László Moholy-Nagy

Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Galleries of the Claremont Colleges, Apr. 4-May 8, 1975; San Francisco Museum of Art, July 8-Aug. 24, 1975; University Art Museum, University of New Mexico, Sept. 28-Nov. 2, 1975.

"Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) became notorious for the declarations he made about the end of painting, encouraging artists to exchange brush, pigment, and canvas for camera, film, and searchlight. Even as he made these radical claims, he painted throughout his career. The practice of painting enabled Moholy-Nagy to imagine generative relationships between art and technology, and to describe the shape future that possibilities might take. Joyce Tsai illuminates the evolution of painting's role for Moholy-Nagy through key periods in his career: at the German Bauhaus in the 1920s, in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in the early 1930s, and as director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago in the last decade of his life. The book also includes an introduction to the history, qualities, and significance of plastic materials that Moholy-Nagy used over the course of his career, and an essay on how his project of shaping habitable space in his art and writing resonated with artists and industrial designers in the 1960s and 1970s. "--

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was a painter, sculptor, filmmaker, writer, graphic and stage designer, teacher, and photographer. Working in his native Hungary as well as in Germany, Holland, England, and the United States, Moholy-Nagy constantly experimented in these various fields, leaving a remarkable legacy of innovation. The J. Paul Getty Museum owns eighty-two photographs by Moholy-Nagy, almost fifty of which are presented in this volume, the second in the Museum's In Focus series on photographers. The plates are accompanied by commentaries by Katherine Ware, Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs. Ms. Ware, along with Thomas Barrow, Jeannine Fiedler, Charles Hagen, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Weston Naef, and Leland Rice, participated in a colloquium on the life and work of Moholy-Nagy at the Museum in 1994. An edited transcript of this discussion and a chronology of significant events in the artist's life are also included in this book.