WORLD BENEATH THE MICROSCOPE
W. Watson-Baker
W. Watson-Baker: WORLD BENEATH THE MICROSCOPE. New York and London: The Studio, Ltd, 1935. First edition. Quarto. Red cloth decorated in yellow. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Unpaginated. 80 gravure reproductions. Elaborate period design and typography. Original cloth lightly worn. Endpapers foxed and signed in pencil by previous owner. Unclipped but defective jacket heavily chipped to edges with some loss. The orange ink coverage uniformly lightened to spine and front panel. A very good copy of this New Vision classic in a good example of the rare dust jacket.
7.5 x 10 book with 80 gravure images photographs selected by the author. The New Vision series was conceived and published by the Studio in London, and included “Aircraft” by Le Corbusier and “Locomotive” by Raymond Loewy. In “Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City,” editors Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton, and Marina Lathouri write: “This book was the second volume of the series entitled ‘The New Vision.’ Le Corbusier’s ‘Aircraft’ was the first—a fact that highlights the correspondence between aerial and microscopic views. It should also be noted that our view of the moon (or any other heavenly body) from the Earth is, in fact, an aerial one.” So there.
One of László Moholy-Nagy’s main focuses was photography, in which, from 1922, he was initially guided by the technical expertise of his wife and collaborator Lucia. In his books “Malerei, Photographie, Film” [1925] and “The New Vision, from Material to Architecture” [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.
Upon its publication in Britain, Karl Blossfeldt's photo-album, “Art Forms in Nature,” was something of a publishing phenomenon, striking a chord with the general public and going through no fewer than three print-runs between 1929 and 1935. Featuring a suite of magnified photographs of flower heads, seeds and plant tendrils, the book's success powerfully represented the current of interest in close-up nature photography contemporaneously experienced in Britain. Indeed, between 1929 and 1939 a wide range of publications were released to popular acclaim that included lavish albumen or silver-gelatin prints of microscopic forms newly disclosed to the human eye through photomicrographic technology. At the same time, the embryonic documentary cinema movement capitalised upon public enthusiasm for scientific discovery by releasing a range of natural history films that made use of pioneering micro-cinematographic techniques.
In his postscript to Moholy’s “Painting, Photography, Film” [March 1969] Otto Stelzer wrote “László Moholy-Nagy saw photography not only as a means of reproducing reality and relieving the painter of this function. He recognized its power of discovering reality. “The nature which speaks to the camera is a different nature from the one which speaks to the eye,” wrote Walter Benjamin years after Moholy had developed the experimental conditions for Benjamin’s theory. The other nature discovered by the camera influenced what Moholy, after he had emigrated, was to call The New Vision. It alters our insight into the real world . . . .
“In 1925, when the Bauhaus book now being re-issued first appeared, Moholy was regarded as a Utopian. That Moholy, this youthful radical, with his fanaticism and his boundless energy, radiated terror too, even among his colleagues at the Bauhaus, is understandable. “Only optics, mechanics, and the desire to put the old static painting out of action,” wrote Feininger to his wife at the time: “There is incessant talk of cinema, optics, mechanics, projection and continuous motion and even of mechanically produced optical transparencies, multicolored, in the finest colors of the spectrum, which can be stored in the same way as gramophone records . . . . ”
“Moholy was prepared to subordinate the human eye to the “photo eye” (Franz Roh). A remarkable parallel may be drawn: at the end of the 19th century Konrad Fiedler wrote of the “mechanical activity of artistic creation,” of a “realm of the visible, in which only the formative activity of the visible, no longer the eye, can advance.” Yet Fiedler belonged to the other side. He meant the mechanical activity of the hand — finesse de doigt. The hand takes up the development and continues it “at the very point at which the eye itself has reached the limit of its activity” — a philosophical basis for “action painting.” “But Fiedler’s conclusion is true also of other mechanical activities which create visible things. It is true of photography, in so far as it is handled, as Moholy wished, not traditionally but experimentally. He called for: “Elimination of perspectival representation,” “Cameras with lenses and systems of mirrors which can take the object from all sides at once,” “Cameras constructed on optical laws different from those of our eyes.” He calls for “scientifically objective optical principles,” the oneness of art, science, technique, the machine. The astonishing extent of his own technical and scientific knowledge is revealed in the wealth of technological Utopias buried in the footnotes of his Bauhaus book, Painting, Photography, Film — many of these having meanwhile, as befits true Utopias, advanced out of the category of possibility into the category of reality.
“The artist Moholy’s feeling for the camera was in its time radical enough, as Feininger’s uneasiness shows. Within photography, however, Moholy moved with surprising tolerance and universality, very differently from our present-day photographers who specialize in either subjective or objective photography, reportage or “photographics.” Moholy admitted all this, provided that the photographic means were applied in purity in the service of a “new vision.” His Bauhaus book exhibits with equal pleasure the zeppelin and the Parisian grisette, a head-louse and a racing cyclist, Palucca and a factory chimney, the interior of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, seen from above, and a bathing girl in the sand (also from above), the spiral nebula in the Hounds and an X-rayed frog, the camouflage of the zebra in Africa and a pond-fishing experimental station in Bavaria, the eye of a marabou and the “refined effect of lighting, materials, factures, roundnesses, and curves” of a Gloria Swanson from Hollywood . . . . “