the Art of Moholy-Nagy

...It is difficult to realize that Moholy is not still alive, so timely is his work for the space age...

...One of the most striking impressions conveyed by Moholy's paintings and "space modulators" is that of space...

...Moholy-Nagy points out, it is not necessary for one form to exist to the absolute exclusion of another...

...There was friction between Moholy and the sponsoring group which misunderstood his revolutionary ideas and withdrew financial support at the end of the first year...

...A painting done in 1926, titled "Tl," is done with oil on metal...

...One circle is blue and red, another gray and red, and the third white...

...It was a geometric-abstract movement in painting and sculpture, and its first forms were hanging and relief constructions...

...The space modulators consist of a layer of plastic, incised or with some painting, over another surface bearing painted form...

...the Art of Moholy-Nagy by CHARLES-GENE McDANIEL During his lifetime, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was acclaimed for his teaching and his writing, and his designs for industry were appreciated by those for whom they were produced...

...Mrs...

...It was in Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper and center of avant garde architecture, that Moholy established the New Bauhaus in 1937 in the old Marshall Field mansion on South Prairie Avenue...

...He was joined by most of the staff from the New Bauhaus...

...Constructivism, in fact, began principally as a Russian movement, akin both to Cubist collage and Futurism...

...Moholy died in Chicago on November 24, 1946, of leukemia...

...He also did pictures in tempera and watercolor and collages...

...Undaunted, Moholy, using his own resources, reopened under the name School of Design, later Institute of Design, in a building next door to the present Museum of Contemporary Art on East Ontario Street...

...Everyday materials, the things people lived with, became art media...

...For the first time since 1947 a major exhibition of his Work was mounted in 1969, and the acclaim it has been accorded in showings across the country would seem to insure a place of permanence for Moholy-Nagy on the rolls of artists of distinction throughout the history of fine art...

...The involvement of all, or at least multiple, senses in esthetic experience is an essential of the dominant contemporary artistic movements...

...While the Moholy-Nagy show was still on at the museum, a huge sign designed by Claes Oldenburg and depicting a "frayed wire" to show "the exposed nerve of an uptight Chicago" was painted in bright raw red on the wall of an adjoining building...

...His experimentation with materials lends part of the quality of crisp cleanness to work done on metallic surfaces, especially paintings done on aluminum...

...The exhibition includes portraits and drawings done "It is difficult to realize Moholy is not still alive, so timely is his work for the space age...

...Moholy-Nagy points out in her introduction to the catalogue for the show, adherents of this movement sought to extend its new ethics " 'from an ink bottle label to a new city', from theater, film, dance, and graphics to the reform of visual education from kindergarten to the involvement of every adult 'willing to see.' " "The new dimension of constructivism has no other purpose than to participate in life," Moholy-Nagy and L. Kassak wrote in their constructivist manifesto...

...in New York, where, in 1947, the last retrospective of Moholy's work was shown at the Guggenheim's predecessor, the Museum of Non-Objective Paintings...

...Moholy-Nagy recalls that just ten days before his death Moholy said to his friend Robert Jay Wolff: "I am not sure how my paintings will be judged...

...The label is literal, relating to the materials and methods of the artists, who "constructed" their pictures and sculptures with materials which then were unorthodox, such as glass, wire, and sheet metal...

...Wall painting and sidewalk chalk contests carry this workshop's efforts to the people of the community and invite their participation...

...The Nazis finally closed the Bauhaus in 1933 because of its advanced notions...

...Rising political pressures brought his resignation, along with Gropius, from the Bauhaus in 1928...

...It also has sponsored rock concerts and light shows and modern dance and fashion...

...The final showing will be at the Guggenheim beginning in February...

...Constructivism derived from Futurism the theory that movement in space was more important than static solidity, and from Cubism the depth of its geometric forms...

...Like other innovative artists, Moholy's unique vision developed through more traditional forms of artistic expression...

...about 1920 in ink and pencil in which the subjects are recognizable...

