L. MOHOLY-NAGY
Paintings, Sculptures, Photograms and Photographs
by L. Moholy-Nagy, Institute Of Design, Chicago
Siegfried Giedion, Frantisek Kalivoda, László Moholy-Nagy
[Institute of Design]: L. MOHOLY-NAGY [Paintings, Sculptures, Photograms And Photographs By L. Moholy-Nagy, Institute Of Design, Chicago]. [Chicago: Institute of Design, 1946]. Original edition. Slim quarto. Thick printed stapled wrappers with overlapping rear flap. 16 pp. 14 halftone reproductions. 2 line art illustrations. Period correct design and typography. Fragile rear flap starting. Wrappers lightly worn, soiled and edgeworn. Interior lightly handled and thumbed. A very good copy of a rare catalog.
8.75 x 11 stapled catalog with 16 beautifully designed and printed pages featuring 14 black and white halftone reproductions as well as two pieces of line art. With texts from TELEHOR [Brno, 1936] by Siegfried Giedion and Frantisek Kalivoda and VISION IN MOTION [in preparation] by László Moholy-Nagy.
In 1937 former Bauhaus Master László Moholy-Nagy accepted the invitation of a group of Midwest business leaders to set up an Industrial Design school in Chicago. The New Bauhaus opened in the Fall of 1937 financed by the Association of Arts and Industries as a recreation of the Bauhaus curriculum with its workshops and holistic vision in the United States.
Moholy-Nagy drew on several émigrés affiliated with the former Bauhaus to fill the ranks of the faculty, including György Kepes and Marli Ehrman. The school struggled with financial issues and insufficient enrollment and survived only with the aid from grants of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations as well as from donations from numerous Chicago businesses. The New Bauhaus was renamed the Institute of Design in 1944 and the school finally merged with the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1949.
In Chicago Moholy aimed at liberating the creative potential of his students through disciplined experimentation with materials, techniques, and forms. The focus on natural and human sciences was increased, and photography grew to play a more prominent role at the school in Chicago than it had done in Germany. Training in mechanical techniques was more sophisticated than it had been in Germany. Emerging from the basic course, various workshops were installed, such as "light, photography, film, publicity", "textile, weaving, fashion", "wood, metal, plastics", "color, painting, decorating" and "architecture". The most important achievement at the Chicago Bauhaus was probably in photography, under the guidance of teachers such as György Kepes, Nathan Lerner, Arthur Siegel or Harry Callahan.
Moholy-Nagy served as Director of the New Bauhaus in its various permutations until his death in 1946.
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) was born in Bacsbarsod, Hungary. Injured during World War I, he turned to painting and made contact with the Budapest avant-garde in 1918. In 1922, Moholy-Nagy participated in the International Dada-Constructivist Congress in Weimar and began experiments in photography with his wife Lucia. Appointed master at the Bauhaus in 1923, he made his first film, Berliner Stilleden, in 1926. Although always a painter and designer, Moholy-Nagy became a key figure in photography in Germany in the 1920's. In 1928 Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus and traveled to Amsterdam and London. His teachings and publications of photographic experimentations were crucial to the international development of the New Vision. In 1937 he was invited to found the New Bauhaus in Chicago by the Association of Arts and Industries.