The Olly and Dolly Sisters - László Moholy-Nagy

László Moholy-Nagy

Moholy-Nagy was born Laszlo Weisz in 1895. His father left the family; a family friend named Nagy helped raise the children, and Laszlo took the name. His cousin was the conductor Georg Solti. None of these facts appear in most accounts of his career, which tend to begin at the Bauhaus as though he materialised fully formed in Weimar in 1923. He studied law in Budapest and served in the First World War, where he was wounded and began drawing during his recovery. After the war he moved to Berlin and was invited by Walter Gropius to head the Bauhaus metal workshop at twenty-eight. He was not a metalworker. He was barely a painter. What he was, by then, was someone who understood that art, technology and education were the same problem. His wife Lucia introduced him to photograms: images made by placing objects directly on light-sensitive paper without a camera. He became obsessed with light as a material. He built kinetic sculptures he called Light-Space Modulators: motorised devices that projected moving shadows and reflections onto gallery walls. He was the first artist to suggest using telescopes, microscopes and x-rays as art tools. After the Nazis closed the Bauhaus, he fled to Amsterdam, then London, then Chicago, where in 1937 he founded the New Bauhaus. It became the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the first American school built on Bauhaus principles. He ran it until his death from leukaemia in 1946, at fifty-one. His ashes are in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, a city he adopted and which adopted him back.