UpDate - Vol. 15, No. 1, Page 4
August 31, 1995
Gallery to showcase works of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

     More than 100 pieces of rarely seen works of art, manuscripts,
historical photographs and other archival materials will be featured
in an exhibition commemorating the centenary of the birth of artist
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
     The exhibition opens Tuesday, Sept. 5, in the University Gallery
at Old College and continues through Dec. 17. An all-day modern art
symposium, devoted to Moholy-Nagy and planned in conjunction with the
exhibition, is scheduled for Friday, Oct. 20, in Clayton Hall.
      Hungarian-born Moholy-Nagy was a unique figure in 20th-century
culture, active as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer,
filmmaker, writer and designer.
     The exhibition, "Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: From Budapest to Berlin,
1914-1923," will bring together a significant portion of his early
works. Major exhibitions in the past have focused on Moholy-Nagy's
accomplishments with the German and American Bauhaus schools and the
Institute of Design in Chicago. In the shadow of these later
achievements, his earliest artistic efforts from 1912-1923 have gone
largely unheralded. This exhibition offers a fresh view of his early
works, which provide a telling look at the growth process of a serious
artist.
     Organized by Belena S. Chapp, University Gallery director, the
exhibition will draw upon the UD's collection of 69 postcard drawings
made by the artist during World  War I.
     Lenders to the exhibition include the Hungarian National Gallery
and the Petofi Irodalmi Muzeum in Budapest, the International Museum
of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., and
many private collectors from the U.S. and abroad.


The artist
     Born in Bacsborsod, Hungary, on July 20, 1895, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
came to excel in a wide range of creative activity, always working on
the cutting edge.  He also was a forceful educator who wrote
persuasively about art, design, theory and pedagogy.
     Because of his varied experiences he was able to synthesize in
his writing and teaching a definitive conception of the role of the
artist in modern industrial society. His influence was both broad and
profound.
     Moholy-Nagy first expressed his creative interests through
writing. He contributed short stories to the Hungarian periodical
Jelenkor (Our Age). While training to be a lawyer at the University of
Budapest, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army and called to
the Russian front during World War I. It was during this period that
he began to experiment with visual art, making more than 400 drawings
on military-issued postcards.
     After the war, Moholy-Nagy returned to Budapest where he became
active in the Hungarian avant-garde, aligning himself with a circle of
intellectuals and artists led by Lajos Kassak. As Moholy-Nagy began to
think about art in increasingly social and revolutionary terms, he
moved from the postcard genre into larger portraits and landscape
drawings.
     These pieces, energized by his forceful, vigorous method, show
the hand of a confident and maturing artist at ease with the technical
demands of his chosen medium.  Moholy-Nagy borrowed freely from the
stylistic lead of his friend and mentor, Lajos Tihanyi, yet succeeded
in creating a body of work distinctly his own in its dynamic and
metaphorical use of line.
     His portrait series coincided with a number of political
upheavals in Hungary after the war. During the rise to power of the
Horthy government, Moholy-Nagy and other members of radical or
revolutionary groups left Hungary in self-imposed political exile.
Many landed in Vienna, where Moholy-Nagy spent six weeks working with
Kassak and the continued publication of the journal MA (Today).
     Moholy-Nagy then moved to Berlin, where he eventually settled
before joining the German Bauhaus School in Wiemar. Moholy-Nagy's
first year in Germany signaled a turning point in his maturation as an
artist. Although he continued to sketch a few representational
portraits of friends, he essentially abandoned this style for
abstraction, turning to the "machine aesthetic" as a universal form
for expressing the visual complexities of modern life. His work from
this transitional period testifies to the flurry of intellectual and
artistic activity which spurred his transformation into the master
teacher know as a "painter of light."


Other activities
     In conjunction with the exhibition, a symposium, "Laszlo Moholy-
Nagy: Translating Utopia into Action," scheduled for Friday, Oct. 20,
will bring together Hungarian, American and Canadian scholars. A
public reception will take place from 5 to 7 p.m. that evening at the
University Gallery. Cost is $25 for the general public and $15 for
students. For registration information, call 831-2216.
     The symposium is organized by the University Gallery and the
Department of Art History. The exhibition, catalog and symposium are
made possible, in part, by support from the Delaware State Arts
Council/Division of the Arts, the Trust of Mutual Understanding and
through other private contributions.
     For more information on any aspect of these projects, contact the
University Gallery via e-mail to Belena.Chapp@mvs.udel.edu. or call
831-8242.