László Moholy-Nagy

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), Hungarian-American painter, sculptor, designer, and photographer, born in Bacsbarsod. Originally a law student, he studied art in Berlin after World War I, where he became an adherent of the abstract school known as constructivism. From 1923 to 1928 he taught at the Bauhaus and became a leader in the development of abstract art in many media. He explored the relationship of light and motion in his rotating Light-Space Requisite (circa 1930) and in a series of Space Modulators (after 1953, machines created posthumously according to the artist’s specifications), which were early examples of kinetic sculpture.

Moholy-Nagy moved to the U.S. in 1937 and founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago—later renamed the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology—which he conducted until his death. Instruction was based on his concepts of architectonic composition and the use of new materials; these concepts are exemplified in his Double Loop (1946, Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Munich), a free-form sculpture of bent Plexiglas. He also experimented and worked in painting, typography, photography, and cinema. He set forth his artistic tenets in Vision in Motion (published posthumously, 1947).