MALEREI, FOTOGRAFIE, FILM
Bauhausbücher 8
László Moholy-Nagy
Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1927 [Bauhausbücher 8]. Second edition (textually identical to the 1924 first edition, the primary difference is the spelling of ‘Fotographie’). Text in German. Slim quarto. Plain card wrappers. Photo illustrated dust jacket attached to spine and endsheets [as issued]. 140 pp. 100 black and white illustrations. Letterpressed text and illustrations with elaborate graphic design throughout by Moholy-Nagy. Front free endpaper with upper and lower corners neatly cut out [? — see scan]. Former owner signature to front free endpaper. Jacket with mild wear to spine junctures and lightly rubbed but 100% complete. Interior bright and clean. Other than that Mrs. Lincoln . . . a very good copy.
7.125 x 9-inch softcover book with 140 pages and 100 black and white photographs. “[Walter] Gropius had invited the twenty-eight-year-old Hungarian phenom onto the Bauhaus faculty in 1923, and 'Malerei Fotografie Film' is Moholy's first attempt to lay out his entire theory and program for photography, and ultimately, for the transformation of human vision . . . The book's bold typography and design enacted Moholy's concept of 'typofoto,' involving the integration of type and images, which was further elaborated in his two later theoretical works, 'Von Material zu Architektur' and 'Vision in Motion” [Roth].
Includes photography by Alfred Steiglitz, Albert Renger-Pazsch, L. Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Lucia Moholy, Hannah Höch, Lotte Reininger, Viking Eggeling, Knud Lönberg-Holm and others.
Original cover design and interior typography by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy serves as a valuable reminder of the graphic design pioneered at the Bauhaus by Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer. The layout of the pages designed by Moholy-Nagy in 1927 -- bold sans-serif captions surrounded by lots of white space; compositions composed of arrows, dots, photographs, and heavy ruled lines -- is much more like a movie storyboard or a musical score. It conveys a suggestion of imploding optical and retinal phenomena, much like driving down the Los Angeles Freeway at 70 mph or jolting through Philadelphia on the Metroliner.
Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy served as Editorial Directors for the 14 titles in the Bauhausbücher [Bauhaus Book] series published in Dessau from 1925 to 1929. The series served as an extension of the Bauhaus teaching tradition with volumes by Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Adolf Meyer, Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy or as as anthologies of work produced by a select group of contemporaries such as Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, J. J. P. Oud, Kasimir Malewitsch and Albert Gleizes.
“In this theoretical treatise in text and pictures Moholy-Nagy condemns the subjectivity of pictorialism (using an Alfred Stieglitz picture as a punchbag), and sets out the framework of what he calls the 'New Vision', featuring his own work and that of others. The New Vision thesis put forward in this book argues that the camera should be left alone to record whatever happens to be before the lens: 'In the photographic camera we have the most reliable aid to a beginning of objective vision.’
This is a typically modernist call to respect the inherent qualities of a medium - form follows function - but is very different from the American purist dogma of the 'straight' photography variety. Moholy-Nagy, heavily influenced by the Constructivists, embraces film, montage, typography, cameraless photography, news and ulitarian photography. Throughout, the pedagogical, utopian tone of the Bauhaus is in evidence. The images selected display all the formal innovations of New Vision photography - dramatically angled chimneys, patterns of flight and movement and so on. But Moholy-Nagy stresses the medium's distinctions from fine art. Photography, especially combined with type, would be a new 'visual literature'. Objectivity, clarity, communication rather than transcendental subjectivity were the primary goals of the new photography.
The modern photographer would be a worker, adept at displaying his skills in the service of society, and equally at home in the related fields of photomontage, typography or film. The photographer of the future would be a contemporary renaissance man or woman - and none fitted the bill better than Moholy-Nagy - the renaissance sparked this time not by the printing press but by the camera: "The traditional painting has become a historical relic and is finished with. Eyes and ears have been opened and are filled at every moment with a wealth of optical and phonetic wonders. A few more vitally progressive years, a few more ardent followers of photographic technique and it will be a matter of universal knowledge that photography was one of the most important factors in the dawn of a new life." (Parr & Badger, The Photobook, vol. 1, p. 92/93).
Prior to the 20th century, when artists were called upon to illustrate texts or provide posters for advertising, their function was to provide visual images that bore no formal relationship to the message. In other words, the illustration was simply a diversion.
More than any other group, the expositional, programmatic set of Bauhaus Bücher engineers one of the most consistently remarkable episodes in the history of the art of the book. A series of 14 volumes (1925–1930) edited by Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, the books rigorously demonstrate format as a systematic support of content and are discussed in Jan Tschichold’s classic and influential Die Neue Typograhie of 1928. In the Bauhaus Books the precepts and sense of content are palpably clear in the logic and decisions of design and format. Content is not so much conveyed by as in the carefully considered means and methods of presentation. Nowhere is the book more completely accomplished as a mental instrument; form and content virtually assume the operation of a mathematical proposition, arriving at a language in which everything formal belongs to syntax and not to vocabulary.
The Bauhaus Bücher series serve as testaments to the graphic design pioneered at the Bauhaus by Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer. The layout of the pages designed by Moholy-Nagy—bold sans-serif captions floating in white space; compositions composed of arrows, dots and heavy ruled lines—is much more like a movie storyboard or a musical score.
. . . typography is an instrument of communication. It has to be clear communication in the most penetrating form. Clarity must be particularly emphasized since this is the essence of our writing as compared with pictorial communication of ages ago. Our intellectual approach to the world is individually precise in contrast to the former individually and later collectively amorphous. Foremost, therefore: absolute clarity in all typographical works. Legibility—communication, that is, must never suffer from a priori assumed aesthetics. The letter types must never be squeezed into a pre-determined form.” — László Moholy-Nagy, 1923
László Moholy-Nagy [Hungarian, 1895 – 1946] was a born teacher, convinced that everyone had talent. In 1923, he joined the staff of the Bauhaus, which had been founded by Walter Gropius at Weimar four years before. Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger and Schlemmer were already teaching there. He was brought in at a time when the school was undergoing a decisive change of policy, shedding its original emphasis on handcraft. The driving force was now "the unity of art and technology.” Moholy-Nagy was entrusted with teaching the preliminary course in principles of form, materials and construction - the basis of the Bauhaus's educational program. He shared teaching duties with the painter Josef Albers, whose career was to develop in parallel with his.
The hyper-energetic Moholy-Nagy also ran the metal workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later in the purpose-designed buildings at Dessau. The metal shop was the most successful of departments at the Bauhaus in fulfilling Gropius's vision of art for mass production, redefining the role of the artist to embrace that of designer as we have now come to understand the term. The workshop experimented with glass and Plexiglas as well as metal in developing the range of lighting that has almost come to define the Bauhaus. The lamps were produced in small production runs, and some were taken up by outside factories. The royalties made a welcome contribution to the school's always precarious finances.
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 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.