Moholy-Nagy: Future Present

From: 02/10/2016
To:03/01/2017
Chicago
United States

Painting, photography, film, sculpture, advertising, product design, theater sets—László Moholy-Nagy (American, born Hungary, 1895–1946) did it all. Future Present, the first comprehensive retrospective of Moholy-Nagy’s work in the United States in nearly 50 years, brings together more than 300 works to survey the career of a multimedia artist who was always ahead of his time. Moholy, as he was known, came to prominence as a professor at the Bauhaus art school in Germany (1923–28). In 1937 he founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago, a school that continues today as the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
He remains the most internationally recognized visual artist ever to have resided in Chicago. A pioneer of abstraction for the industrial age, Moholy insisted that art must be developed from the materials of one’s time, in his case recorded sound, photography, film, and synthetic plastics. He demonstrated that in our era of reproducibility works of art gain fresh meaning with a change in size or even reorientation, reverse printing, or a shift in lighting. For Moholy, every citizen could be creative, and every viewer could educate his or her senses by studying effects of light, transparency, and motion in common materials of everyday modern life.
Future Present presents a wide body of works ranging in date from 1920, when the artist moved to Germany, until his death in Chicago in 1946. One room shows 38 photomontages—nearly all known compositions in nearly every physical variant—brought together for the first time. Another presents three “telephone paintings,” a single abstract composition that Moholy ordered in three sizes from an enamel sign factory in 1923; this trio of industrial paintings has been separated for decades. All six of Moholy’s iconic, plunging views from the Berlin Radio Tower are united in another room, while a multimedia installation, Room of the Present, which