Major exhibitions in the recent past have focused on Moholy-Nagy’s accomplishments with the German and American Bauhaus schools and the Institute of Design in Chicago. In the shadow of his later achievements, his earliest artistic efforts from the period 1914 to early 1923 have gone largely unheralded. László Moholy-Nagy: From Budapest to Berlin, 1914-1923 presented these nascent works, providing a telling record of the self-actualization and gestation process of the artist. The exhibition was documented by a fully illustrated 168 page catalogue which is available from the University Gallery.

László Moholy-Nagy was a unique figure in twentieth century culture. He was active as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer, film-maker, writer, and designer. Moholy-Nagy was also a forceful educator who wrote persuasively about art, design, theory, and pedagogy. He excelled in this wide range of creative activity, always working on the cutting edge. Because of these varied experiences, he was able to synthesize in his writing and teaching a definitive conception of the role of the artist in modern industrial society. He had an influence both broad and profound.

Born in Bácsborsod, Hungary on July 20, 1895, László Moholy-Nagy first expressed his creative interests through writing. He contributed short stories to the Hungarian periodical Jelenkor (Our Age), published by the aesthetician Iván Hevesy. While training to be a lawyer at the University of Budapest, Moholy-Nagy was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army and called to the Russian front during World War I. It was during this period that Moholy-Nagy began to experiment with visual art, making over 400 drawings on military-issued postcards.

After World War I, Moholy-Nagy returned to Budapest where he became active in the Hungarian avant garde, aligning himself with the circle of intellectuals and artists led by Lajos Kassák. As Moholy-Nagy began to think about art in increasingly social and revolutionary terms, he moved from the postcard genre into larger portraits and landscape drawings. These pieces, energized by Moholy-Nagy’s forceful, vigorous method, show the hand of a confident and maturing artist at ease with the technical demands of his chosen medium. He borrowed freely from the stylistic lead of his friend and mentor, Lajos Tihanyi, yet succeeded in creating a body of work distinctly his own in its dynamic and metaphorical use of line.

Moholy-Nagy’s first year in Germany signaled a turning point in his maturation as an artist. Although he continued to sketch a few representational portraits of friends, he essentially abandoned this style for abstraction, turning to the “machine aesthetic” as a universal form for expressing the visual complexities of modern life. His work from this transitional period testifies to the flurry of intellectual and artistic activity which spurred Moholy-Nagy’s transformation into the master teacher known as a “painter of light.”

A related symposium, László Moholy-Nagy: Translating Utopia into Action was organized on October 20, 1995 that brought together Hungarian, American, and Canadian scholars. Speakers include: Oliver Botar (University of Toronto); Eleanor Hight (University of New Hampshire); Victor Margolin (University of Illinois, Chicago); Alain Findeli (University of Montreal); Krisztina Passuth (Etövös Lóránd University (Budapest); Jeffrey Meikle (University of Texas); Lloyd Engelbrecht (University of Cincinnati); and Steven Mansbach, director of the American Academy of Art and Humanities, Berlin. The proceedings are available by contacting the University Gallery at 302.831.8242.