László Moholy-Nagy Hungarian, 1895-1946

László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) more than any other figure established what a photograph could be in the twentieth century. A central figure at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau from 1923 to 1928, he later founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago, subsequently the School of Design and the Institute of Design, where he remained until his death. As both artist and educator, he used photography to challenge established conventions of visual perception. The term he gave this program, the New Vision, continues to define an era in the medium’s history.

The photogram lies at the center of his photographic practice. Working without a camera, Moholy-Nagy placed ordinary objects directly onto photosensitive paper and exposed them to light, describing the process as at once the most direct and the most oblique translation of an object into a photograph. From 1925, he refined the technique in the darkroom, using controlled artificial lighting rather than daylight. Each photogram was a unique sheet, neither enlargeable nor exactly repeatable, in which light, shadow and transparency transformed familiar objects into unexpected configurations.

Alongside his photograms, Moholy-Nagy explored negative prints, radically elevated and oblique viewpoints, aggressive cropping and photomontage. His photographic sensibility also extended well beyond the avant-garde. In England in the mid-1930s, he photographed for The Architectural Review, illustrated John Betjeman’s An Oxford University Chest, made the films Lobsters and New Architecture and the London Zoo, and designed posters for the London Underground. Across these different forms, he applied the same rigorous attention to line, texture, tonal relationships and composition that informed the Bauhaus foundation course. In his graphic work, as he put it, text becomes illustration.

Born in Hungary in 1895, Moholy-Nagy studied law before being wounded in the First World War and turning to art during his convalescence. In 1923, Walter Gropius invited him to teach at the Weimar Bauhaus, where he soon became one of its central figures. He edited the Bauhausbücher series, published Painting, Photography, Film in 1925 and The New Vision in 1929, and collaborated with Katherine Dreier and Marcel Duchamp on exhibitions for the Société Anonyme.

Moholy-Nagy left Germany in 1934 and arrived in Chicago in 1937 to direct the New Bauhaus, founded by the Association of Arts and Industries to bring modern design into American industry. The school evolved into the School of Design and subsequently the Institute of Design. Its photography program, developed with Arthur Siegel, György Kepes and Nathan Lerner, helped shape generations of American photographers. With Kepes and Lerner, Moholy-Nagy also developed How to Make a Photogram for The Museum of Modern Art.

During the final year of his life, Moholy-Nagy continued to work across an extraordinary range of media, producing photograms, photographs, color photographs, paintings, drawings and sculptures in Plexiglas and metal. He led a six-week symposium on the New Vision in Photography with Arthur Siegel and completed Vision in Motion, published posthumously in 1947. His work was included in Bruce Silverstein Gallery’s The New Bauhaus: 1930–1971 (2002).