MOHOLY-NAGY 1895 – 1946
Roy Gussow [Installation Designer]
Roy Gussow [Installation Designer]: MOHOLY-NAGY 1895 – 1946. Colorado Springs, CO: Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 1950. Original edition. Slim quarto. Thick blue printed stapled wrappers. 8 pp. 3 halftone reproductions. Quotations, chronology and catalogue with period correct design and typography. Wrappers lightly worn and creased with a parallel fold to textblock, but a very good copy of a scarce catalog.
7 x 8.9375 stapled catalog with 8 beautifully designed and printed pages featuring 3 black and white halftone reproductions of a photogram, artists’ portrait and painting, a Chronology, a Catalogue and Quotations from VISION IN MOTION.
Catalog prepared for an exhibition titled “Moholy-Nagy 1895 – 1946” at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center from May 15 – 31, 1950. Institute of Design alumnus Roy Gussow credited with the exhibition installation design, and we are comfortable crediting the striking two-color cover design to him as well.
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.
Roy Gussow, Abstract Sculptor, Dies at 92 By Dennis Hevesi, published in the New York Times, Feb. 20, 2011: Roy Gussow, an abstract sculptor whose polished stainless-steel works with swooping contours gleam in public squares and corporate spaces, died on Feb. 11 in Queens. He was 92 and had lived and worked in Long Island City, Queens, for nearly half a century.
Large-scale pieces by Mr. Gussow stand in more than a dozen cities, including outside the Civic Center in Tulsa, Okla., the Xerox building in Rochester and insurance company buildings in Hartford, and on the campus of North Carolina State University.
In 1967, Mr. Gussow helped fabricate a sculpture designed by José de Rivera: a 16-foot-long continuous swirl of stainless steel in front of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of History and Technology, now the Museum of American History. Mounted on a granite-sheathed tower, it stands 24 feet high and was one of the first abstract sculptures to adorn a major public building in Washington.
Mr. Gussow’s smaller works are in the collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney and the Brooklyn Museum. When some of his sculptures were exhibited at the prominent Borgenicht Gallery on upper Madison Avenue in 1973, James R. Mellow wrote in The New York Times, “This is precisionist work of a high degree, every effect calculated for maximum effect and carried off with perfect aplomb.”
Born in Brooklyn on Nov. 12, 1918, Roy Gussow was one of three children of Abraham and Mildred Gussow. He wanted to be a farmer and went to Farmingdale State College on Long Island but changed course and earned a degree in landscape architecture in 1938.
While serving in the United States Army in France during World War II, Mr. Gussow met the painter George Kachergis, who urged him to pursue a career in art and design. Returning to the United States, he enrolled at the Institute of Design in Illinois, where the cubist sculptor Alexander Archipenko became a mentor. Mr. Archipenko took him to his summer school in Woodstock, N.Y., in 1946. There he met Mary Maynard, whom he would later marry. She died in 2004.
Mr. Gussow taught at Bradley University, the Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs and the North Carolina State University School of Design in Raleigh before moving to Manhattan in 1962. Two years later he moved to an industrialized section of Long Island City, becoming one of the first of a wave of artists to settle there.
In a building that had been a silver-plating factory, he set up his home and his studio and began bringing in drill presses, polishing grinders, a hydraulic lift and a band saw that his daughter said was “the size of a truck.” All to fashion sleek, seemingly seamless works.”