Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo

The Hungarian painter, designer, and teacher László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was one of the leading figures in the Bauhaus and was highly instrumental in bringing its ideas to the United States.

László Moholy-Nagy was born on July 20, 1895, in Bacsbarsod. He studied law before becoming interested in painting. In 1919 he discovered the work of the Russian constructivists El Lissitzky and Kasimir Malevich, whose lifelong influence can be seen in Moholy-Nagy's paintings with the characteristic severe patterns of rectangles and other geometric shapes scattered sparsely over a plain background.

In 1921 Moholy-Nagy moved to Berlin. His paintings were now completely nonobjective, and he began to study the function and effect of light, which became one of his main continuing interests. Combined with this was his enthusiasm for the potential uses of the new plastic materials. Like Marcel Duchamp, he began to question the traditional involvement of the artist's hand in his own work. In 1922 Moholy-Nagy came up with a brilliant and audacious idea: he had five paintings made for him by a factory. He telephoned the factory and described what he wanted, using the factory's color chart and graph paper. As Duchamp did with his ready-mades, Moholy-Nagy claimed the five paintings as his because he had thought of them rather than actually made them by his own hand.

Moholy-Nagy's interests in a new relationship between the artist and his art, his investigations into the use of light, and his use of new materials made him a very suitable member of the Bauhaus, where he went to teach in 1923. The Bauhaus had been founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius to provide a new sort of artistic training, where the artist no longer had to choose between art and design but was instead given an all-round education which would allow him to use his knowledge of art and materials to make a more functional art, often involved in industrial design.

Moholy-Nagy taught the introductory course at the Bauhaus and helped turn it away from its preoccupation with mysticism and intuitive philosophy and toward a more practical and tightly controlled emphasis on materials and their potential and function. He was peculiarly adept at fusing theory and practice and was thus highly successful at both teaching and writing. In 1928 he left the Bauhaus and executed stage designs in Berlin, using his Bauhaus-evolved ideas of space and light. During a short stay in London he produced a number of documentary films.

In 1937 Moholy-Nagy went to Chicago, where he directed the New Bauhaus for a year and then set up his own School of Design, which he ran on Bauhaus principles until his death in Chicago on Nov. 24, 1946. An extraordinarily idealistic man, he passionately believed in his own concepts of design and teaching and worked feverishly to accomplish his aims. It is in large part owing to him that the Bauhaus ideas so thoroughly infused American design.

Further Reading

Moholy-Nagy's own writings are very epigrammatic and perhaps provide a more exciting picture of the potential of his ideas than do his artistic productions. His The New Vision (1928) and Vision in Motion (1947) give a fine sense of his liveliness of mind and wide-ranging interests. An extremely touching and very informative book is the biography by his wife, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality (1950; 2d ed. 1969).

Additional Sources

Kaplan, Louis, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: biographical writings, Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

For more information on László Moholy-Nagy, visit Britannica.com.

(1895-1946)

