Nagy came of age during the First World War and launched himself as an artist during the post-War period of cultural ferment that enveloped the Western world. After the Great War finally ended, modernist trends in many fields, whose development the War had stifled, could now flower, and Moholy-Nagy became an active participant in several of them, gradually positioning himself on the cutting edge of art, photography, commercial design, stage and film, and design education.
Art
His career path, his artistic production, as well as his personal life, were strongly influenced by large-scale cultural trends and historical events.
Hungary.
Borsรณd.
born in 1895.
Lรกszlรณ Moholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design 1946 Chicago
Lรกszlรณ Moholy-Nagy in his atelier 1923 Dessau
In Budapest Lรกszlรณ attended evening art school classes and entered his work in exhibitions. So we can say that he embarked upon his career as an artist around 1918 at the age of 23. His paintings and drawings were figurative and tended towards Expressionism.
Konstruktionen: Kestnermappe 6 1923 Lithograph Prints 53.3 x 34 cm
Konstruktionen: Kestnermappe 6 1923 Lithograph Prints 53.3 x 34 cm
His fascination was transparent plastic, experiment with shapes, lights and shadows.
Beginnings of his career
w a s a H u n ga r ian-Fre nch h uman is t phot ogr aphe r.
During the Weimar Republic between the two World Wars, Berlin was the Big Apple for Eastern and Central European artists and writers. The three years Moholy spent in Berlin during his first stay there must have been exhilarating for a young man in his twenties. The most significant development in his art is that it went from being figurative into a short Dadaist phase. And from there it went completely abstract.
photogram
1896-1967
László added the name of Guszti bácsi’s town to his own and became László Moholy-Nagy. He apparently became interested in photography at this time through another friend, Erzsébet Landau, who had her own photography studio in Budapest. Presently known evidence suggests that Erzsi Landau, gave or sold László one of her old cameras and set him on the path to becoming a photographer. Although I don’t know the exact date when he began to photograph, it was some time before he left Hungary. When the War ended, Hungary went through a short period of revolution and political turmoil before a dictatorship was established under Admiral Miklós Horthy. László left Budapest and returned to Szeged. And from Szeged he went to Vienna at the end of 1919.
Moholy was strongly impressed by the Russian Constructivists, who, for a short while, exerted considerable cultural influence in the newly established Soviet Union. Their work was exhibited in a widely-seen show in Berlin in 1922. Moholy embraced this new style with characteristic enthusiasm and energy. The earliest of his Constructivist paintings already illustrate Moholy’s life-long preoccupation with light and transparency, as seen in his signature intersecting and overlapping planes. The earliest paintings are static – they kind of stand and deliver. But by the mid-1920s his compositions had become dynamic and reflect his verve and optimism. He had developed his own individual style. However, he was also strongly attracted to Constructivism for its social philosophy, which saw art and the artist as active agents in improving society. To put it somewhat simplistically, the Constructivists felt that a good art environment could promote good individual and communal values. Moholy somehow managed to retain his social idealism for the rest of his life. In Chicago he tried to promote it through his school. Besides painting on canvas, Moholy worked with collages on paper. He produced linoleum and woodcut prints, and sculptures of wood, glass, and metal. And in 1921 his personal life changed, when he married his first wife, Lucia Schulz. She was born in 1894 near Prague, now the Czech Republic, and died in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1989.
Moholy became aware of the photogram, and Lucia helped him perfect his methods. A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera. Objects are set directly upon photosensitive paper or placed between a source of light and the paper to cast shadows on it. The photosensitive paper is exposed and then developed like any other photograph.
Photogram 1926 Gelatin silver photogram Photogram 24.1 x 17.8 cm
A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera. Objects are set directly upon photosensitive paper or placed between a source of light and the paper to cast shadows on it.
