Lazlo Moholy-Nagy

László Moholy-Nagy

László Moholy-Nagy was born on July 20th, 1895 to a Jewish-Hungarian family. Originally he was born László Weisz, but then changed his surname to Nagy after a family friend, then added Moholy after his childhood city of Mohol. In his childhood he lived in Mohol, Hungary, and attended grade school there. He attended Gymnasium (high school) in the city of Szeged, which is a neighboring city of Mohol. After his time in Gymnasium he converted to the Hungarian Reformed Church, and started studying law in Budapest. After his conversion he was enlisted into the army. He fought in World War 1 and was injured severely, then returned to study law. While in college his friend and art critic Ivan Hevesy, introduced him to a journal, Jelenkor, and an activists group that based its beliefs off of a journal by the name of "Ma". These journals greatly influenced his art in the future. Soon after he was discharged from the army he went to the private art school of the Hungarian Fauve artist Robert Bereny. This is where Moholy-Nagy learned all of his techniques and learned to love art.

He began his artist career in October 1918. His first pieces of artwork were all influenced by the activist group that he was a part of in college. Also, his new mentor, Robert Bereny, was a Hungarian Soviet Republic member who was just an activist of the party and had no real position in the party. After the party was defeated in 1919 Moholy returned to Szeged, as it was a location that he felt safe and then he moved to Vienna, Austria after an art exhibit. In 1923 became a professor at the Bauhaus and began teaching his artistic style, constructivism, compared to the expressionism that was taught previously. Moholy preferred photography to express his artistic style, but often worked in other fields such as photography, typography, sculpture, painting, printmaking, and industrial design. He even coined the term "the New Vision" because he felt that through his art style that he was able to make people think of a different way to look at the world. He mainly took pictures of buildings, as his form of artwork was constructivism. He often used black and white images to make his images more appealing and to have the viewer look closer at the image since many didn't have very many colors. In this image to the right you can see that the picture was taken from below and it makes the viewer look at the black and white image that is surrounded by the colorful foreground. This is how many of his pieces of artwork were created. He often worked for corporation such as magazine companies. The most common place that you would find Moholy's artwork was on the cover of magazines and the piece of art to the right is also from a cover of a booklet for the Bauhaus.

After Moholy taught at Bauhaus he moved to Chicago