MOHOLY-NAGY SCHOLARSHIP AUCTION CATALOGUE
Institute of Design, Arts Club of Chicago
Institute of Design, Arts Club of Chicago: MOHOLY-NAGY SCHOLARSHIP AUCTION CATALOGUE. Chicago, IL: Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, n. d [circa 1951 – 1954]. Four panel single fold brochure printed in three colors to recto and one color to verso and machine folded for mailing [as issued]. Interior panel finger smudged and edges suunned, but a very good copy of a rare survivor.
9.75 x 13-inch single fold brochure for the Moholy-Nagy scholarship auction “organized in 1948 in memory of laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the founder of the Institute of Design. The purpose of this auction is to raise funds for deserving students who would be unable to continue their studies without scholarship aid.”
Features a list of 128 items donated by Robert Matta, Harold Krisel, Arthur Siegel, Aaron Siskind,Emerson Woelffer, Ossip Zadkine, Art Sissabaugh, Cosmo Campoli, Richard Koppe, Harry Callahan, Harry Bertoia, Burton Kramer, Max Bill, Misch Kohn, Serge Chermayeff, George Nelson, Angelo Testa, and many others.
One of Chicago's great cultural achievements, the Institute of Design was among the most important schools of photography in twentieth-century America. It began as an outpost of experimental Bauhaus education and was home to an astonishing group of influential teachers and students, including László Moholy-Nagy, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind.
In 1937 László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), a Hungarian Jew fleeing Nazi Germany, was brought to Chicago by the city's industrial leaders to establish a school of industrial design to be modeled after the original Bauhaus in Germany, the pioneering school of art, design and architecture where Moholy had taught previously. Although the New Bauhaus lasted only one year (1937-1938), it was quickly reorganized as the School of Design (1939-1944) and eventually became the Institute of Design (1944-present).
The photographs produced in the ID's early years were controlled studio experiments, more concerned with form and materials than with imitating works by photography's masters or documenting the world. Moholy's photograms, for example, are elegant light studies that reveal the complete scale of gray between black and white and illustrate photography's abstract potential.
Along similar lines, faculty member György Kepes (1906-2001) produced an extensive series of photographs of his wife in which he explored solarization and negative exposure and even painting on the picture's surface. Nathan Lerner (1913-1997), a student and later teacher at the ID, worked with refractive lenses and photomontage and used his light box to test the pictorial effects of pure light. Another student, Milton Halberstadt (1919-2000), produced a triple -exposed portrait to showcase photography's capacity for simultaneous vision. At a moment when American photography was largely confined to more conventional portraiture, landscape or documentary reportage, these experimental and abstract pictures revealed the enormous creative potential of the medium.
As the school grew, Moholy hired Arthur Siegel (1913-1978) and Harry Callahan (1912-1999) to lead a new, four-year program in photography. After Siegel resigned, Callahan hired Aaron Siskind (1903-1991), and the two formed a superbly effective teaching team that is now legendary. Under their leadership, the program's emphasis shifted from experimentation toward the development of individual vision and subjective expression.