PICTURING MODERNISM
MOHOLY-NAGY AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN WEIMAR GERMANY
Eleanor M. Hight
Eleanor M. Hight: PICTURING MODERNISM: MOHOLY-NAGY AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN WEIMAR GERMANY. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995. First edition. A fine hardcover book in a fine dust jacket: looks and feels unread. A rather uncommon volume. Out-of-print. 7.25 x 10.25 book with 258 pages and 108 illustrations of photography, photograms, photoplastics, graphic design, sculpture and other forms of neo-plastic art. A comprehensive treatment of the photographs and theoretical writings of Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), focusing on his program to develop a visual language, the "New Vision" and a cohesive theory of the applications of photography, film and light equipment.
Includes work by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Alexandr Rodchenko, Theo van Doesburg, Lucia Moholy, Albert Renger-Patzsch, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Christian Schad, Hans Richter, and Vladimir Tatlin.
Although recognized today as a pioneer in constructivist art, kinetic sculpture, and graphic design, the Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy made his most important contribution to twentieth-century art in photography. Picturing Modernism is the first comprehensive treatment of the photographs and theoretical writing of this pivotal figure in modernist photography.
Eleanor Hight rejects the traditional approach to modernist photography in which Moholy is seen as merely applying formalist means to his subject matter. Instead, her penetrating study focuses on his intensive program to develop a visual language, which he called the "New Vision," to explore and image the modern world. She examines such issues as the relationship between his theory and Russian formalist criticism, the impact of contemporary physics on his use of light in abstract photography, the new concepts of architectural space that informed his photographs of buildings, and his visual scrutiny of modern urban society.
After several years an exile in Berlin, Moholy was invited by the architect Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1928, the most fertile period of Moholy's career. His work from this period, Hight observes, represents the first attempt by an artist of the modern movement to develop a cohesive theory of photography and to propose a broad, brilliantly innovative set of applications for photography, film, and light equipment.
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