Moholy-Nagy influenced the Bauhaus in its shift toward industrial aesthetics and materials.
László Moholy-Nagy, Composition A.XX, 1924, oil and graphite on canvas, 135.5 x 115 cm (Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris)
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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:11] We’re in the Pompidou in Paris, and we’re looking at László Moholy-Nagy. This is “A.XX” from 1924. Moholy-Nagy was a member of the Hungarian avant-garde, but in 1920 he comes to Dessau, to Germany, to Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus, and takes over the first-year program.
[0:23] Now, what’s really important is that when Moholy-Nagy comes in, he comes in almost as a kind of engineer. He’s often portrayed in work coveralls. He helps the Bauhaus transform into a school that emphasizes the industrial to a much greater extent.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:38] With the arrival of Moholy-Nagy, we have this new interest in the machine. We certainly have a sense here of very simplified forms. It’s easy to misunderstand its simplicity unless one spends some time with it.
Dr. Zucker: [0:55] At first, it simply looks like a number of geometric forms that are overlapping and there’s nothing much there, but in fact, this is a really careful study about space, transparency, translucency, and opacity.
Dr. Harris: [1:09] If you think about it in terms of light, it becomes easier to understand its complexity.
Dr. Zucker: [1:15] This is, in fact, one of the so-called “light” paintings. Let’s see if we can work our way through it. My eye is led into this canvas by this long plane of glass, or what seems like glass, this purely transparent form that almost looks like an outsized glass slide that you might use under a microscope.
Dr. Harris: [1:34] It forms a diagonal line that suggests a recession into space.
Dr. Zucker: [1:35] I want to stay with that metaphor of the microscope’s glass slide for a moment because I think that there is a kind of scientific investigation here.
Dr. Harris: [1:47] If we have that transparent glass-like shape that forms that diagonal, we have another similar form that doesn’t appear transparent, that emerges into our space almost like it’s abutting against the transparent shape.
Dr. Zucker: [1:59] But not exactly at a right angle.
Dr. Harris: [2:01] No.
Dr. Zucker: [2:01] It’s a bit more open, and it goes into a much deeper space.
Dr. Harris: [2:08] It’s remarkable to me how deep a space Moholy-Nagy has constructed, just with these very simple forms. We also have a sense of opacity and transparency and translucency in the forms around the circle that are overlapping here, and also in the two vertical forms.
Dr. Zucker: [2:27] What’s interesting about those vertical forms is that instead of using orthogonals to create space, he’s using scale to create space. We have the larger, thicker one and then evidently much deeper in space, much further away, the one that’s more narrow.
Dr. Harris: [2:41] And also that circle in the distance, it helps to create an illusion of space.
Dr. Zucker: [2:42] Right, and then look at the bands, both vertical and horizontal, that cross. Those are translucent, but when they cross, in a sense there’s enough visual mass, so they become opaque, but then counter that with what we might take to be opacity, but it’s not.
[2:56] It’s reflectivity in the way that the transparent plane actually overlays that translucent vertical. Then, you have a white negative space, but that seems to be the result of reflectivity as opposed to opacity.
Dr. Harris: [3:18] So we have the opaque, which one can’t see through; the translucent, which one can see through somewhat; the transparent, which one can see through entirely; and reflectivity and the different ways that those overlap and affect color and space.
[3:34] What’s interesting to me is that Moholy-Nagy has not represented any of those things. If you think about the way that painters represent reflectivity and mirrors, or transparency with a wine glass in a still life, all of those things are still here, but in a very different language.
Dr. Zucker: [3:55] It’s almost the language of mathematics. This is an abstraction that refers to those things in the purest terms, almost mathematical terms, as opposed to the representation of those things.
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