László Moholy-Nagy. The Art of Light
June 09, 2011. - September 25, 2011.
, his photographs, films and photograms - now synonymous with his name - were of such significance that they have transformed our thinking about art. In the series of Hungarian artists who accomplished world fame - Robert Capa, Martin Munkácsi, György Kepes - the Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art now presents the work of László Moholy-Nagy in an impressive exhibition.
The central organising principle in Moholy-Nagy’s diverse activities was light: light defined his paintings, sculptures, photoplastics, photograms, photographs, typography and theatre sets. He did not regard photography as a tool for the perfect imaging of reality; rather, it was his conviction that the camera offered new possibilities for modern people, and finally liberates art from the obligation to depict, to copy reality. The years at the Bauhaus proved to be an experience that defined his entire life. He settled in Chicago in 1937, where he founded the ‘New Bauhaus’ and soon the Institute of Design and worked until the end of his life as an experimental, innovative artist, theorist and teacher. László Moholy-Nagy regarded art as a non-hierarchical, widely accessible and cultivatable activity that embraced the whole of life, and he firmly believed in the educational significance of it.
The central organising principle in Moholy-Nagy’s diverse activities was light: light defined his paintings, sculptures, photoplastics, photograms, photographs, typography and theatre sets. He did not regard photography as a tool for the perfect imaging of reality; rather, it was his conviction that the camera offered new possibilities for modern people, and finally liberates art from the obligation to depict, to copy reality. The years at the Bauhaus proved to be an experience that defined his entire life. He settled in Chicago in 1937, where he founded the ‘New Bauhaus’ and soon the Institute of Design and worked until the end of his life as an experimental, innovative artist, theorist and teacher. László Moholy-Nagy regarded art as a non-hierarchical, widely accessible and cultivatable activity that embraced the whole of life, and he firmly believed in the educational significance of it.
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Paintings such as The Big Wheel (1920–1), with its letters and numbers and diagramlike structure, and Black Quarter Circle with Red Stripes (1921), with its seemingly translucent planes, show Moholy’s distinctive take on Dada and Constructivism. This period also saw Moholy’s first experiments with camera-less photography, describing his so-called photograms as ‘painting with light’. By arranging mundane objects such as spring coils and cog wheels into geometric compositions and exposing specially coated photographic paper to light of varying intensities, Moholy created ghost-like images of peculiar intensity.
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