THE NEW BAUHAUS • SCHOOL OF DESIGN IN CHICAGO
PHOTOGRAPHS 1937 - 1944
Hattula Moholy-Nagy [Essay]
Hattula Moholy-Nagy [Essay]: THE NEW BAUHAUS • SCHOOL OF DESIGN IN CHICAGO • PHOTOGRAPHS 1937 - 1944. New York: Banning and Associates, 1993. First edition. Slim octavo. Photographically printed thick wrappers. 56 pp. 34 black and white plates. Wrappers lightly worn. A nearly fine copy.
8.5 x 11 perfect-bound softcover catalogue with 56 pages and 34 full-page plates by László Moholy-Nagy, György Kepes, Arthur Siegel, Nathan Lerner and James Hamilton Brown. Introduction by Adam Boxer. Essays by Stephen Prokopoff, Nathan Lerner, Myron Kozman and Hattula Moholy-Nagy. Selected Bibliography.
Presents the works that emanated from the Chicago institutions known as the New Bauhaus, The School of Design and the Institute of Design, which offered the most important and influential photography programs in the United States from the 1930's through the 1960's. No other photography school or program since then has matched let alone surpassed the achievement of the schools and their enduring influence.
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. 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.