Creative type2 by Abby Ayoade

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C R E AT I V E W R I T I N G + T Y P O G R A P H Y

For the creative by the creative

CREATIVE WRITING & TYPOGRAPHY ISSUE 06/2014

Issue 3 £6.99

ONE FROM THE VAULTS

He was the most inventive and engaging of all the Bauhaus artists, galvanising the movement to ever-greater heights. What a shame Britain never embraced László Moholy-Nagy when he fled the Nazis in the 1930s. By Fiona MacCarthy, originally published in the Guardian, March 2006. Moholy-Nagy settled in Berlin in 1920 and married soon after. His Czech-born wife, Lucia, had trained as a photographer and they worked together in developing the photogram, a photographic image made without a camera when objects on coated paper are exposed to light. They developed photoplastics, fluent, lyrical and curious photomontages, sometimes with drawn additions, which had enormous influence on 1960s graphics. At the same time, MoholyNagy was one of the first designers to realise the potential of photography in advertising and commercial art.

The lamps were produced in small production runs, and some were taken up by outside factories. The royalties made a welcome contribution to the school’s always precarious finances. Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s table lamp, with its sheeny opaque dome, has remained in production and spawned many imitations. As we choose our pseudoBauhaus lighting from Ikea, it is MoholyNagy we must thank.

In 1930, the light prop was the hero of Moholy-Nagy’s abstract film Light Play: Black-White-Grey. Though I knew the work well from illustrations, it was only last summer that I came face to face with the lifesize replica at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. I found myself agreeing with Moholy-Nagy: its effect was magical beyond belief.

“FIERY STIMULATOR,

He was a born teacher, convinced that everyone had talent. In 1923, he joined the staff of the Bauhaus, which had been founded by Walter Gropius at Weimar four years before. Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger and Schlemmer were already teaching there. He was brought in at a time when the school was undergoing a decisive change of policy, shedding its original emphasis on handcraft. The driving force was now “the unity of art and technology”. Moholy-Nagy was entrusted with teaching the preliminary course in principles of form, materials and construction - the basis of the Bauhaus’s educational programme. His co-tutor on the course was the painter Josef Albers, whose career was to develop in parallel with his. Albers and Moholy-Nagy are joint subjects of a major exhibition at Tate Modern, London, which serves as a reminder of the exhilaration of being at the Bauhaus at that time. The hyper-energetic Moholy-Nagy also ran the metal workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later in the purpose-designed buildings at Dessau. The metal shop was the most successful of departments at the Bauhaus in fulfilling Gropius’s vision of art for mass production, redefining the role of the artist to embrace that of designer as we have now come to understand the term. The workshop experimented with glass and Plexiglas as well as metal in developing the range of lighting that has almost come to define the Bauhaus.

PRINCIPAL DRUMMER BOY AND TEETH CHATTERER” : the recollections of other Bauhaus masters and his students have left a strong impression of Moholy-Nagy’s galvanic personality. He became in effect chief publiciser of the Bauhaus, designing the layout for its publications and directing the typography for the “Bauhaus books”, textbooks of Bauhaus principles. Through his “new typography”, Moholy-Nagy set an unmistakable visual image for the school using simple modern letter forms, strong colour, intriguing combinations of photography and text. Single letters, vowels, consonants would be isolated and treated as compositional elements. This typographic approach was serious yet comedic, as was the Bauhaus itself. It was also at the Bauhaus that Moholy-Nagy began the project that was to preoccupy him over the next decade and take its place in his mythology as a kind of alter ego, a Frankenstein’s monster. This is the Light Prop for an Electric Stage, a huge kinetic sculpture for the theatre composed of colour, light and movement: light as performance art. The light prop takes the form of a cubic box containing a glass and polished metal mechanism designed to stand alone on a darkened stage. The audience watches, through a porthole in the box, the machine’s direct response to a two-minute illumination sequence created by 116 coloured lightbulbs flashing on and off.

By the time the light prop was at last completed, he was embarking on yet another life. Moholy-Nagy was now remarried, to Sybil Pietsch, a film scriptwriter he had worked with in Berlin. As the German political situation darkened, they travelled hopefully to London via Holland. MoholyNagy’s friendship with JG Crowther, science correspondent of the then Manchester Guardian, had encouraged him to seek refuge in this country. He was also influenced by his reading of Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques sur les Anglais, which convinced him that England was a haven of free speech. Of the influx of mainly Jewish refugees arriving in England in the 1930s, many were artists, architects, designers. Moholy-Nagy had been preceded by his former Bauhaus colleagues Gropius and Marcel Breuer. He and Sybil joined them briefly at Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, one of London’s few modernist buildings, before moving into their own house in Golders Green. There was a solidarity among the émigrés. A touching picture of Moholy-Nagy at this period shows him on the promenade at Bexhill-on-Sea photographing the just completed De La Warr pavilion, whose architect, Erich Mendelsohn, was another recent exile from Berlin.

Moholy-Nagy’s fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda commissioned him to design special effects for the science fiction film Things to Come. He was asked to make a film about the sex life of the lobster, at a time when David Attenborough was still a boy. A quizzical Moholy-Nagy spent several weeks on the Sussex coast getting to know the fishermen, grappling with their dialect, recording their families and close community. At the other end of the social spectrum, he took photographs for Bernard Fergusson’s book Portrait of Eton and John Betjeman’s Oxford University Chest. Where Sybil responded to 1930s England with an often explosive impatience at its snobbery, Moholy-Nagy remained unemotional, professional. The English class structure was the object of his fascinated observation.