Moholy-Nagy: A Modernist Polymath

by Victor M. Cassidy

During the first half of the Twentieth century, László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) made important contributions to painting, sculpture, photography, and film. He expounded his ideas in books and articles, taught at the Bauhaus in Germany, and brought Modernism to Chicago as Director of the New Bauhaus, predecessor of the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Moholy: An Education of the Senses, an exhibition of the artist’s photographs, films, lithographs, books, and Light-Space Modulator (more on this below), is up at the Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA) until May 9. Carol Ehlers, a long-time Chicago photo dealer and curator, organized the show, stating recently that it is not a retrospective but a presentation of the artist’s thought. “I hope that the world is ready to listen to Moholy’s ideas again,” she said. “They kind of got lost.”

According to Ehlers, Moholy believed that art should “heighten our awareness of the ever-changing present.” Perception was “at the core of this new modern art” and Moholy dedicated his career to examining the fundamentals of perception. In the works at LUMA, he “employed abstraction as a way to explore basic forms (lines, rectangles, squares, circles), reducing his palette to black, white, and gray in an effort to define how we see.”

Moholy’s career might be termed a series of aesthetic adventures, which were focused on the expressive possibilities of light. “The capacities of one man seldom allow the handling of more than one problem area,” he wrote in 1944. “I suspect this is why my work since [the beginning of my career] has been only a paraphrase of the original problem, light.” This preoccupation with light naturally made photography a medium of central importance to him.

After growing up in the Hungary’s countryside, Moholy began to study law in Budapest, but was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War One and sent to the Russian front. Severely wounded in 1917, he recuperated in the hospital and decided to become artist when he discovered that he could draw. Returning to Budapest, he enrolled in studio classes, made rapid progress there, and joined the Activists, a group of radical artists and writers who welcomed Béla Kun’s short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic when it was proclaimed on March 21, 1919. When Kun’s government fell in August, the Activists fled to Vienna. Moholy followed them, but disliked Vienna and worked his way across Germany to arrive penniless and half-starved in Berlin during January of 1920.

He soon began to move in Berlin’s avant-garde circles, where he met Kurt Schwitters, the German Dadaist, and El Lissitzki, the Russian Constructivist. Schwitters, with whom he shared a studio for a time, taught him collage, photomontage, and typography. Constructivist influence toughened his paintings.

Lucia Schultz, whom Moholy met soon after he arrived in Berlin and married a year later, collaborated with him on photography until 1929 when they separated. In summer of 1922, the couple made their first photograms by placing objects on photographic paper in a dark room, flooding the paper with light, and developing the result. In these camera-less photographs, the paper turns dark where the light strikes it and remains white where the object was.

Photogram technique, which was employed contemporaneously by the Swiss Dadaist Christian Schad and the American artist Man Ray, creates a mysterious abstract world. The black background seems infinitely deep while white and gray objects float before it in three-dimensional space.  Moholy made photograms all his life and taught the technique to his students. He refined his effects and added complexity by placing multiple objects on or near the paper and moving the light source. There are several photograms, mostly dating from the 1920s, in the LUMA show.

In 1922, Moholy met Walter Gropius, the architect and founder of the Bauhaus, who invited him to teach at his new school of art and architecture. Gropius founded the Bauhaus because he believed that architecture had become an academic pursuit of people who had little understanding of the materials and craft work that go into a building. He designed an integrated curriculum in which students began with art fundamentals and materials, progressed through a complete apprenticeship in a single craft, and then studied architecture. Moholy knew little of architecture, but he felt that painting had lost its way because fine artists had isolated themselves from the crafts. He liked to work with industrial materials and saw no difference between commercial design activity and the creation of fine art. Working with his metals workshop students, he designed lighting fixtures that were later mass produced.

Moholy taught at the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1933—and these were the most productive years of his career. Save for the “Chicago Room” at the end of the LUMA show, virtually all the objects exhibited were made during this period. Moholy thrived in an artistic community—and lost momentum when he was on his own. His Bauhaus colleagues—a tremendous group–included Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Oskar Schlemmer.

During the late 1920s, Moholy experimented with photographic perspective and cropping. In 1928 (see image), he shot a Berlin street on a diagonal from far above. He took many birds-eye or worms-eye views like this to convey a sense of the city and its architecture rather than creating images of specific places. In 1929 (see image), he photographed Ellen Frank with her head tilted in partial shadow, the top and chin partially cropped, and her single visible eye looking diagonally upwards. These photographs are more than 80 years old now—and Moholy’s techniques are so accepted and familiar that first-year photography students learn them—but his work still seems fresh and it’s hard to forget.

The LUMA show includes three documentary black and white films–Impressions of Marseilles Old Port (1929), Berlin Still-Life (1931), and Big-City Gypsies (1932)—which employ the same birds-eye views and diagonal perspectives that we see in the photographs. The films are lively impressions of their subject rather than connected narratives. By making films, Moholy ventured into territory that artists had largely ignored. He deserves credit as an avant-garde pioneer.

The films are great fun, by the way, with views of gypsies–which Moholy would have known from his childhood in Hungary– talking, gambling, drinking, dancing, and fighting as mobs of children mill underfoot. The Marseilles film has a scene of a little boy lowering his pants to heed nature’s call as he looks up anxiously at the camera.

The climax of the LUMA exhibition is the Light-Space Modulator (1929-30), aka Light Prop for an Electric Stage, which is a contraption that Moholy conceived in 1922 and tinkered with for years until he got it right. Roughly 4.5 ft high, it’s a slowly revolving table that’s chain driven by an electric motor with moving metal shapes mounted on it. There’s a large flat circle drilled with holes, a polished lens-like dish, a rotating device that recalls a bottle brush, a tilted rectangular form that could be a vegetable grater, a captive wooden ball that rolls up and down in a heavy wire holder, and more. When the Light-Space

Modulator is illuminated from above, it creates moving shadows on the wall, floor, and ceiling.

The show includes A Lightplay black white gray (1930), Moholy’s film of the Light-Space Modulator in action showing the interplay it creates between forms, shadows, and reflections at different depths. Nowadays we’d use solids modeling software or some such thing to get the effects that Moholy achieved mechanically, but we’d do no better. The best idea: see the real thing. Moholy brought the Light-Space Modulator with him to Chicago and it was shown here in the early 1940s, but it went to Harvard University after his death. The original no longer works well so we see a replica at LUMA. But who cares—it’s a wonder to behold.

Nazi agents raided the Bauhaus in 1933. It closed down, Moholy lost his job, and he left Germany to bounce around Europe for the next four years. In 1937, Gropius, who had landed at Harvard University, recommended Moholy to a group that was setting up an art school in Chicago called the New Bauhaus. Moholy became Director of this school and an inspiring teacher to a new generation of artists. The final room at the LUMA show presents drawings he made during this time and Do Not Disturb (1945), a color film with student actors and some special effects. Moholy died of leukemia on November 24, 1946, leaving a legacy which remains less appreciated than it should be. This exhibition is a step in the right direction.