LASZLO MOHOLY­ NAG Y Biographical Writings by Louis Kaplan Duke University Press Durham & London I995 © 1995 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00 Typeset in Sabon by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page ofthis book. Frontispiece: Lucia Moholy, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1930, gelatin silver, gouache, 8.3 x 5.8 cm. (Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California) Contents • List of Figures VB Acknowledgments IX Introduction: Signing on Moholy I I Production-Reproduction 3 I 2 Forging Ahead: The Plague of Plagiarism 63 3 It Works 79 4 The Anonymous Hand I 19 5 Moholy: The Significance of the Signature 157 Signature's Postscript: Moholisch/Like Moholy 191 Notes 193 Selected Bibliography 217 Index 229 List of Figures • I. Lucia Moholy, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Frontispiece 2. Lucia Moholy, Constructivist and Dadaist Congress~ Weimar. 5 3. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (or Lucia Moholy), Laszlo Moholy- Nagy. 27 4. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Photogram. 38 5. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Stage Scene-Loudspeaker. 4 2 6. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, The Diving Board. 57 7. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Play. 60 8. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Yellow Disc. 86 9. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Photogram: SelfPortrait Profile. 91 10. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Self-Portrait~ Photogram with Torn Paper. 97 I I. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Self-Portrait Lighting a Cigarette. 110 12. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Bicyclist. II 5 13. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Telephone Picture EM 3. 120 14. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Love Your Neighbor (Murder on the Railway Line). 135 15. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, In the Name ofthe Law/Psychology ofthe Masses. 138 16. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Poster for Schocken Department Store. 148 17. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Light Space Modulator. 160 18. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, A Chick Remains a Chick; Poeticizing ofSirens. 175 19. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, The Hydrocephalus. 178 20. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, City Lights. 179 21. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Space-Modulator L3. 186 • Laszlo Moholy- Nagy viii Acknowledgments • Published in the year marking the centenary anniversary of the birth of its Bauhaus artist subject, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Bio­ graphical Writings has had its own nine-year gestation period from inception to publication. This lengthy passage of life's writ­ ing has generated an appropriately lapsed situation in which the present signee finds it most difficult to identify (with) the originat­ ing author of the biographical writings and in which much of the editing has taken place in relation to an anonymous hand. Its biographical trajectory has coincided with two of Moholy's ma­ jor life coordinates (Chicago and Berlin) and has wound up in the "Mo-holy" city ofJerusalem. (Here, by coincidence, the Moholy one dropped in during the last phase ofthis book's editing, thanks to a wandering exhibition of his photographs organized by the Goethe Institute in spring 1994.) In order then to roll the credits of this book in conventional terms, it is necessary to honor the tripartite division of its inscription. This work began as a doctoral dissertation in the Department of History of the University of Chicago. I want to thank both Harry Harootunian and Chuck Krance for their steadfast support and encouragement of a work that crossed over many disciplin­ ary borders in its pursuit of Moholy's life-writing. I acknowledge a great deal of indebtedness in this first phase of the project to an important exterior force, Tom Conley, whose "graphic uncon­ scious" mobilized the writing and editing, and whose "vision in motion" perceived both the project's possibilities and possibilis­ tics. I also want to acknowledge Scott Michaelsen for the valuable insights that he offered and for whatever might have been culled from our other writerly collaborations that found a way into the Moholy text. I received a great deal of assistance from the Moholy archives at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Uni­ versity of Illinois (Chicago Circle), and the University of Cincin­ nati. Finally, I acknowledge the help of the late E. Ray Pearson for opening up his personal archives on his life with Moholy in Chicago. In Berlin, I want to acknowledge the assistance of the library and the archives of the Bauhaus Museum under the direction of Peter Hahn. Here, I was able to bring Moholy's Bauhaus period and the German linguistic register to bear upon Laszlo Moholy­ Nagy: Biographical Writings. In addition, I also want to thank Moholy and Bauhaus scholars such as Andreas Haus, Lloyd