untitled, László Moholy-Nagy

Exhibition Label: "Machine in a Void: World War I & the Graphic Arts," Mar-2010, Steve Goddard In 1914 Moholy-Nagy was called to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army. He fought on the Russian front and was wounded several times. He started sketching while recovering from "shell shock" in 1915. After the War, Moholy-Nagy participated in the activities of the progressive Hungarian artists' group MA in Vienna in 1919 and then, in Berlin, he forged connections with the Dadaists and the Sturm Gallery. This geometrical abstraction was done before his activities in the Bauhaus in Weimar. Archive Label 2003: The young Moholy-Nagy read for a law degree in Budapest before joining artillery forces during World War I. He found that his sketches recording wartime scenes were appreciated, which was enough to steer him into an art career when the war was over. Disappointed with the results of Budapest’s Communist Revolution of 1919, Moholy-Nagy went to Berlin, at that time a hub of radical ideology and intellectual ferment. In 1922, he was invited to teach at the new Bauhaus school of design, where he developed theories about production and the plastic nature of artistic space. Moholy-Nagy had a very practical view of what art should accomplish, however, and turned Bauhaus design to more industrial uses, such as producing household appliances. In 1929, he and headmaster Walter Gropius left the Bauhaus over political disagreements. Four years later, the artist moved to Amsterdam, pursuing typography and photography projects as well as new design challenges. As tensions mounted on the Continent with Nazi control, Moholy-Nagy joined Gropius again in London for the years 1935-7. Plans for for opening the New Bauhaus in Chicago brought the artist an appointment to its faculty in 1937. The new school did not exactly fill the void left from the closing of the original in Germany, but after a tentative beginning the school eventually became the Institute of Design.