Moholy-Nagy, Theobald van der Rohe in Chicago

László Moholy-Nagy fled Nazi Germany in 1935, eventually settling in Chicago, where he founded the New Bauhaus. In 1945, one year before his death, he asked Bill if he would be willing to come to Chicago and teach with him at the Institute of Design, the successor institution to the New Bauhaus. Bill declined the offer, just as he had done when presented with a similar opening from Josef Albers, who had tried to get him to accept a post at Black Mountain.

In the 1950s, Max Bill corresponded with Paul Theobald, the Chicago-based publisher, as well as with the New York publicist George Wittenborn, who published books on Mondrian, Moholy-Nagy, and Vantongerloo, among many others.35

The last Bauhaus director, architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe visited Ulm in 1953. He was particularly interested in Bill’s architectural project for the new HfG campus building. Mies had taken U.S. citizenship in 1944, the same year as Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius.

By this point in time, Bill had already started on a publishing assignment dedicated to Mies’s architectural life’s work. He had already got the publishing contract in 1948, but the completed book, richly illustrated with black-and-white plates, wasn’t published until February 1955 in Milan, as the twelfth volume in the series Architetti del Movimento Moderno. The series was produced by the architects Lodovico Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti, and Ernesto N. Rogers in memory of their office partner and friend Gian Luigi Banfi, who was murdered in the Gusen concentration camp in Austria just weeks before the war ended in 1945.