En­ gelbrecht, Magdalena Droste, and Rainer Wick for their discus­ sions on the biographical subject. Above all, I want to acknowl­ edge the significant impact ofJeannine Fiedler on this work. Her friendship has left a deep and indelible mark on the body of this text. In Jerusalem, I want to thank the many colleagues and friends (including Paul Mendes-Flohr, Stephane Moses, Steve Aschheim, Hanni Mittelman, and Gabriel Motzkin) at the Franz Rosen­ zweig Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where I have been based since fall 1993 and where I have found a supportive working environment to bring the Moholy project to completion amid my current preoccupations in German-Jewish cultural history and the discourse on the Jewish joke. As to be expected, there are also those acknowledgments where the tripartite division breaks down. Many thanks to Patrick Clancy for his invaluable feedback on both the theoretical constituents and photographic conditions of the Moholy subject at hand. On a more personal note, I want to acknowledge the support of • my parents, Leon and Sarah Kaplan, for their appreciation of the Laszlo value of scholarship and its scripting through too many years of Moholy- academic underemployment. I would like to thank all of the institutions that have lent pho­ Nagy tographic materials for use in this volume: J. Paul Getty Museum, x The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House, Davis Museum and Cultural Center, and the Harvard University Art Museums. A special word of thanks goes out to a bearer of the proper name encountered in this work-Hattula Moholy-Nagy. She is deserving of special credit for serving an anonymous stranger with much hospitality and in providing open access to her invalu­ able personal archive of Moholy materials when this project was in its early phases. I am also grateful to her for granting permis­ sion for the use of all of the illustrations in this book. Acknowledgment must be given to the three anonymous read­ ers for Duke University Press who provided insightful critical comments that helped to shape the editing of the work in its final phase. I also want to thank Jean Brady, Mark Brodsky, and Rich­ ard Morrison of the Press for their able assistance at many stages along the way toward publication. Last but not least, I want to acknowledge the able editorial direction and steering efforts of Ken Wissoker, with whom I have been acquainted (on and off) through the twists and turns of this life narrative. It has been a long, strange trip of convergences and divergences starting from scratch in the phonographic studios of WHPK radio in Chicago to the publication of these scratches and marks in the biographical service of the Moholy signature. L.K. Jerusalem November 9, 1994 • Acknowl- edgments xi LASZLO MOHOLY NAG Y Introduction: Signing on Moholy • He wants to side with any writing whose principle is that the subject is merely an effect oflanguage. - Roland Barthes, Barthes by Barthes Free form! Marvelous! No hung-up old art history words for these guys. America's first unconscious avant-garde! The hell with Mondrian, whoever the hell he is. The hell with Moholy-Nagy, if anybody ever heard of him. Artists for the new age; sculptors for the new style....- Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: From Constructivist Tradition to Signature Effect The overarching title of this study indicates that it belongs to the genre of individual biography as a subset of historical studies. The first part of the title announces the proper name of the vis­ ual artist, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, in the starring role, cast as its ob­ ject of study; and the second part of the title, Biographical Writ­ ings, declares that it will involve the writing of a life. To provide, in shorthand, the conventional facts and figures of the histori­ cal context at issue throughout this work: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was an abstract artist who grew up in Hungary, who turned to painting after the Great War, who moved to Berlin and came under the sway of the dadaist and constructivist move­ ments in the flourishing international avant-garde scene of the early twenties, who taught under the direction of Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus in its middle period (1923-28), who moved to Holland and then to Great Britain in flight from the ominous rise of Fascism, who was called to Chicago in 1937 to form a New Bauhaus art school, and who spread Bauhaus modernist art edu­ cation doctrines in America for the next decade until his untimely demise in 1946. In his ever westward wanderings, Moholy's jour­ ney depicts the migratory pattern typical of so many artists of that era. If this work were to be set up within the terms ofthe traditional historical narrative, the individualized Moholy biography would provide an easy outline of life chapters (a sequence of periods of settlement) and a constant vectorial direction (westward). Of course, there is quite a temptation to adopt this linear grid as a ready-made model ofhistorical understanding and apply it to this particular case study.