Laszlo Moholy-NagyUsing the pink book. See what you can establish about Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Pg. 210-214, 220, 228.

Gropius enlisted Moholy-Nagy who became the chief spokesman for the educational ideas of the Bauhaus. He redefined Gropius’ philosophy in analytical terms and produced an unending stream of influential ideas.

László Moholy-Nagy first studied law in Budapest in 1913. From 1914 to 1917, while completing his military service and staying in a military hospital, he produced his first drawings. Later the same year, he attended evening classes in figure drawing at a free art school in Szeged, Hungary. The following year, he quit his law studies. He subsequently worked as a painter and took evening classes in life drawing at a free art school in Budapest. At the same time, he was in contact with the avant-garde group MA. Moholy-Nagy relocated to Berlin in 1920 and cultivated contacts with the Dadaists Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Höch as well as with Herwarth Walden’s gallery Der Sturm. In 1922, a first solo exhibition of Moholy-Nagy’s work was held in Walden’s gallery. He

met Walter Gropius through the art and architecture critic Adolf Behne. In the same year, he participated in the first Constructivist congress in Weimar.

In March 1923, Walter Gropius appointed him as a master at the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar. Here, his work centred on typographic design and experimental film. From 1923 to 1925, Moholy-Nagy was the director of the preliminary course and head of the metal workshop in Weimar. From 1925 to 1928, he resumed the same posts in Dessau. Together with Walter Gropius, Moholy-Nagy began to publish the series of Bauhaus Books.

Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus after five years in 1928 and established his own studio for typography, exhibition design, photomontage and photo collage in Berlin. Here, in 1929, he created set designs for the Kroll-Oper and Piscator’s theatre. His books Malerei, Photographie, Film and Von Material zu Architektur were published in 1925 and 1929. In 1930, his Light-Space-Modulator, which was designed in 1922, was exhibited for the first time in Paris. He also exhibited in the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart. In 1933, he participated in the 4th CIAM Congress (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) in Athens. A year later, he emigrated to Amsterdam and then to London. During this time, he exhibited with the art group Abstraction–Création in Paris. In London in 1935/36, he began working as a graphic designer and received commissions for documentary films. On Walter Gropius’s recommendation, he was made director of the planned New Bauhaus – American School of Design in Chicago in 1937. However, the school was forced to close as early as 1938 for financial reasons. In 1939, Moholy-Nagy founded the successor to the School of Design in Chicago, which was restructured in 1944 as the Institute of Design and is now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Moholy-Nagy also worked as a freelance artist and designer until his death in 1946.

The fiery stimulatorhttp://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/mar/18/art.modernismFiona MacCarthy

Read MacCarthy’s article and see what information you can glean about Molholy Nagy’s style. How may this have had an impact on the world of architecure? How significant is his involvement with the Bauhaus?

He was the most inventive and engaging of all the Bauhaus artists, galvanising the movement to ever-greater heights. What a shame Britain never embraced László Moholy-Nagy when he fled the Nazis in the 1930s.

László Moholy-Nagy, one of the leading figures in the Bauhaus, arrived to work in England in 1935, two years after that experimental school of art and design was closed down by the Nazis. His English was not fluent. Taken to a party in London by John Betjeman, he said smilingly to his hostess: "Thank you for your hostilities."

The remark was not entirely inappropriate: Moholy-Nagy's reception in this country was not an open-armed one. Even so-called modernists found him baffling, the boiler-suited technocrat with the magnificent grin. His sheer versatility was suspect in a country where they liked you to be one thing or another. Painter, sculptor, photographer, film-maker, industrial designer, typographer: what was Moholy-Nagy not? The Bauhaus itself, which placed great emphasis on programmes and production, seemed alien to a nation still steeped in the gentler traditions of the arts and crafts. London Transport's design impresario Frank Pick expressed a widely held artistic xenophobia in dismissing Moholy-Nagy as "a gentleman with a modernistic tendency who produces pastiches of photographs of a surrealistic type, and I am not at all clear why we should fall for this. It is international, or at least continental. Let us leave the continent to pursue their own tricks."

When he arrived in London, however, László Moholy-Nagy was at the height of his extraordinary powers.

László Nagy had been born almost 40 years before, on a wheat farm in southern Hungary, near the village of Moholy, whose name he later appropriated. His father deserted the family and he was brought up by his mother and his grandmother. He looked back at that childhood as "a terrible great quietness". The young László began to study law in Budapest but soon afterwards was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army, fighting in Galicia and on the ferocious Russian front in the first world war. He was wounded, hospitalised and suffered horribly. On and around the battlefields, he made his first drawings and wrote poetry. One of these poems, Light Vision, deals with principles that from then on were to obsess him: "Space, time, material - are they one with light?"

