LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY (1894-1946)

This study is of one Bauhaus master by another. Schlemmer had been appointed by Walter Gropius in 1920 as Master of Form in the sculpture workshop. With an appropriate disdain for the conventional hierarchies of art and for any demarcations between fine, applied and performing arts, Schlemmer interlinked several disciplines. He concentrated on the human figure, reconstructing it as a configuration of strict geometric forms and exploring the figure in space through highly stylised dance. For Schlemmer, the stage and particularly dance became the perfect paradigms of utopian Bauhaus cross-discipline creativity that challenged the elitist convention of the unique precious work as the ultimate expression of art.

Moholy-Nagy effectively defined his radical approach to artistic experimentation in his 1927 publication Malerei Fotografie Film. His modernist aesthetic, that distilled elements of dada and of de Stijl, saw photography as a central and essential tool of radical picture making and communication. Able to express his innovative vision through his multiple and inter-connected skills as painter, sculptor, graphic designer and typographer, Moholy-Nagy was equally unfettered by tradition in his exploration of photography. Appointed Master of Form in the metal workshop in 1923, he soon led the crucial preliminary course, giving him the opportunity to instil a broad and inclusive attitude that linked vision, technology and the media and allowed photography a privileged central position.

This portrait was one of a series of images that Moholy-Nagy made on this balcony at Casa Fantoni in Ascona, Switzerland, where he joined Schlemmer's family on vacation. The hard shadows of the railings become a grid that is distorted by and, curiously, at once emphasises yet obscures the forms on which it falls. This study was among the very substantial submission of ninety-seven photographs by Moholy-Nagy presented in the Film und Foto exhibition.