Antoine Sammut: Laszlo Moholy Nagy

Laszlo Moholy Nagy was born in Hungary in 1895. In the war of 1914 he joined the Austro-Hungarian Army as an artillery officer. In the War he was wounded and whilst he was recovering at the military hospital he began drawing his first sketches. After the war he continued s he studied in Law in Budapest but with the political and cultural he felt that his true passion was in Painting and abandoned his Law career and devoted himself to painting.

After the war ended Moholy Nagy moved to Vienna in 1919. In Vienna he started to shy away from figurative painting and adopted a more rationalised and non-objective techniques. He started combining Lines and geometric shapes with iconographic elements. His first non-objective work was produced in 1919 entitled 'perpe' , this work consisted of industrial images combined with letter shapes, lines and a minimal colour scheme.

'perpe'
Laszlo Moholy Nagy
1919

Moholy Nagy stay in Vienna was brief, he then moved to Berlin. After the war , Germany became a hot spot for art and artist and Berlin was the centre for the growing international avant-garde movements. Influences like Expressionism, Dada, De Stijl and Constructivism brought by important figure of the avant garde including El lissitsky, Alexander Rodchenko and Teo van Doesburg. This allowed Moholy Nagy to be influenced by this diversified styles and art forms.

Due to Moholy Nagy's Easter European roots he was greatly fond of the eastern artist especially the Russian culture. Moholy-Nagy was particularly attracted to art by Malevich and El Lissitsky. He examined the works by Rodchenko, Tatlin and Kandinsky in detail and learned about the cultural aspects of the Russian Revolution. His own style would be influenced by Suprematism, Russian Constructivism and Dada, but only in its form.

From 1921 onward his work started incorporating all of these influences . He started creating paintings incorporating forms and movement, exploring colour , space , light and transparency. Such elements can bes observed below.

László Moholy-Nagy. Konstruktionen. Kestenermappe 6 (Constructions. Kestner Portfolio 6). (1923)

Konstruktionen. Kestenermappe 6
(Constructions. Kestner Portfolio 6)
Laszlo Moholy Nagy
1923

László Moholy-Nagy. Q 1 Suprematistic. 1923

Q 1 Suprematistic
Laszlo Moholy Nagy
1923

A 19
Laszlo Moholy Nagy
1927

After his work in painting the next technique he adopted was photography as a new artistic medium. He got acquainted with photography when he met a talented lady photographer, Lucia Schultz. Moholy Nagy and Schultz got married in 1922. He started experimenting with the camera, which lead to the production of photo collages ( which were first introduced by the Dada movement). he also started to experiment with different views when taking his photos which included bird-eye views, diagonal perspectives and unusual cropping. Through out these experimentations with the camera Moholy Nagy also experimented with the photographic process when developing photos, he experimented with the different levels of exposures and exposing light sensitive paper. this lead to Moholy Nagy creating the Photogram.

Such example can be viewed below;

Photogram IV
László Moholy-Nagy 1
922

Funkturm (radio tower) Berlin
László Moholy-Nagy
1926

Head
LaszloMoholy Nagy
1926

untitled
Laszlo Moholy Nagy
1923-25

untitled
Laszlo Moholy Nagy
1923-25

In 1922 Moholy Nagy secured numerous exhibitions in Germany and in the same year he took part in the Constructivist-Dadaist congress in Weimar. In Weimar he met Walter Gropius the founder of the Bauhaus academy of design. A year after ,1923, Gropius approached Moholy Nagy and asked him to teach at the Bauhaus and was given control of the preliminary course.
When he arrived at the Bauhaus he began the concept of meeting and combine art with industry. Moholy Nagy brought to the Bauhaus his knowledge of Constructivism, typographical material and his exceptional talent in Photography and photo-montage. At the Bauhaus Moholy Nagy came up with a new concept of combining typeography and photography which he coined as 'Typo-Photo' which began what has become the central medium of graphic design.

Moholy Nagy's in his years at the Bauhaus collaborated with Walter Gropius and developed and published the series of 14 ‘Bauhausbücher’ (Bauhaus Books) that acted as the manifest of the school. He designed the visual identity for the school’s publishing house in which he combined a circle, a square and a triangle, fundamental geometric shapes in Bauhaus design.

Moholy Nagy also played a big role in creating a new typeface at the Bauhaus which worked along with other talented tutors, including Jan Tschichold and Schwitters. The new typography combined photography with asymmetric composition, Sans serif lowercase type in a grid, geometric form absence of any decoration

logo for Bauhaus Publishing
László Moholy-Nagy

Neue Gestaltung
Piet Mondriaan
attributed to
László Moholy-Nagy
1924

With the out break of world war two the Nazi brought a halt to the Bauhaus and Moholy Nagy and his colleges fled Germany to neutral grounds. In 1937 he moved to Chicago and founded a design school 'The New Bauhaus: American School of Design'.