...A few of the early pictures are reminiscent of Braque and Leger and Mondrian, but whatever schools or movements or artists influenced him soon were assimilated into his unique style...

...More than ever before, constructivism has relevance in the increasing popularity of "total theater," theater and art of involvement, "happenings," and this-and-that-"ins...

...After the Chicago showing, the exhibit moved on to museums in Santa Barbara, Berkeley, and Seattle...

...Upon discharge from the army in 1918, he returned to Budapest to complete his law degree, then left for Vienna in 1919, where the "Ma" group began publishing a contemporary art quarterly, Horizont...

...Much of this too can be seen in modern dance...

...By that time it was situated in Berlin and directed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the great architect, who later was associated with the Illinois Institute of Technology, which ultimately incorporated the outgrowth of Moholy's Chicago Bauhaus...

...Also not unlike some other major artists, he embarked on a career in a totally different field, having trained for the law in his native Hungary, where he was born in Bacsbarsod in 1895...

...The graceful bend of his clear plexiglass sculptures has the line of a portion of an orbit, and the perspective of lines and geometric forms, with no recognizable earth objects, instantly calls to mind outer space...

...An announcement of the monumental sign noted that it was sponsored by the Museum "in an attempt to reach beyond its exhibition galleries and bring art out into the street"—a further realization of the constructivist philosophy...

...After suffering shell shock when he was in the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1915, he started making pencil and crayon sketches while recovering...

...Moholy's first show was held in a Berlin gallery in 1922, and, after seeing the show, Walter Gropius invited him to join the Bauhaus at Weimar...

...This philosophy has found additional expression in the Museum's support of an "Art & Soul" workshop in a rundown Negro neighborhood where youths without formal art training are creating unusually sophisticated works which reflect their environment and their concerns...

...In 1955 the institute moved to the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology on the south side, having become a department of IIT in 1949...

...Further, its emphasis on student participation in school affairs (1970 student revolutionaries please note) and individual creativity over rote recitation found a salubrious environment in a land where John Dewey's philosophy had taken hold...

...The next year he moved to Berlin and devoted himself to Dadaist collages and experiments with photograms (photographs made without a camera...

...Part of the price he paid for being so multi-faceted and so attractive as a personality was that his work as an artist was overshadowed by his other accomplishments...

...The Bauhaus was easily exportable as a school, emphasizing as it did simplicity to the point of severity in architecture and being, therefore, independent of the European environment...

...The exhibition, however, is really an international undertaking, with works lent from collections in Venezuela, Germany, and the Netherlands, as well as numerous public and private collections in the United States, including that of the artist's widow, Mrs...

...His HPSCHD at the University of Illinois is the latest acme of light and sound experience...

...books and television coexist, as do space rockets and ocean liners...

...Many of those who knew him can now fully appreciate his artistic productivity, and the many more who did not know him—and who were only marginally acquainted with his work, if at all—may "discover" him...

...His paintings and sculpture have been little known since his untimely death in 1946, outside of a few esoteric circles and among those still alive who remember him...

...Not the least of the advocates of participatory multi-art is John Cage, the composer, who once was associated with Moholy at the New Bauhaus in Chicago...

...He was severely wounded in 1917, and during convalescence he began making grease crayon and watercolor portraits...

...The philosophy of the totality of art lay behind the founding of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art three years ago...

...It stages shows of works of living or recent artists and presents the work of unknown movie makers...

...A unique "space modulator," done in 1936, consists of zinc, with sievelike perforations, over composition board on which two circles—one small, one large—have been painted...

...He began teaching there in 1923, the year when he began describing his works as "constructivist" and shifting the emphasis of the compositions from line to form...

...He filled only a portion of the composition space with figures, most of which bear no reference point and no suggestive title...

...And, as Mrs...

...In 1941 he developed his concept of the "space modulator," a development from traditional painting forms, into three-dimensional sculpture, primarily of plexiglass, which presents different plays of light when viewed from various aspects...