Hungarian-born Moholy-Nagy is recognized for the key role that he played in 20th-century design education, first at the Bauhaus in Germany and later at the ‘New Bauhaus’ and Institute of Design, Chicago, where he promoted the values of European Modernism. His artistic activity covered many fields including the fine arts, design, film, and photography. Initially, his professional aspirations lay in the law but his studies were interrupted by the First World War in which he was seriously wounded whilst a serving officer in the Hungarian army in 1917. Whilst convalescing he resumed earlier interests in practical art, becoming aware of the activities of the German Expressionists, De Stijl and the Russian avant-garde. From 1919 to 1920 he lived in Vienna and, in the following year, met the Russian Constructivist designer El Lissitsky and the De Stijl artist, designer, and writer Theo Van Doesburg in Düsseldorf. During a period in Berlin (1921-2) he became involved with experimental photography, fine art, and debates with many leading avant-garde artists and writers about the relevance of a machine aesthetic. Despite the lack of a background in design he was appointed as head of the metal workshops at the Weimar Bauhaus by Walter Gropius in 1923, and also made a distinctive contribution—together with Josef Albers—to the institution's Foundation Course (Vorkurs) on which he replaced Johannes Itten. Moholy-Nagy described the aims of the Vorkurs in his Von Material zu Architektur of 1929, one of a series of books issued by the Bauhaus. Importantly, he played an important role in conveying the intellectual underpinning of the Bauhaus as co-editor with Walter Gropius of this series of Bauhaus Books (Bauhausbücher), fourteen of which were published between 1925 and 1930. With the exception of two volumes Moholy-Nagy designed the typographic layout of all of the volumes, as well as a number of the cover designs. In addition to Von Material zu Architektur he also wrote Malerei, Photographie, Film in 1925. In the same year Moholy-Nagy moved to Dessau with the Bauhaus, leaving the institution in 1928. He moved to Berlin, where, in addition to his work as a typographer, he became interested in film, exhibition, and stage design. He left Germany in the difficult political climate of the early 1930s, travelling to Amsterdam in 1934. He moved to London in 1935, where he was involved in publicity design for the Isokon Furniture Company, which also employed his former director at the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, as Controller of Design. Other work included publicity for Imperial Airways and London Transport and design work for the Architectural Review. In 1937, encouraged by Gropius, he emigrated to the United States, where he directed the ‘New Bauhaus: American School of Design’ or, in a later reconstituted form, the Institute of Design in Chicago from then until his death in 1946. Other design work in the United States included work for the Container Corporation of America, Fortune magazine, and the Parker 51 pen in 1941.

(1895–1946)

Hungarian-born American artist, theorist, and teacher. An important figure in the Bauhaus and supporter of Gropius, he not only was one of the editors of Bauhaus publications, but wrote two of them himself, including the influential Von Material zu Architektur (From Material to Architecture—1929). He went into practice as a freelance designer after Hannes Meyer took over in 1928.

Bibliography

• Jane Turner (1996)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Moholy-Nagy, László (1895-1946), Hungarian-born theorist and multimedia artist. He arrived in Berlin in 1919 with no formal training, but immediately became active in the arts. After his marriage with Lucia Schulz (Moholy) he engaged both in art theory and in avant-garde painting and photogram production. At the Weimar Bauhaus 1923-8 he developed a curriculum in industrial design comprising material studies as well as early media elements, e.g. photography and film. He also wrote two influential books, Malerei Fotografie Film (1924) and Von Material zu Architektur (1929; trans. as The New Vision, 1930), and planned a third (Vision in Motion) which appeared posthumously in 1947. In 1928 he moved to Berlin, where he worked as an exhibition and stage designer and film-maker. He continued to collaborate with Lucia even after their divorce. With his second wife and his daughter, he emigrated in 1934 to Amsterdam, then London—where he produced several photographic books and designed sets for the film Things to Come (1936)—and in 1937 to Chicago, where he founded, and tirelessly promoted, the ‘New Bauhaus’ (soon reorganized as the Chicago School of Design). There he worked in colour photography and acrylic sculpture, and planned numerous projects in various media that his early death left unrealized. Although Moholy's reputation attracted many talented students to Chicago, it was not until the advent of Conceptual art that the importance of his work was fully recognized.

— Rolf Sachsse

Bibliography

• In Focus: László Moholy-Nagy at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (1995)

Moholy-Nagy, László (lä'slō mô'hôlē-nŏ'dyə) , 1895–1946, Hungarian painter, designer, and experimental photographer. He turned to art after studying law. While living in Berlin he was one of the founders of constructivism, experimenting with photograms and translucent materials. As a professor in the newly opened Bauhaus from 1923 to 1928, Moholy-Nagy was coeditor with Walter Gropius of the school's regular publications. While there he experimented with a form of kinetic art, which he called “light space modulators,” a stunning array of motor-driven shapes that he illuminated to produce elaborate shadows on the nearby walls. He worked in Berlin until 1934 as a typographer and designer of stage sets. In 1937 he directed the Bauhaus School of Design in Chicago until it failed (1938). Thereafter he opened the Chicago Institute of Design, which he headed until his death. His greatest contribution to modern art lay in his teaching, which deeply influenced American commercial and industrial design. He was the author of The New Vision (tr. 1928) and Vision in Motion (1947).

Bibliography

See study by his wife S. Moholy-Nagy (1950).