Verschillende auteurs - Laszlo Moholy-Nagy - 1974

László Moholy-Nagy

Monograph on one of the main figures of the Bauhaus.

Contents see photo 4.

Excellent condition.

"László Moholy-Nagy - Bácsborsód, July 20, 1895 - Chicago, November 24, 1946) was a Hungarian-American sculptor, painter, photographer and designer. He taught form theory at the Bauhaus.

Life
László Moholy-Nagy was born László Weisz. His father Lipót Weisz left the family around the time of the birth, after which an uncle took care of the family. In 1910 László and his brothers adopted the family name of this uncle: Nagy. In 1919 he added to this name a reference to the place Mohol: in this town in southern Hungary (now Mol in the Serbian Vojvodina) he spent part of his youth, until the family moved in 1905 to Szeged. There he attended the gymnasium. From 1913 to 1918 László Nagy studied law in Budapest, a study he did not complete. During the war years 1916 and 1917 he served at the front, until he returned wounded to Hungary in 1917.
Since 1918 Moholy-Nagy engaged in painting. In 1919, after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he, like many other Hungarian artists, moved to Vienna, and a year later continued to Berlin. There he married photographer Lucia Schulz in 1921. On September 24, 1922 he lived with her in Jena at a meeting of the Städtische Kunstverein of Walter Dexel, and the next day in Weimar at the Congress of Dadaists and Constructivists organized by Theo van Doesburg. In 1923 he received a appointment as a lecturer at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he also worked with typography and photography. In 1928 he left the Bauhaus and set up his own studio.

After the Nazis seized power, Moholy-Nagy fled to London in 1934 via Amsterdam, where he had exchanges with English abstract sculptors, such as Barbara Hepworth. In 1937 he settled in Chicago, where he founded a short-lived New Bauhaus, followed in 1938 by the School of Design, which in 1944 was renamed the Institute of Design, which still exists.

Moholy-Nagy died in 1946, a year after he had obtained American citizenship, from leukemia.

The University of the Arts in Budapest has borne his name since 2006: Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design.

Work

Moholy-Nagy produced groundbreaking work with his photography in the broad sense: photographs, photograms and photo montages. For his black-and-white photos he chose very unusual viewpoints, with a preference for bird’s-eye and frog’s-eye perspectives. Although the subjects may seem fairly banal (e.g., people sitting, city and harbor views, portraits), the composition, the play of light and shadow, and the cropping are so original that each photo remains fascinating.

The photo montages or ‘Foto plastiken’ have something of pared-down Dadaist collages. They nevertheless contain a lot more white space and here and there a sober graphical addition, usually a line drawing. They are critical visual puzzles that in a glance evoke complex stories and connections, e.g., ‘Jaloezie or The Structure of the World’.

Less intellectual but aesthetically stimulating are the photograms, where the artist directly exposes objects in the darkroom onto light-sensitive paper. Moholy-Nagy’s play with values from black to gray to white and the inventive, unrecognizable shapes speak to the imagination.

In the twenties Moholy-Nagy developed the ‘Licht-Raum-Modulator’, a three-dimensional artwork that, through movement and light projection, transforms a space into a kind of theater of light and shadow.

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