(Bácsborsód, 20 July 1895 – Chicago, 24 November 1946)
He was a versatile avant-garde personality, making experiments in the most distant fields of arts, whose most prolific artistic period is related to the 1920s art scene of Germany. Neither his (unfinished) law studies, nor his literary career or his involvement in WWI had a stronger influence on him than his connection with the circle of the Budapest-based MA journal. At first the landscape and portrait painting of József Nemes Lampérth, Béla Uitz és Lajos Tihanyi helped to develop his own style.
Although not involved in the art policy movements of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he left Hungary at the end of 1919, settling first in Vienna and later in Berlin. While, in his landscapes and portraits he retained his activist view, he became acquainted with the most important movements and representatives of international Dadaism and Russian Constructivism. Among his friends we find Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, El Lissitzky, Ivan Punyi and others. From 1922 he had regular joint exhibitions in Berlin with the Hungarian sculptor László Péri in the gallery Der Sturm and in the left-wing Novembergruppe. From 1921, he became the editor and Berlin correspondent of the Wiener MA. Inspired by the bridges and transformer stations in Berlin, he created Dadaistic "industrial landscapes", later published in the Horizont album of MA. From 1922, a unique form of geometric abstraction —, which he called glass-architecture — came to be prevailing in his paintings. In 1922, he published The Book of New Artists with Lajos Kassák in Vienna (in Hungarian and German).
From the spring of 1923, invited by Walter Gropius, he started to teach in the Bauhaus in Weimar as the youngest professor. Apart from being the leader of the metal workshop and the introductory course in the Bauhaus, he was involved in creating graphic portfolios, developing the new, up-to-date Bauhaus typography, and editing the Bauhaus book series. It was in this period that his most harmonious abstract paintings, photographs, photograms and "photoplastics" were created, and he published his screenplay entitled Film skeleton: Dynamics of a Metropolis. He also published two separate books in the Bauhaus series, Painting, Photography, Film (1925) and From Matter to Architecture (1929).
By the time the latter appeared, he, following Gropius, had left the Bauhaus and settled in Berlin. His Light-modulator, an early example of kinetic structures creating colourful play of light, was first presented in the Werkbund Exhibition in Paris in 1930. His abstract film, entitled Black-White-Gray Film Play was shot using this structure. In the meantime, his articles — mainly on photography — regularly appeared in a number of journals, such as thei 10, in Amsterdam, the Korunk in Kolozsvár, the Dokumentum and Munka in Budapest, and later the Telehor in Brno.
In 1934, he moved to Amsterdam, then in 1935 to London, where he did practical, commercial jobs with György Kepes. In 1937, Gropius invited him to Chicago, which he accepted, and settled there for the rest of his life, working as the director of the New Bauhaus-American School of Design. As the New Bauhaus, due to financial problems, closed in 1938, Moholy-Nagy founded his School of Design in February 1939, which became a collage as Institute of Design in 1944. László Moholy-Nagy continued to teach here right until his death.
In 1945, he finished his fundamental book, Vision in Motion, which is the summary of decades of his experiences, including a carefully selected choice of illustrations. The art heritage of László Moholy-Nagy — especially his research works in the field of photography — is more and more the subject of international attention; a number of exhibitions and studies dealt with it in the recent past.