Through the 1920s, Moholy-Nagy was part of the new artistic movement sweeping across Europe, a revolutionary movement in which representational and story-telling art was jettisoned in favour of the abstract, primordial, elemental. Functional design for mass production and mass distribution was seen as a means of repairing the devastating social damage done by war. This was the brilliantly iconoclastic period in which Mondrian and Van Doesburg were pursing the objective harmonies of rectangles and primary colours in their paintings, and Gabo was conceiving his constructivist monument to the industrial revolution. Moholy-Nagy was especially attuned to the Russian suprematists Malevich and Lissitsky, with their visions of aerodromes and radio stations, architecture of mass communication for a brave new world. A famous group photograph of the Constructivist and Dadaist Congress held in Weimar in 1922 shows Moholy-Nagy alongside Hans Arp and Tristan Tzara, taunters of the bourgeoisie.

Moholy-Nagy was fundamentally a painter. "It is my gift to project my vitality, my building power, through light, colour, form. I can give life as a painter," he wrote at the end of that most destructive war. His early visual experiments took the form of a return to fundamentals, exploring the relations of colour, shape, position by glueing coloured strips of paper on to backgrounds of varying tones. One of the attractions that constructivism had for him was that it expressed the pure forms of nature: "the direct colour, the spatial rhythm, the equilibrium of form".

At the same time, he was fascinated by the city, by the skyscrapers and factories, the fast-developing industrial landscape of the early 20th century. Moholy-Nagy thrived on ideas of dynamic progress, of mechanisation, the inherent possibilities of new materials. As he wrote in MA (Today), the avant-garde magazine then being published in Vienna: "Everyone is equal before the machine. I can use it; so can you. It can crush me; the same can happen to you." His grasp of new technologies was prophetic.

Moholy-Nagy was entranced by the mechanised production of artworks, ridiculing the artist's traditional stance as individual creator. In 1922, his Telephone Paintings were exhibited at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin. The series of three enamel panels had been ordered from a factory specialising in commercial signs. The geometric motif of vertical bar and two crucifix forms was identical on all three panels; only the panel sizes differed. Moholy-Nagy later claimed that he had ordered them by telephone, giving his instructions to the sign painter by means of graph paper and a standard industrial colour chart. This may not be entirely true: Moholy-Nagy could be a joker. Still, he titled the Telephone Paintings not with words but with letters and numbers like a factory production code.

He foresaw photography as the artform of the future. As the discovery of one-point perspective gave creative impetus to the Renaissance, so Moholy-Nagy realised that technical advances in photography and film would transform social and cultural values as the 20th century progressed. He predicted: "It is not the person ignorant of writing but the one ignorant of photography who will be the illiterate of the future."

Moholy-Nagy settled in Berlin in 1920 and married soon after. His Czech-born wife, Lucia, had trained as a photographer and they worked together in developing the photogram, a photographic image made without a camera when objects on coated paper are exposed to light. They developed photoplastics, fluent, lyrical and curious photomontages, sometimes with drawn additions, which had enormous influence on 1960s graphics. At the same time, Moholy-Nagy was one of the first designers to realise the potential of photography in advertising and commercial art.

He was a born teacher, convinced that everyone had talent. In 1923, he joined the staff of the Bauhaus, which had been founded by Walter Gropius at Weimar four years before. Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger and Schlemmer were already teaching there. He was brought in at a time when the school was undergoing a decisive change of policy, shedding its original emphasis on handcraft. The driving force was now "the unity of art and technology". Moholy-Nagy was entrusted with teaching the preliminary course in principles of form, materials and construction - the basis of the Bauhaus's educational programme. His co-tutor on the course was the painter Josef Albers, whose career was to develop in parallel with his. Albers and Moholy-Nagy are joint subjects of a major exhibition at Tate Modern, London, which serves as a reminder of the exhilaration of being at the Bauhaus at that time.

The hyper-energetic Moholy-Nagy also ran the metal workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later in the purpose-designed buildings at Dessau. The metal shop was the most successful of departments at the Bauhaus in fulfilling Gropius's vision of art for mass production, redefining the role of the artist to embrace that of designer as we have now come to understand the term. The workshop experimented with glass and Plexiglas as well as metal in developing the range of lighting that has almost come to define the Bauhaus. The lamps were produced in small production runs, and some were taken up by outside factories. The royalties made a welcome contribution to the school's always precarious finances. Wilhelm Wagenfeld's table lamp, with its sheeny opaque dome, has remained in production

and spawned many imitations. As we choose our pseudo-Bauhaus lighting from Ikea, it is Moholy-Nagy we must thank.

