László Moholy-Nagy’s reputation as one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century photography has survived the vagaries of fashion and the evolution of thinking about the medium in the post-war period, a dialogue that his ideas were instrumental in feeding. A painter, sculptor, designer, filmmaker, theorist and teacher, as well as a pioneering experimental photographer, Moholy-Nagy seemed to be the embodiment of a twentieth-century Renaissance man, equally at home, in the classroom, the studio, the experimental laboratory and the realm of ideas.
Laszló Moholy-Nagy was born in 1895 to a peasant family in the village of Bácsborsod, in an agricultural area of southern Hungary, where he grew up and attended primary school. For his secondary education he attended the grammar school in Szeged, where he studied law. It was in Szeged that he first came into contact with the intellectual elite that would shape modern Europe. The poet Gyula Juhász was a mentor, and Moholy-Nagy also nurtured ambitions to become a writer. In 1914, during the First World War, he was drafted into the artillery and served on the Russian front. Wounded and hospitalised twice during the war, Moholy spent his convalescence drawing, a childhood interest. Discharged with a hand wound, he returned to study law in Budapest after the war, but around the time of the bloodless bourgeois revolution of 1918 and the subsequent rise of Communism with the proletarian takeover, Moholy-Nagy became an activist.
Moholy-Nagy abandoned his studies to return to Szeged and take up the life of an artist.
Although active in the intelligentsia, Moholy was not essentially political; he moved first to Vienna, then in 1920 to Berlin, where he met the Czech-born Lucia Schultz, his future wife and collaborator.
Moholy-Nagy became a member of the organisation of avant-garde Marxist Hungarian artists who were then actively shaping the new regime; in 1922 they issued a manifesto entitled ‘Constructivism and the Proletariat’, published in their journal MA (Today).
Early artistic efforts included co-editing and designing the Book of New Artists with Lajos Kassák, a leader of the Hungarian artistic and political avant-garde.
A turning point in his life came in 1923 when the architect Walter Gropius, impressed by an exhibition he had seen, invited Moholy-Nagy to teach at the Bauhaus, which had been founded four years earlier in Weimar. Moholy was asked to teach the foundation course, replacing the painter Johann Itten, and remained at the school for five years, first in Weimar and then when it moved to Dessau.
The Bauhaus was a radical new idea in education. Unlike traditional art education, which was based on mastering accepted forms, often by copying masterpieces, the Bauhaus had a hands-on approach combined with a philosophy that art was an integral part of everyday life; it aimed to educate the whole person and to combine art and technology in the service of society. Photography, however, did not yet play a significant role at the Bauhaus. Although Lucia was a trained photographer, Moholy-Nagy was self-taught, but it was his interest in the medium that brought it to the forefront of the Bauhaus curriculum, with significant contributions from figures such as Erich Consemuller, the Feininger brothers – Andreas and T. Lux Feininger – and Walter Peterhans.
Moholy-Nagy’s vision of art was both idealistic and practical. On the function of the artist, he wrote: “Art is the grindstone of the senses, sharpening the eyes, the mind and the feelings. Art has an educational and ideological function, since not only the conscious but also the unconscious absorbs the social atmosphere that can be translated into art […] What art contains is not fundamentally different from the content of our other utterances, but art achieves its effect mainly through the unconscious organisation of its own means. If this were not so, all problems could be successfully solved by intellectual or verbal discourse alone.”
For Moholy-Nagy, photography was the ideal creative medium for the times, capable of constructing a ‘new vision’, which became the title of his highly influential book in 1927. In the new world, so radically transformed by the modern technology emerging in Europe, he sought new ways of perceiving and interpreting modern life and found them in what he called the ”pure design of light”.
Together with Lucia Moholy, he developed the camera-less technique of the photogram, which had been independently developed by others, including Man Ray. He enjoyed all kinds of technical images, including X-rays, photomicrographs and motion photography.
Exploring Constructivist ideas, he photographed from radical angles, including the bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye views advocated by Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, whom he had met during a stay in Düsseldorf in 1921. A notable example is Bauhaus Balconies of 1926 (also known as Dessau, 1926). His duties at the Bauhaus included planning, editing and designing publications, and he produced 14 Bauhaus books, including his influential text Painting, Photography, Film (1925) as number 8 in the series.
Through his teaching and writing, Moholy expanded his belief that photography was an essential part of the modern sensibility.