...Moholy continued to be preoccupied with easel painting (the good fortune of later generations), even though, as his widow writes, "he had been the most eloquent prophet of a new age in which paint and brushes would be discarded, museums would be closed, and everyone would participate in 'painting with light' by technological means on clouds, reflecting and warped surfaces, photographic emulsion, and architectural volumes...

...His institute by then had moved to North Dearborn Street and had 680 students, many of them World War II veterans...

...Moholy's photograms—pictures made on film without a camera—have created particular excitement, and lamentation from some that more of his photographic work was not included in this exhibition...

...The Guggenheim holds the largest number of the artist's works in the public domain and contributed thirty-five works to this show of 120 pieces, which includes painting, collage, photographs, sculpture, and theatrical design...

...Glass-headed pins are spaced in clusters over the lower half of the picture, rather like a salesman's map...

...The New Bauhaus opened in 1937 with thirty-five students and ten faculty members...

...Moholy continued to work as a designer in an advisory capacity for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the Parker Pen Company, and others...

...After sojourns in Amsterdam and London, Moholy arrived in Chicago in 1937 to assume directorship of the New Bauhaus, sponsored by the Association of Arts and Industries...

...He was one of five artists who organized an artists' group in Szeged called "Ma" (Hungarian for "today...

...It has a solid black ground on which three circles have been placed, one in roughly each third of the picture, but unaligned...

...Any gallery or museum display of Moholy's work is not without irony, for he was a constructivist, one who eschewed any work which set artistic endeavor apart from life...

...The museum's director, Jan van der Marck, told me prior to the opening of the Museum that before a work could be exhibited there it would "have to have human involvement...

...In 1925 he moved with the Bauhaus to Desau...

...And most major cities have their "electric theaters" or "kinetic playgrounds" in which the audiences, mostly youthful, are enveloped in deafening sound and psychedelic displays of lights...

...This museum has no permanent collection, and so far plans none...

...Near the end of his life, he prefixed the numbers with "leu" for leukemia...

...Now that memories of the personality have faded, and his many books, while still valid artistic expressions, have been crowded on the library shelves by volumes on the new technology, perhaps his "art work" can find its rightful and deserved place...

...He then defined contemporary art as "whatever is relevant to our lives today, whatever ideas seem to be valid and pertinent and have bearing on the life we're living...

...While the movement was connected with the social revolution of the time, it rejected Soviet Bolshevism because it was a tyranny...

...More importantly for future generations, he continued to paint and make sculptures...

...Many of the photographic pictures, particularly the photograms, in which^ the object becomes an abstraction, are similar in concept to the painted pictures...

...The third circle floats free at the upper left...

...The white one, in the bottom third to the left, bears an inverted cross at the top and is linked with a line to the middle circle, to the right of the picture...

...It is unfair to liken his space modulators to shadow boxes, but that is the only comparative form I can think of, and the comparison, such as there is, ends with the form...

...Chicago was chosen for the show's opening last spring, for it was in this city that Moholy's name and reputation were established after he left Germany...

...One piece of hanging sculpture in the show is made of a piece of plexiglass through which bent chrome-plated steel rods have been threaded to form a series of extended irregular elipses...

...The forms are mostly geometric—lines, orbs, elipses, parallelograms...

...For the most part, he painted with clean lines and crisp, clear, pure color...

...While the space modulated refers to the immediate environment, this form particularly evokes the feeling of outer space...

...The show was put together through the cooperative efforts of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum CHARLES-GENE McDANIEL is a Chicago writer and editor...

...Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, a professor at Pratt Institute in New York and writer in the field of architecture...

...but I am proud of my life...

...Constructivism became a discernible art movement toward the end of World War I. As Mrs...

...As the present exhibition demonstrates, he had every reason also to be proud of his paintings...

...Except for some of the works painted early in his career, the pictures are labeled with letters and numbers relating to types of materials used and sequence...