Photograms fascinated Moholy for the rest of his life. In Berlin he came to the attention of Walter Gropius through an exhibition held in the avant-garde art gallery, Der Sturm. Gropius was the director of the Bauhaus, which he had founded in Weimar in 1919. He hired Moholy as a master or teacher. In 1923 László and Lucia moved from Berlin to Weimar, and then went with the Bauhaus to Dessau in 1925. The German architect, Walter Gropius, had founded the Bauhaus (which is a coined word meaning something like “construction house”) as a new kind of school of architecture, art and design. Its stated goal was to promote “a new unity of art and technology in the service of humanity.”
His photographs are characterized by multiple exposures, strong diagonals, worm’s-eye views, bird’s-eye views, and incorporation of shadows.
Gropius, too, can be regarded as another of Moholy’s mentors, and they enjoyed a close friendship that lasted over 20 years until Moholy’s death. The Bauhaus pursued a holistic philosophy. It aimed at educating the whole person, with the rationale that only this kind of education would give the student a better grasp of society and an understanding of how the products he or she would design could improve it. The social improvement aspect dovetailed nicely with Moholy’s own social idealism. The Bauhaus also put more emphasis on the process of education than on the concrete results. Teamwork was encouraged, among the students and among the different departments, called workshops, e.g., in the designing and furnishing of a house. Moholy was hired to direct the Metal Workshop. was one of the Bauhaus’s most important innovations. It encouraged experimentation as a way to acquire direct knowledge of tools and materials, and to open up unexpected possibilities.
TEACHING 1923 – 1925 Staatliches Bauhaus, Weimar, Germany
Gelatin silver photogram 1940 Photographs Prints 50.1 x 40.2 cm
Students were to view tools and materials without preconceived notions. They were encouraged to think outside the box. For exmple, a 2-dimensional sheet of flexible paper could be used to make a rigid, 3-dimensional structure or, conversely, flexible or see-through structures could be made of hard, rigid material like wood. At the Bauhaus Moholy continued to develop his painting. Besides canvas, he also painted on aluminum and some of the new kinds of plastics that were coming into production at the time. He experimented with spray guns. He continued to make camera photographs. Some recorded Lucia or his friends, but most of the better known images of this time are in the Formalist style and show strong compositional resemblances to his paintings. Like several other avant-garde artists of the 1920s and 1930s, Moholy also created a body of Dadaistic photomontages, which he called “photoplastics,” the “plastic” referring to sculpture rather than to synthetic substances. They are usually read as social commentary. Later he continued to use photomontage in the commercial work he did for a living after he left the Bauhaus, as in advertisements, book jackets, and magazine covers.
Photogram 1926 Photographs Prints 18.3 x 24.1 cm
1925 – 1928
1939 – 1944
Staatliches Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany
School of Design, Chicago, IL USA
1937 – 1938
1944 – 1946
New Bauhaus, Chicago, IL USA
Institute of Design, Chicago, IL USA
Moholy was extremely active during this, his second Berlin period. He had to be because he was now earning his living as a free-lance designer. He set up a studio and did advertising, exhibitions, stage designs and costumes. He made some of his best-known camera images during this period and published them in magazines and books all over Europe. His photographs are characterized by multiple exposures, strong diagonals, worm’seye views, bird’s-eye views, and incorporation of shadows.
Moholy was one of the earliest artists to create art with purely mechanical means.
After Hitler came to power in 1933, it became increasingly difficult for avant-garde artists, architects, and designers to make a living in Germany. Many of them began to look for work in other countries. In 1934 Moholy accepted a job with a design firm in Amsterdam and moved to Holland, where he continued to do advertising work and exhibition design. A significant development during his year in Holland was the use of color photography, at first in his commercial work. He regularly commuted to England to learn about color processes. After his contract in Holland expired in the spring of 1935, Moholy moved to London, the new home of several other self-exiled Bauhaus people, including Walter Gropius. Our reunited family lived in the northern part of London near Hampstead Heath. Moholy was joined in London by his long-term collaborator, Gyรถrgy Kepes, with whom he had worked in Berlin. My sister, Claudia, was born in London in 1936 and died in New York in 1971. Meanwhile, back in Chicago, the Association of Arts and Industries, a group of businessmen, decided to realize a long-held desire to open a design school of their own. Their aim was to educate industrial designers, who could provide them with improved products for their businesses. They were impressed with the achievements of the German Bauhaus and invited Walter Gropius to direct their new school. Gropius, however, had just accepted a position at Harvard University.