Political pressures at the Bauhaus led Moholy-Nagy (as well as Walter Gropius) to leave and return to Berlin in 1928. His marriage to Lucia ended in 1929, and he remarried in 1931 to Sibyl Pietzsch in 1931. In Berlin, Moholy worked as a designer, including sets for Tales of Hoffman and Madame Butterfly, as well as painting and experimenting relentlessly with the new materials of modernism, such as plastics. He was particularly fascinated by the play of light on and through these materials, and soon created what he called ‘light-space modulators’ to demonstrate the interaction of light as a dynamic element in sculpture. Moholy-Nagy was a pioneer of experimental photography with his abstract light pictures or photograms, manipulated images including multiple exposures, and montage and collage techniques. His graphic design was similarly experimental and advanced, combining photography, text and formal ”fine art” elements, and he was one of the first to recognise the value of photography as a tool for commercial art and advertising. The ‘typofoto’, a combination of image and text, played a central role in his own publications and was taken up and developed by Herbert Bayer. He also made films.
Along with dozens of other modern artists, Moholy-Nagy was forced to flee the increasing tyranny of the Nazi regime that took over Germany in the mid-1930s. He made his way to Amsterdam and then, in 1935, to London, where he continued to take photographs and complete commercial commissions, including photographic illustrations for the book The Street Markets of London and a book on Eton College. He also continued to experiment, particularly with the juxtaposition of several negatives, which he called ‘superimpositions’, and with forays into the use of colour.
For fellow Hungarian refugee and director Alexander Korda, he created special effects for Korda’s 1936 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come, although they were not used in the final film. He also worked on a documentary about the London Zoo with the writer and social theorist Julian Huxley. Another turning point came in 1937 when he was invited to America to set up a new school of industrial arts.
In Chicago, a centre of industry and mercantilism, efforts to find a director for a proposed school of industrial arts had resulted in an offer to the architect Walter Gropius. However, Gropius had recently accepted a professorship at Harvard and recommended his close friend for the post. In May 1937, Moholy-Nagy travelled to Chicago and agreed to head the New Bauhaus – American School of Design, as it was initially called, which was to be housed in the former mansion of the merchant baron Marshall Field. The prospectus he produced to demonstrate his curriculum was in the form of a diagram of concentric circles. It outlined a five-year programme of study, with general first-year courses on the outermost layer. ‘Light, Photography, Film and Advertising’ were grouped together in a block in the third year, after students had completed the prerequisite ‘Science’.
Moholy quickly appointed a faculty, drawing on his former Bauhaus colleagues, including Hin Bredendieck, who had been one of his students, and Gyorgy Kepes, who was to teach the Light Workshop, as the photography department was initially called. Early students of the Light Workshop, including Nathan Lerner and Arthur Siegel, eventually became photography teachers at the New Bauhaus.
Moholy’s teaching method, so admired by his students and colleagues, largely confused the industrialists who funded the school. They complained of seeing strange and inexplicable models and objects (light-space modulators, no doubt) lying around the school’s classrooms, and were alarmed by the collegial nature of the teaching, which encouraged collaboration and interaction between teacher and student, and between the students themselves.
After only a year, the school’s governing body, the Association of Arts and Industries, attempted to fire Moholy, citing, among other things, his lack of ‘teaching experience’. In the face of overwhelming support for Moholy from his students and faculty, the AAI board, citing financial difficulties as a lingering effect of the Great Depression, closed the school despite Moholy’s five-year contract. It was this contract that effectively gave birth to the School of Design. Moholy successfully sued the AAI and immediately set up a new school in an abandoned bakery on Chicago’s near north side. Classes at the School of Design began in February 1939. Moholy had taken a job as a designer for the Parker Pen Company and for Spiegel’s mail-order business, and he ploughed some of his earnings back into the school. He had also found an enlightened patron in Walter Paepcke, the executive who ran the progressive Container Corporation.
Under Paepcke’s patronage, Moholy was finally able to realise the school he had envisioned. He appointed a board of advisors, including New York curator Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, educator John Dewey of the University of Chicago, and his friends Walter Gropius and Julian Huxley. In 1944 the name of the school was changed to the Institute of Design.
In his own work, during the Chicago years, Moholy-Nagy worked extensively with a Leica camera and experimented with colour slide photography. At the Institute of Design he worked with students to help the war effort, including designing camouflage.
Diagnosed with leukemia in 1945, Moholy returned to his first love, painting, including a series of abstract canvases entitled Leuk, after the disease that would kill him in the autumn of 1946. His widow, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy compiled his many and varied writings into a posthumously published book, Vision in Motion. Moholy-Nagy’s legacy, however, lived on at the Institute of Design, which flourished, attracting teachers such as Harry Callahan (whom Moholy hired just months before his death) and Aaron Siskind, and graduating talents such as Kenneth Josephson, Art Sinsabaugh and Barbara Crane. The International Museum of Photography and Film, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, has an extensive collection of Moholy’s photographic work from the private collection of his widow. Moholy-Nagy’s daughter, Hattula, has continued to promote Moholy-Nagy’s work. Materials are held primarily at the Archives of the Illinois Institute of Technology (which merged with ID in 1949), which holds original manuscripts documenting the early years of the Institute of Design, and at the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin.
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