László Moholy-Nagy

painting and photography

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The following two texts focus on the Hungarian avant-garde painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy.
“Moholy-Nagy,” written by his countryman Ernő Kállai, principally concerns Moholy-Nagy’s early work in
painting. As such, it describes their geometricism and abstraction, as well as their amenability to architecture.
He’d been converted to constructivism, of course, by El Lissitzkyduring his travels to the West. Lissitzky
managed to convince a number of members of the De Stijl group in Holland to adopt these principles as well,
and stopped by later at the Bauhaus to reconnect with some of his former students and collaborators.
“Production-Reproduction,” the second article reproduced here, was written by Moholy-Nagy himself. It
proved to be of immense importance for subsequent theories of photography as a form of art, and by extension
art in general. Walter Benjamin read it and was influenced by it, as was his colleague (and sometimes
plagiarist) Siegfried Kracauer. Also, if anyone’s interested, you can download the 1968 translation of Moholy-
Nagy’s book Painting, Photography, Film (1925), part of the Bauhausbücher series.

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Moholy-Nagy
Péter Mátyás [Ernő
Kállai] Ma vol. 9
September 15, 1921
.
In the extremes of its adventures, [László] Moholy-Nagy’s art reaches out on the
borders of Cubism and Dadaism, and by organically uniting these opposite poles, he
heralds the world of contemporary man who has managed to subjugate the machines.
Speaking purely in terms of form, he constructs either concentric or eccentric systems
of forms or tries to interlink these opposing entities.

In the case of those works, in the monumentality of the few masses which are
distanced so as to suggest inevitability, a strong will and elementary laws manifest
themselves. In his use of the landscape motifs of the railway tracks, for example by
the projection of the tremendous diagonal of a factory chimney leaning left, the
leaning, resting forces, forces pressing tensed into vertical, are gathered into a
compact architecture of form. Details of bridges and architectural structures, having
lost all their utilitarian references and practical functions, freely elevate themselves
into a self-willed order, an existence meaningful in itself. In another picture, based on
a white horizontal stripe, with an almost organic vitality, the form swings and leaps
into a slender vertical. This is all discipline of form, self-awareness, and pride, a
totally new and individual manifestation of the modern constructive style, which is
devoid of the sometimes dangerously short-changing form and color-splitting and
space-complicating of the more differentiated Western Cubism. Colors develop
themselves into form through their strong contrasts, through their brutal clashing with
each other; the articulations of the form are of the most simple kind possible, and that
space, which was left empty for a tabula rasa, constitutes a single, wide abstract wall
behind the form, on which the artist’s credo concerning the future-shaping power of
man’s civilizing activity is written up with lapidary laconicism.

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However, Moholy-Nagy is not only a monumental lord and master-builder of
contemporary life and of form, but with a naive admiration of the eternal-primitive
child-barbarian, and with his raving joy too, he is also an ecstatic admirer of this life.
In other people’s hands Dadaism serves as a murderous weapon of moral and social
criticism. The exultation over a million possibilities of forms and motion which only
the metropolis and modern technology can create, the sudden discovery of a new

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world and the dancing laughing youth of a vision totally open to the universe: all these
are there in Moholy-Nagy’s art.

Semaphores of joys, forms and colors are standing on all points of space.

Freshly felt surprises and perspectives of gravitational pulls of manifold directions, of

the many and of the many kinds, spring up from everywhere. Total geometrical
abstractions as well as pieces, numbers, letters and realistically represented objects or
fragments of objects picked from the primary reality proliferate in Moholy-Nagy’s
eccentrical pictures.

This is a cosmic harmony, nonetheless it has not been kindled by a Futurist

Romanticism and, still yet, these works, despite of all their divergences, form, after
all, a perfectly intelligible system of absolutely interdependent units.

Anarchy is getting perceptibly arranged into a system of unified law. Although still
not with the centralism of the self-containing architectonic structures, the pieces are
coalescing into cohesive units, replacing the exploded conglomerate forms. Structures,
still open, but set into motion from sharper defined and closer interrelated centers,
emerge. Here, the mechanism of the modern machine and its kinetic system has been
converted into art through the process of a fruitful coalescence of centrical and
eccentrical pictorial factors with the creative principles connecting with Dadaism and
Cubism.

This fusion without inner contradictions of the style forming and negating trends of
modern art gives Moholy-Nagy a chance to elevate his paintings on the terms of their
own forms the level of vision. His art, after all, maintains a close link with its own
well-defined objective territory. But in his relatedness to reality he is not satisfied with
pointing out that meaning which is already present, although more or less hidden, in
our senseless, chaotic age.

