Lászlo Moholy-Nagy

Leda and the Swan, 1946

On the European avant-garde scene in the 1920s, especially in the groups connected with Constructivism, László Moholy-Nagy (Bácsborsód, Hungary, 1895 – Chicago, United States, 1946) stands out because of his experimental work with the medium of photography and the possibilities of its specific elements: light, representation/reproduction and photograms. He also took part in the renewal of modern visual languages in other media – or instruments of reproduction, as he called them – such as films, graphic design and advertising.

In Moholy-Nagy’s career, his theoretical contribution is indissociable from his artistic practice, and these two paths came together in his teaching activity. His remarkable early writings, such as “Light. A Medium of Plastic Expression” (Broom, no. 4, 1923), were followed by books such as Malerei, Photographie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film, 1925), Von Material zu Architektur (1929), published in the United States as The New Vision in Photography (1938), and Vision in Motion (1947). In 1923 Moholy-Nagy joined the Bauhaus, where he taught part of the foundation course and was the master of “form” in the metal workshop until 1928. During the periods that he spent in Berlin, Amsterdam and London between 1929 and 1937, his output was very varied and his activity was very intense and productive. He worked as a graphic designer and theatre set designer, he organised and participated in fundamental exhibitions in the development of modern visual culture, such as Film und Foto (Stuttgart, 1929) and Raum der Gegenwart (Hanover, 1930), he also attended the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM, International Congresses of Modern Architecture) in 1928 and 1933, and he made several films, without giving up photography or writing. In the autumn of 1937 he moved to Chicago and became the director of the recently founded School of Design, renaming it as the New Bauhaus: American School of Design, but it closed the following year. Despite this, in 1939 he created the School of Design in Chicago, and in 1944, after reorganisation, it became the Institute of Design.

There are two ways in which Leda and the Swan exemplifies the processes of experimenting with composing with light that characterise Moholy-Nagy’s work. Firstly, in the conception of an object reminiscent of sculpture, with a name that recalls an episode of classical mythology. It could be understood as an exercise in advancing beyond traditional media and materials, rather than a desire to work with or develop new themes. Therefore, for the construction of this object he used Plexiglas, a registered trademark and an industrial chemical formula patented in 1934 that has the property of being as transparent as glass but is more malleable. In this case the artist has perforated the various interconnected pieces that represent the shape of a bird or that suggest the body of a woman, breaking up the smooth, homogeneous surface of the material and thus multiplying the possibilities of iridescence and distortion when light is applied.

Secondly, Leda and the Swan is a mobile, an object intended to be suspended and subjected to rotatory movement and exposed to white or coloured light from a projector. The resulting rotation and illumination contribute to the visual/perceptual disintegration and dematerialisation of the sculptural object. Therefore this experimental exercise does not end with the construction of the Plexiglas figure; the figure is an instrument that fulfils a function in the construction of a photogram or in the creation of a setting or scenario. Moholy-Nagy defined the photogram (a camera-less photograph) as “a bridge leading to new visual creation for which canvas, paint-brush and pigment cannot serve […] the materialization of light, hitherto secondary, becomes more direct”. In this way he advanced in the exploration of writing with light that he had begun in the 1920s with his conception of photographic paper as a writing surface on which the object acted as something that wrote, giving rise to new forms of representation.

This theoretical and practical idea of creation employing new media that were characteristic of and consubstantial with modern times, which were dominated by industry and technology and the perceptual experience and ways of seeing that they imposed, had been begun by Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s when he developed his first ideas about the light-space modulator. That was the beginning of his Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne (Light-space modulator for an electric stage, 1930), with which he made a film the same year, Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Grey). He himself said that “These techniques will probably be employed in the near future for advertisements, as entertainment in popular festivals, and in theatres for heightening tension”. This work, made near the end of his life, contains the potential of invading the space of perception, disturbing or enlarging that perception. It also exemplifies the work with which Moholy-Nagy was always involved in the laboratory and in the workshop.

References

Matthew S. Witkovsky, Carol S. Eliel and Karole P. B. Vail (eds.): Moholy-Nagy. Future Present. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 2016.

Moholy-Nagy. El arte de la luz. La Fábrica Editorial, Madrid, 2010.

Achim Borchardt-Hume (ed.): Albers and Moholy-Nagy. From Bauhaus to the New World, Tate Publishing, London, 2006.

 Rocío Robles Tardío, 50 Obras maestras 1900-1950, IVAM, València, 2019, p.68.