Light Space Modulator 1931 Phothograph 24 x 18.1 cm
He also believed that the concept behind a work of art was its most important aspect, not who actually created it.
So he recommended his former Bauhaus colleague, László Moholy-Nagy, for the position of director. Moholy was overjoyed at the opportunity to teach again, to be able to spread the word. By the fall of 1937 we were settled in Chicago. The school opened in October of 1937 in a converted mansion on Prairie Avenue, which had been built by the department store tycoon, Marshall Field. Moholy called the school “the new bauhaus: American School of Design.” He had a readymade educational blueprint for his Chicago school. Many of the teaching methods and exercises were essentially those of the Bauhaus, adapted to American circumstances. The objective was also the same, namely, to educate the whole person, so that he or she could make a contribution to society. However, the New Bauhaus closed in June of 1938, done in by student unrest and financial difficulties. But Moholy did not abandon his hope of establishing Bauhaus education in America. In February of 1939 he was able to open his own school. He called it “The School of Design in Chicago” and the first of its several locations was in a former bakery in the Schatz Building on East Ontario Street. The School held day and evening classes, as well as six-week summer sessions and Saturday morning children’s classes. From then on, until the end of his life, Moholy’s time, energy, and financial resources were devoted to keeping this School afloat. It became like a member of the family. Somehow he managed to keep it going through the Second World War, the most destructive war in history. It was primarily financial support from Walter P. Paepcke, another of Moholy’s helping hands, which enabled the School of Design to open and operate.
He did not develop his own photographs or photograms, and much of his Berlin and London theater and commercial design work was actually executed by artists working in his studio.
After the fall of 1946 the Institute of Design moved several times. It became a department of the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1949. The Institute of Design still continues its mission as a department of IIT, a direct descendant of the School Moholy founded over 75 years ago. With the School the main focus of his time and energy, one wonders that Moholy had time for anything else. But he continued to paint, photograph, and publish. This was, in part, because he was blessed with great reserves of energy. But it was also because he had such efficient support in his wife, Sibyl, another capable woman who was devoted to his cause. Without her he could not have accomplished all that he did in his nine years in Chicago. In December of 1945, Moholy was diagnosed with leukemia. He underwent X-ray treatments, which enabled him to carry on his superhuman schedule for another year, and he died on 24 November 1946 at the premature age of 51. His ashes are buried in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, his adopted city. In 1999 he was honored with a Chicago Tribute Marker. His last book, Vision in Motion, was published posthumously in 1947. In it he sets out his educational philosophy and its foundation in the principles of the Bauhaus. He presents its actualization in the curriculum and the products of the School. I have given you a few highlights in the life of László Moholy-Nagy and what he accomplished along the east-west trajectory that took him from Bácsborsód, Hungary, to Chicago, Illinois--a trajectory propelled by personal inclinations, helping hands, serendipity, and the momentous historical events of the first half of the 20th century. The vast distance--geographical, cultural, and professional--that he covered in his relatively short life is astonishing.
Light Space Modulator 1930 Phothograph 37.4 x 27.4 cm
H i s l a t e r w o r k w a s d o n e i n l a r g e r s h e e t s o f p a p e r a n d c o n d i t i o n s . H i s e a r l i e s t p h o t o g r a m s c o m p o s i t i o n s .
t h e d a r k r o o m w h e r e h e c o u l d u s e a c h i e v e b e t t e r c o n t r o l o v e r l i g h t i n g
t e n d
t o
r e s e m b l e
h i s
C o n s t r u c t i v i s t
Constructivist
Photoplastic 1926 Photoplastic 20 x 14.9 cm
Photograms.
Das Korsett 1927 Photoplastic 24 x 18 cm