Laszlo Moholy Nagy

Stil: Constructivism; Dada;

Plass: Bácsborsód

Født: 1895

Død: 1946

Biografi:

László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.
Moholy-Nagy was born "László Weisz" in Bácsborsód, Hungary to a Jewish family. His cousin was the conductor Sir Georg Solti. He attended Gymnasium in the city of Szeged. He changed his German-Jewish surname to the Magyar surname of his mother's Christian lawyer friend Nagy, who supported the family and helped raise László and his brothers when their Jewish father, Lipót Weisz left the family. Later, he added “Moholy” to his surname, after the name of the town of Mohol (today in Serbia) in which one part of his boyhood was spent, in the family home nearby.
In 1918, he formally converted to the Hungarian Reformed Church; his godfather was his Roman Catholic university friend, the art critic Iván Hevesy. Immediately before and during World War I he studied law in Budapest and served in the war, where he sustained a serious injury. In Budapest, on leave and during convalescence, Moholy-Nagy became involved first with the journal Jelenkor (“The Present Age”), edited by Hevesy, and then with the “Activist” circle around Lajos Kassák’s journal Ma (“Today”). After his discharge from the Austro-Hungarian army in October 1918, he attended the private art school of the Hungarian Fauve artist Róbert Berény. He was a supporter of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, declared early in 1919, though he assumed no official role in it. After the defeat of the Communist regime in August, he withdrew to Szeged. An exhibition of his work was held there, before he left for Vienna around November 1919. He left for Berlin early in 1920.
In 1923, Moholy-Nagy took over Johannes Itten's role co-teaching the Bauhaus preliminary course with Josef Albers and also replaced Itten as Head of the Metal Workshop. This effectively marked the end of the school’s expressionistic leanings and moved it closer towards its original aims as a school of design and industrial integration. The Bauhaus became known for the versatility of its artists, and Moholy-Nagy was no exception. Throughout his career, he became proficient and innovative in the fields of photography, typography, sculpture, painting, printmaking, and industrial design.
One of his main focuses was photography, in which, from 1922, he was initially guided by the technical expertise of his partner and collaborator Lucia. In his books Malerei, Photographie, Film of 1925 and The New Vision, from Material to Architecture, of 1932, he coined the term Neues Sehen (New Vision) for his belief that the camera could create a whole new way of seeing the outside world that the human eye could not. This theory encapsulates his approach to his art and teaching. He was the first interwar artist to suggest the use of scientific equipment, the telescope, microscope and radiography in the making of art. With Lucia, he experimented with the photogram; the process of exposing light-sensitive paper with objects laid upon it. His teaching practice covered a diverse range of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, photomontage and metal.
He left the Bauhaus in 1928 and established his own design studio in Berlin. Marianne Brandt took over his role as Head of the Metal Workshop.
An enduring achievement was Moholy-Nagy's construction of the "Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne" (completed 1930), a device with moving parts meant to have light projected through it in order to create mobile light reflections and shadows on nearby surfaces. Made with the help of the Hungarian architect Istvan Seboek for the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition held in Paris during the summer of 1930, and after his death, it was dubbed the "Light-Space Modulator" and was seen as a pioneer achievement of kinetic sculpture using industrial materials like reflective metals and Plexiglas. Given his intention for it, it might more accurately be seen as one of the earliest examples of Light Art, a form that he continued to develop in the 1940s in the United States, in Space Modulator 1939-1945, Papmac 1943 and B-10 Space Modulator 1942.
Moholy-Nagy was photography editor of the Dutch avant-garde magazine International Revue i 10 from 1927 to 1929. He designed stage sets for successful and controversial operatic and theatrical productions, designed exhibitions and books, created ad campaigns, wrote articles and made films. His studio employed artists and designers such as Istvan Seboek, Gyorgy Kepes and Andor Weininger. After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, and, being a foreign citizen, he was no longer allowed to work. He operated for a time in the Netherlands (doing mostly commercial work) before moving to London in 1935.

More...