Rajesh PunjabiGR616InfluencesLaszlo Moholy-Nagy

July 20th, 1895 in Hungary, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was born. His mother took him, along with his younger brother, to live with their grandmother after their father abandoned them. He left for Budapest in 1913 to study law but was drafted into the Army as an artillery officer in WWI. During his service Laszlo was injured and taken to the hospital. While in recovery, he discovered his inclination for art and began to sketch the fields, soldiers, and civilians around him.

After the war, in 1918, he returned to Budapest to continue his studies in law. However, Moholy-Nagy left his studies of law to attend the private art school of Robert Bereny. He identified himself as a supporter of the com-munist party in 1919, the same year in which the Hungarian Communist Republic was defeated. Moholy-Nagy left for Vienna in Germany, along with many other communist Hungarians.

His time in Vienna was short since he moved to Berlin, which was quickly becoming the center of the growing Dada movement. He began to create paintings such as K VII, and Composition Z VIII (Figures 7.1 & 7.2). which were depictions of the elements of design without reference to any particular subject. In 1922, Moholy-Nagy married Lucia Schultz, a photographer who exposed him to the medium. He experimented with his photos creating collages, unusual cropping, and creating photograms (Figures 7.3 & 7.4).

That same year his art was exhibited in a several galleries in Berlin, Hanover, Dresden, Hamburg and Frankfurt. He also took part in the Dadaist congress in Weimar where he met Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus, who later asked Moholy-Nagy to teach at the school of architecture and design in 1923. While teaching there he devel-oped his concept of typo-photo, which combined typography and photography into one image (Figure 7.5). He collaborated with Gropius to create 14 Bauhaus Books which were the main texts at the school.

Just before resigning from the Bauhaus school in 1928, Laszlo became the photography editor of the Dutch magazine, International Revue i 10. He also worked as a freelance designer for stages, theaters, books, ad cam-paigns, wrote articles, and made films. During this time, he left Lucia and went on to marry his second wife, Sibyl, in 1932. The following year the Nazi party took power in Germany and Moholy-Nagy, a foreigner who was not permitted to work, moved to London in 1935.

Gropius and Moholy-Nagy attempted to open a Bauhaus school in England but were unable to establish backing. Laszlo turned to freelance work once again, taking jobs with Imperial Airways and Architectural Review. He was commissioned to design special effects, by producer Alexander Korda, for the film Things to Come though his work was rejected.

The New Bauhaus school of design was founded in Chicago by Moholy-Nagy in 1937. Due to unstable sources of financial backing, the school was closed after a year but re-opened in 1939 as the Chicago School of Design. Moholy-Nagy released his book, Vision in Motion to offer details of the development of the curriculum he created for the school.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy died in 1946 from leukemia. His school of design in Chicago was integrated into the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1949. In Budapest, the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design was named after him. He also received the Tribute Marker from the City of Chicago in 1998.

Figure 7.1

Figure 7.2

Figure 7.3

Figure 7.4

Figure 7.5

[Top Left] K VII. 1922. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

[Top Right] Composition Z VIII. 1924. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

[Bottom Left] The Law of Series. 1925. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

[Bottom Right] Mass Psychosis. 1927. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

[Next Page] Pneumatik. 1924. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.