whole human being and to combine art and technol-
ogy in the service of society. Photography, however,
did not yet play a role of any significance at the
Bauhaus. Although Lucia was a trained photogra-
pher, Moholy-Nagy was self-taught, yet it was his
concern with the medium that brought it to the fore
in the Bauhaus curriculum, with such figures as Erich
Consemu ̈ller, the brothers Andreas Feininger and T.
Lux Feininger, and Walter Peterhans making signifi-
cant contributions.
Moholy-Nagy’s vision of art was idealistic, yet
practical. Concerning the function of the artist,
he wrote:
Art is the senses’ grindstone, sharpening the eyes, the
mind and the feelings. Art has an educational and for-
mative ideological function, since not only the con-
scious but also the subconscious mind absorbs the
social atmosphere which can be translated into art....
What art contains is not basically different from the
content of our other utterances, but art attains its effect
mainly by subconscious organization of its own means.
If that were not so, all problems could be solved suc-
cessfully through intellectual or verbal discourse alone.
(Moholy-Nagy, Passuth, 363–364)Photography was, in Moholy-Nagy’s mind, the
ideal creative medium for the times, able to con-
struct a ‘‘New Vision’’(Neue Sehen), which in 1927
became the title of his highly influential book. In the
new world, transformed so fundamentally by the
modern technology emerging in Europe, he sought
new possibilities for perceiving and interpreting
modern life, and found them in what he termed
the ‘‘pure design of light.’’ Together with Lucia
Moholy, he developed the camera-less technique
of the photogram, which had been independently
developed by others, including Man Ray. He
delighted in all manner of technical imagery, includ-
ing X-rays, photomicrographs, and motion photo-
graphy. Exploring Constructivist ideas, he shot
from radical angles, including the bird’s-eye and
worm’s-eye views advocated by Alexandr Rod-
chenko and El Lissitzky, whom he had met in
1921 during a sojourn in Dusseldorf. A notable
example isBauhaus Balconiesof 1926 (also known
asDessau,1926). Part of his duties at Bauhaus was
to plan, edit, and design publications, and he pro-
duced 14Bauhausbu ̈cher including his influential
text,Malerei, Fotographie, Film(Painting, Photo-
graphy, Film; 1925) as Number 8 in the series.
Through his teaching and writing, Moholy ex-
tended his conviction that photography was an
essential part of the modern sensibility.
Political pressures at the Bauhaus effected Mo-
holy-Nagy’s (as well as Walter Gropius’s) departure
and return to Berlin in 1928. His marriage to Lucia
ended in 1929, and he remarried in 1931 to Sybil
Pietzsch. In Berlin, Moholy worked as a designer,
including stage set designs forTales of Hoffmanand
Madame Butterfly, and he painted and experimen-
ted relentlessly with the new materials of modernity,
such as plastics. He was particularly fascinated by
the play of light on and through these materials,
and soon had fashioned what he called ‘‘Light-
Space Modulators’’ to demonstrate the interaction
of light as a dynamic element in sculpture. With his
abstract light-pictures or photograms, manipulated
images, including multiple exposures, and montage
and collage techniques, Moholy-Nagy was a pio-
neer of experimental photography. His graphic
design was similarly experimental and advanced,
combining photography, text, and formal ‘‘fine
arts’’ elements, and he was one of the first to recog-
nize the value of photography as an instrument for
commercial art and advertising. The ‘‘Typofoto,’’ a
combination of image and text, played a central role
in his own publications, and then was taken up and
continued by Herbert Bayer. He also made films.
Along with dozens of other modern artists,
Moholy-Nagy was forced to flee before the increas-
ing tyranny of the Nazi regime as it took hold of
Germany in the mid-1930s. He first made his way to
Amsterdam and then to London in 1935, where he
continued to actively photograph, completing com-
mercial assignments including photographic illus-
trations for the book The Street Markets of
Londonand a book on Eton College. He also con-
tinued to experiment, particularly with sandwiching
multiple negatives, which he called ‘‘superimposi-
tions,’’ and with forays into the use of color.
For his fellow Hungarian refugee and director
Alexander Korda, he created special effects for Kor-
da’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’sThe Shape of Things
to Comein 1936, although they were not used in the
final film. He also worked on a documentary film
about the London Zoo with writer and social theor-
ist Julian Huxley. In 1937, there was another turning
point—he was invited to America to set up a new
school of industrial arts training.
In Chicago, a center of industry and mercantilism,
an effort to find a director for a proposed school for
industrial art had resulted in an offer to the architect
Walter Gropius. Gropius, however, had only re-
cently accepted the offer of a professorship at Har-
vard, and he recommended his close friend for the
position. In May of 1937, Moholy-Nagy traveled to
Chicago and agreed to head the New Bauhaus—
American School of Design, as it was initially
known, to be housed in the mercantile baron Mar-
shall Field’s former mansion. The prospectus heMOHOLY-NAGY, LA ́SZLO ́