No other teacher at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, nor nearly any other artist of the 1920s in Germany, an epoch rich in utopian designs, developed such a wide range of ideas and activities as László Moholy-Nagy, who was born in Bácsborsód in Southern Hungary in 1895 ? of all artists at the Bauhaus he was the most eclectic and productive. His pioneering theories on art as a testing ground for new forms of expression and their application to all spheres of modern life are still of influence today.
His oeuvre bears evidence to the fact that he considered painting and film, photography and sculpture, stage set design, drawing, and the photogram to be of equal importance. He continually fell back upon these means of expression, using them alternately, varying them, and taking them up again as parts of a universal concept whose pivot was the alert, curious, and unrestrained experimental mind of the ?multimedia? artist himself. Long before people began to talk about ?media design? and professional ?marketing,? Moholy-Nagy worked in these fields, too ? as a guiding intellectual force in terms of new technical, design and educational instruments. ?All design areas of life are closely interlinked?, he wrote about 1925 and was, despite his motto insisting on ?the unity of art and technology,? no uncritical admirer of the machine age, but rather a humanist who was open-minded about technology. His basic attitude as an artist, which exemplifies the idealistic and utopian thinking of an entire era, may be summed up as aimed at improving the quality of life, avoiding specialization, and employing science and technology for the enrichment and heightening of human experience.
After he had left the Bauhaus in 1928, he founded his own office in Berlin, where he, among other things, developed advertising solutions for Wilhelm Wagenfeld?s designs for the Jena Glassworks. Faced with the Nazis? seizure of power, Moholy-Nagy emigrated to the United States via Amsterdam and Great Britain and founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937 and, after it had been closed, the Chicago School (and later Institute) of Design in 1939, where he continued to champion an integration of art, science, and technology. László Moholy-Nagy died of leukemia in Chicago on 24 November 1946.
Presenting about 170 works ? paintings, photographs and photograms, sculptures and films, as well as stage set designs and typographical projects ? the retrospective encompasses all phases of his oeuvre. On the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the foundation of the Bauhaus, it offers a survey of the enormous range of Moholy- Nagy?s creative output to the public for the first time since the last major exhibition of his work in Kassel in 1991. Never having been built before 2009, the artist?s spatial design Raum der Gegenwart (Room of Today), which brings together many of his theories, will be realized in the context of the exhibition.
Beside ?Art for the millions. 100 sculptures of the Mao-age? the Kunsthalle Schirn presents a second outstanding exhibition, which are worth a visit. An excellent catalogue has been publishedalongside the exhibition.
CATALOG: László Moholy-Nagy. Edited by Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein. With a preface by Max Hollein and texts by Ulrike Gärtner, Kai-Uwe Hemken, Gerald Köhler, Herbert Molderings, Ingrid Pfeiffer, and Joyce Tsai. German and English editions, 192 pages and 220 illustrations each, Prestel Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-7913-5002-8 (English), ISBN 978-3-7913-5001-1
(German), 29.80 ? (Schirn) / 49.95 ? (trade edition).
