is missing. Such spoiled prints – generally the result of overprinting with offset processes, misprints, bad paper, or configuration errors in printing machines – were, admittedly, accidental by-products, but at the same time they hold a significant artistic value.

Herbert Bayer sent this print to Joella Haweis Levy as a Christmas greeting card. Bayer had met Haweis Levy shortly after emigrating to New York. At that time she was married to the art dealer, Julien Levy, and was able to offer Bayer valuable industry contacts. Haweis Levy divorced her husband in 1942 and, on December 2, 1944, married the recently naturalised Herbert Bayer. He had received American citizenship on July 27 of the same year and subsequently filed for divorce from his first wife, Irene.

In reality, Bayer designed this page as a gift for another woman. The name “Pia” refers to Ise Gropius, the wife of Walter Gropius - also referred to as “Pius”.