Just as the anarchistic manifestations of Moholy-Nagy’s art mean neither the rejection
nor the approval of the all-destroying selfish instinct of the bourgeois free enterprise.
Over problematical features of the present, Moholy-Nagy proclaims law and liberty
which throw light on the perspectives of the infinite future.

Translated from the Hungarian by Krisztina Passuth.

Between Two Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-
Gardes, 1910-1930. (The MIT Press. Cambridge, MA: 2002).

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Production-reproduction
László Moholy-Nagy
De Stijl No.7
July 1, 1922
.
If we want to understand correctly the mode of human expression and shaping in art
and in other related domains, and if we want to achieve progress therein, we have to
examine the contributing factors: namely, man himself as well as the means he applies
in his creative activity. Man as construct is the synthesis of all his functional
apparatuses, i.e. man will be most perfect in his own time if the functional apparatuses
of which he is composed — his cells as well as the most sophisticated organs — are
conscious and trained to the limit of their capacity.
Art actually performs such a training — and this is one of its most important tasks,
since the whole complex of effects depends on the degree of perfection of the
receptive organs — by trying to bring about the most far-reaching new contacts
between the familiar and the as yet unknown optical, acoustical and other functional
phenomena and by forcing the functional apparatuses to receive them. It is a
specifically human characteristic that man’s functional apparatuses can never be
saturated; they crave ever new impressions following each new reception.
This accounts for the permanent necessity for new experiments. From this perspective,
creative activities are useful only if they produce new, so far unknown relations. In
other words, in specific regard to creation, reproduction (reiteration of already existing
relations) can be regarded for the most part as mere virtuosity.

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Since it is primarily production (productive creation) that serves human construction,
we must strive to turn the apparatuses (instruments) used so far only for reproductive
purposes into ones that can be used for productive purposes as well. This calls for
profound examination of the following questions:

 What is this apparatus (instrument) good for?

 What is the essence of its function?
 Are we able, and if so to what end, to extend the apparatus’s use so that it can
serve production as well?
Let us apply these questions to some examples: the phonograph and photography —
single pictures (stills) and film. Phonograph. So far it has been the job of the
phonograph to reproduce already existing acoustic phenomena. The tonal oscillations
to be reproduced were incised on a wax plate by means of a needle and then
retranslated into sound by means of a microphone (correctly: diaphragm, moving
cone).

An extension of this apparatus for productive purposes could be achieved as follows:

the grooves are incised by human agency into the wax plate, without any external
mechanical means, which then produce sound effects which would signify — without
new instruments and without an orchestra — a fundamental innovation in sound
production (of new, hitherto unknown sounds and tonal relations) both in composition
and in musical performance.

The primary condition for such work is laboratory experiments: precise examination
of the kinds of grooves (as regards length, width, depth etc.) brought about by the
different sounds; examination of the man-made grooves; and finally mechanical-
technical experiments for perfecting the groove-manuscript score. (Or perhaps the
mechanical reduction of large groove-script records.)

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Photography. The photographic camera fixes light phenomena by means of a silver
bromide plate positioned at the rear of the camera. So far we have utilized this
function of the apparatus only at a secondary level: in order to fix (reproduce) single
objects as they reflect or absorb light. In the event of revaluation taking place in this

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field, too, we will have to utilize the bromide plate’s sensitivity to light to receive and
record various light phenomena (parts of light displays) which we ourselves will
have formed by means of mirror or lens devices.
Many experiments are needed here, too. Telescopic recordings of stars as well as
radiography represent interesting preliminary stages.

Film. Kinetic relationships of projected light. This can be achieved by sequences of

fixed partial movements. Cinematography as practiced so far is limited mainly to the
reproduction of dramatic action. There are certainly many important activities to be
carried out in the domain of film. Some are scientific in nature (dynamism of various
motions: of man, animal, city etc.; different observations: functional, chemical etc.;
wireless projection of film news etc.); some involve the completion of reproduction
itself from a constructive standpoint. But the main task is the formation of motion as
such; naturally, this cannot be realized without a manmade play of forms as motion
carrier.
Naïve experiments relative to such development were the trick-films (advertisements).
Much more highly developed are the works of Ruttman and the Clavilux of
Th[omas] Wilfred; these, however,p resented motion as an objectless dramatic action
(abstraction or styling of erotic or natural events), albeit by trying to introduce the
color picture.
So far the most perfect works are those of [Viking] Eggeling and [Gerhard] Richter, in
which instead of dramatic action there is already a play of forms, although to the
detriment of kinetic formation. In fact, movement is not given formal purity, for over-
emphasis upon the forms’ development absorbs almost all the kinetic forces. The way
ahead here will be the formation of motion without the support of any direct formal
development.

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