László Moholy-Nagy 1895–1946
Born in Hungary in 1895, László Moholy-Nagy was one of the most prominent members of the Bauhaus School. First studying law in Hungary, Moholy-Nagy was later drafted into the army to fight in World War I. He was wounded in combat, and while convalescing, he began to draw and write. Moholy-Nagy started to take courses in painting and became a part of the newly-formed Avant-garde group known as “MA”, or Magyar Aktivizmus which means Hungarian Activism. In 1920, Moholy-Nagy married photographer Lucia Moholy (née Shulz) and the couple often experimented with photographic methods; Moholy-Nagy’s Photograms, made without the use of a camera or negatives, stand as enduring part of his legacy. In 1922, Moholy-Nagy was invited by Walter Gropius to become a Master at the Bauhaus School in Weimar. At the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy taught the famous foundational course and was head of the metalsmithing workshop. He left the Bauhaus in 1928 and moved to Berlin where he founded his own graphic design firm. With the rise of the Nazi party, in 1934 Moholy-Nagy left Germany for Amsterdam. A year later, he moved to London, where he continued to work as a graphic designer. In 1937 Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago at the urging of Walter Gropius and together they founded the New American Bauhaus. Due to financial difficulty, the school closed in 1938, but reopened again in 1939 as the Chicago School of Design and is now known as the Illinois Institute of Technology. Moholy-Nagy was director of the school until 1945. He died the following year. His expansive and cross-disciplinary career was honored in 2016 with a retrospective entitled Moholy-Nagy: Future Present at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
