László Moholy-Nagy
5.30 min
Germany 1930

"The reality of our century is technology: the invention, construction and maintenance of machines. To be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century. Machines have replaced the transcendental spiritualism of past eras."
László Moholy-Nagy

Moholy-Nagy began working on sketches for his Light Space Modulator at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the 1920s. The Kinetic sculpture built from steel, wood and glass was finally completed with sponsorship from the electronics company AEG for the Deutsche Werkbund exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1930. Moholy-Nagy wrote later that “the function of the light modulator is to catch, reflect and modulate light”.

Lichtspiel, schwarz-weiß-grau pairs Moholy-Nagy’s machine with the apparatus of cinema to achieve a two-fold celebration of technology and a record of this abstract scheme of light and shadow in motion.

László Moholy-Nagy
(1895–46) Hungary

László Moholy-Nagy was a lifelong innovator with many artistic roles, including photographer, filmmaker, typographer, painter, sculptor, writer, graphic designer, stage designer, and teacher. He began his work with visual media during military service in World War I, creating more than four hundred drawings on military-issue postcards. Afterwards, he became active in Budapest's artistic circles, fleeing the city in 1919 amidst political upheaval. He landed in Berlin and joined the faculty of the German Bauhaus school in 1923. In 1937 Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago to become the director of the New Bauhaus, a school which promulgated its doctrines in America. When it folded after a year, he joined other former faculty members to establish the School of Design, which in 1944 became the Institute of Design in Chicago. He died of leukemia at age fifty.

(1-2) László Moholy-Nagy, Lichtspiel: Schwartz-Weiß-Grau, 1930

(3) László Moholy-Nagy The Light-Space Modulator replica, 1930, Bauhaus Archive, Berlin. All images © courtesy of the Estate of László Moholy-Nagy