László Moholy-Nagy

Biography

Moholy-Nagy put his surname together himself. He was born László Weisz, and after his father left the family he took the name of his uncle Gusztáv Nagy, a lawyer, who supported and educated him. Later he added “Moholy”, after the town of Mohol, where part of his childhood was spent. Mohol is now in Serbia.

He was born on 20 July 1895 in Bácsborsód, into a Jewish family. He attended the gymnasium in Szeged, wanted to be a writer, and as a teenager published poems in local newspapers. From 1913 he studied law in Budapest. In 1915 he joined the Austro-Hungarian army as an artillery officer. On service he made pencil sketches and watercolours and wrote notes about the war. In July 1917 he was wounded on the Russian Front and recovered in Budapest. There he became close to the journal Jelenkor (“The Present Age”) and to the circle of Lajos Kassák around the journal Ma (“Today”). After his discharge in October 1918 he abandoned his law studies and began attending the private art school of the painter Róbert Berény.

He supported the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 but held no post in it. After its defeat he withdrew for a time to Szeged, where an exhibition of his work was held, and around November 1919 he moved to Vienna. By early 1920 he was in Berlin. There he met the photographer and writer Lucia Schulz, whom he married the following year. In the summer of 1922, on holiday with her on the Rhône, he learned from her how to make photograms on light-sensitive paper. Around then he made the first sketches for what would become the Light-Space Modulator.

In that same year, 1922, at a joint exhibition with Peter Laszlo Peri at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, he caught the attention of Walter Gropius.

In 1923 Gropius invited him to the Bauhaus, the school of art and design then in Weimar. Moholy-Nagy co-taught the foundation course with Josef Albers in place of Johannes Itten, and took over the Metal Workshop from Paul Klee. He published the book “Painting, Photography, Film” (1925) and later “The New Vision: From Material to Architecture” (1932). In them he introduced the concept of the “New Vision” (Neues Sehen). His idea was that the camera creates a way of seeing that the human eye cannot achieve. He proposed using the telescope, the microscope and X-rays in art, and made photograms together with Lucia. In 1924, as is generally held, he met Vladimir Mayakovsky and took several portraits of him.

In 1928 he left the Bauhaus and opened his own design studio in Berlin. In 1929 he separated from Lucia. The studio took commissions for books, exhibitions and advertising; he designed sets for opera and theatre productions, and from 1927 to 1929 he was photography editor of the Dutch magazine i 10. In 1930, at the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Paris, “Light Prop for an Electric Stage” (1928–1930) was shown: a moving construction of reflective metal and Plexiglas through which light threw shifting shadows and reflections onto the walls. It was later called the Light-Space Modulator. To my mind, the most interesting thing about it is that its maker cared less about the parts themselves than about the pattern of light they produce. The film “A Lightplay: Black White Gray” was based on it. His other short films include “Berlin Still Life”.

In 1932 he married the actress and scriptwriter Sibyl Pietzsch. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, a foreigner could no longer work in Germany. In 1934 he went to the Netherlands, where he did mostly commercial work, and in 1935 he moved with his family to London. There he lived in the Isokon building beside Gropius and photographed architecture for The Architectural Review. For the producer Alexander Korda he designed special effects for the film “Things to Come” (1936), based on the novel by H. G. Wells, but the director used almost none of them. Attempts to found an English Bauhaus and to win a post at the Royal College of Art failed. In 1937 his work was shown in Munich at the “Degenerate Art” exhibition mounted by the Nazis.

In the same year, on the recommendation of Gropius and at the invitation of Walter Paepcke, chairman of the Container Corporation of America, he moved to Chicago. There he became the founding director of the New Bauhaus, which was housed in a mansion on Prairie Avenue. The school closed for lack of money as early as 1938, and in February 1939, with Paepcke’s support, he reopened it as the School of Design. From 1944 it was called the Institute of Design, and in 1949 it became part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, the first institution in the United States to award a PhD in design. In Chicago he himself began making static and moving sculptures in transparent plastic with chromed metal.

In April 1946 he became an American citizen. He went on working, teaching and attending conferences until the end of his life. He died in Chicago on 24 November 1946 and was buried at Graceland Cemetery. “Vision in Motion”, which sets out the programme of his school, was published in 1947, after his death.