László Moholy-Nagy

Lifetime

1895–1946

Country

Germany / USA

László Moholy-Nagy, born László Weisz on 20 July 1895 in Bácsborsód, Hungary, studied law at the University of Budapest from 1913. During the First World War, he served as an artillery officer in the Austro-Hungarian army and was wounded on the Eastern Front in 1917. He took up painting in 1918, moved to Vienna in 1919 and to Berlin a year later, where he held his first solo exhibition at the Der Sturm gallery in 1922.

In 1923, Walter Gropius brought him to Bauhaus in Weimar. Moholy-Nagy took over Johannes Itten’s preliminary course, taught jointly with Josef Albers, and headed the metal workshop, where Marianne Brandt later succeeded him. Together with Gropius, he edited the Bauhausbücher series and the “bauhaus” journal from 1924; the series included his books “Malerei, Photographie, Film” (1925) and “Von Material zu Architektur” (1929). He also worked with photograms, for which he coined the term “Fotoplastik”.

After leaving Bauhaus in 1928, he ran his own studio in Berlin. Between 1928 and 1930, he built the kinetic object Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne, later called the Light-Space Modulator, which was shown in 1930 at a Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Paris. From 1933, he designed advertisements for Jenaer Glas for Schott & Gen. Via Amsterdam (1934), he moved to London (1935), where he worked in advertising, photography and special effects for the film “Things to Come” (1936).

In 1937, at the invitation of Walter Paepcke, he took over the direction of New Bauhaus in Chicago. The school closed in 1938 and resumed its activities in February 1939 as the School of Design, renamed the Institute of Design in 1944. Moholy-Nagy died of leukaemia on 24 November 1946 in Chicago; his book “Vision in Motion” was published in 1947.