Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who was born in Hungary and died in Chicago, in 1946, was a multi-media artist before the term existed. Critics disagree over whether he did his best work as a) a painter who adopted the abstract style of the Russian Constructivists; b) a photographer who favored the photogram, a camera-less way of recording light and shadow on photo-sensitized paper; or c) a professor who taught design at the Bauhaus and exhorted his students to wed art to industry and inaugurate a brave new world.
“Moholy-Nagy: Future Present,” a fascinating and all-important retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through Sept. 7, 2016), gives us yet another reason to admire him. Moholy was a proto-post-modernist who dissolved lines — especially those between high art and commercial culture — decades before boundary-blurring became the mandatory mission of contemporary art. It’s telling that the show concludes with some very nifty see-through oil paintings done on Plexiglas, an inspired meeting between high art and cheap plastic.
A charismatic thinker and teacher, Moholy was basically self-taught. His original name was Laszlo Weisz, and he grew up in a Jewish family in the rural south of Hungary. He initially aspired to be a poet, but turned to art after he enlisted in World War I and suffered an injury.
If there is a theme uniting his work across different media, surely it is this: He wanted to capture the interplay of light and shadow, whether through photography (a word that means “writing in light”) or oddball contraptions. The Guggenheim show gives pride of place to his quirky masterpiece of 1930, “Light Prop for an Electric Stage,” a clunky metal-and-glass machine that he carried with him as he moved from Berlin to London to Chicago. Its moving parts were designed to cast colored shadows (not unlike a disco ball) and it is usually described as the first-ever example of kinetic sculpture.
Moholy’s precocious interest in the mechanized production of art came three decades before Warhol printed his endlessly repeating Marilyns and proclaimed with his trademark irony, “I think everyone should be a machine.”
Unlike Warhol, Moholy viewed machines as a force for social uplift. As he once wrote, “Everyone is equal before the machine. I can use it; so can you.” But so can people whose aims are not so noble. In the end, his life attests to the failure of art to effect social change, and I think of him as modernism’s most beautiful loser.