"Fiery stimulator", "principal drummer boy and teeth chatterer": the recollections of other Bauhaus masters and his students have left a strong impression of Moholy-Nagy's galvanic personality. He became in effect chief publiciser of the Bauhaus, designing the layout for its publications and directing the typography for the "Bauhaus books", textbooks of Bauhaus principles. Through his "new typography", Moholy-Nagy set an unmistakable visual image for the school using simple modern letter forms, strong colour, intriguing combinations of photography and text. Single letters, vowels, consonants would be isolated and treated as compositional elements. This typographic approach was serious yet comedic, as was the Bauhaus itself.

It was also at the Bauhaus that Moholy-Nagy began the project that was to preoccupy him over the next decade and take its place in his mythology as a kind of alter ego, a Frankenstein's monster. This is the Light Prop for an Electric Stage, a huge kinetic sculpture for the theatre composed of colour, light and movement: light as performance art. The light prop takes the form of a cubic box containing a glass and polished metal mechanism designed to stand alone on a darkened stage. The audience watches, through a porthole in the box, the machine's direct response to a two-minute illumination sequence created by 116 coloured lightbulbs flashing on and off.

In 1930, the light prop was the hero of Moholy-Nagy's abstract film Light Play: Black-White-Grey. Though I knew the work well from illustrations, it was only last summer that I came face to face with the lifesize replica at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. I found myself agreeing with Moholy-Nagy: its effect was magical beyond belief.

By the time the light prop was at last completed, he was embarking on yet another life. Moholy-Nagy was now remarried, to Sybil Pietsch, a film scriptwriter he had worked with in Berlin. As the German political situation darkened, they travelled hopefully to London via Holland. Moholy-Nagy's friendship with JG Crowther, science correspondent of the then Manchester Guardian, had encouraged him to seek refuge in this country. He was also influenced by his reading of Voltaire's Lettres Philosophiques sur les Anglais, which convinced him that England was a haven of free speech.

Of the influx of mainly Jewish refugees arriving in England in the 1930s, many were artists, architects, designers. Moholy-Nagy had been preceded by his former Bauhaus colleagues Gropius and Marcel Breuer. He and Sybil joined them briefly at Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, one of London's few modernist buildings, before moving into their own house in Golders Green.

There was a solidarity among the émigrés. A touching picture of Moholy-Nagy at this period shows him on the promenade at Bexhill-on-Sea photographing the just completed De La Warr pavilion, whose architect, Erich Mendelsohn, was another recent exile from Berlin. Moholy-Nagy's fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda commissioned him to design special effects for the science fiction film Things to Come. He was asked to make a film about the sex life of the lobster, at a time when David Attenborough was still a boy. A quizzical Moholy-Nagy spent several weeks on the Sussex coast getting to know the fishermen, grappling with their dialect, recording their families and close community. At the other end of the social spectrum, he took photographs for Bernard Fergusson's book Portrait of Eton and John Betjeman's Oxford University Chest. Where Sybil responded to 1930s England with an often explosive impatience at its snobbery, Moholy-Nagy remained unemotional, professional. The English class structure was the object of his fascinated observation.

But Moholy-Nagy was not totally cold-shouldered. He designed the publicity for Jack Pritchard's English modernist Isokon Furniture Company. One leaflet included a typically dreamlike small drawing of a figure floating in a bath, suggesting that a Breuer Long Chair gave a similar sensation. Imperial Airways commissioned him to design a mobile exhibition to tour the British empire in a railroad car, promoting the still-novel idea of air travel. He became display consultant for the

menswear store Simpsons of Piccadilly, bemusing passersby with his abstract compositions of striped shirts and bowler hats. But these activities were desultory in relation to Moholy-Nagy's far-reaching design philosophy.

In 1936, he returned to Berlin intending to record the Olympics on 16mm film. His aim was to investigate spectator psychology, pursuing the physiological contrasts between the international visitors and the rabid German nationalists. At the entrance to the stadium, he met a former Bauhaus student now in SS uniform. His ex-pupil attempted to persuade him that by joining up with Hitler he could eventually influence the Nazis. The episode so disgusted him that he left Berlin immediately. Not long after, Moholy-Nagy's paintings were removed from public galleries in Essen, Hanover and Mannheim, branded "degenerate art".

Moholy-Nagy sailed from Southampton in the SS Manhattan in July 1937. He had been appointed head of the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Joseph Albers, who had stayed on at the Bauhaus in Dessau until its closure by the Nazis, was by this time also in America, teaching at the radical Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Gropius now held the chair of architecture in Harvard. America appeared a more fertile ground than Britain for the promulgation of the Bauhaus's ideals.

Moholy-Nagy, ever questioning, observed that in the US, "the provocative statement is constantly annulled by chequebook and cocktail party. Am I on the same way?" The most inventive and engaging of all the Bauhaus artists died of leukaemia in 1946, bequeathing to the world one of the prime examples of mass-produced design of the mid-20th century - the 1951 Parker pen.