László Moholy-Nagy

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century art and design, a Hungarian-born painter, photographer, filmmaker, sculptor, writer, and educator whose radical vision helped transform the visual culture of the modern era. Born in Bácsborsód, Hungary, Moholy-Nagy initially studied law in Budapest before serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. His experiences during the war, along with his exposure to the Hungarian avant-garde around the journal MA, redirected him toward the visual arts and toward the utopian belief that art could reshape modern life.

Moholy-Nagy moved to Berlin in 1920, where he quickly became a central figure in the German avant-garde. In 1923 Walter Gropius invited him to join the faculty of the Bauhaus, where he took over the celebrated Preliminary Course previously taught by Johannes Itten. During his years at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later Dessau, Moholy-Nagy pursued a remarkably wide-ranging practice that included painting, photography, film, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and stage design. He championed the use of new industrial materials and technologies, produced groundbreaking photograms without a camera, and developed the concept of the "New Vision" that would reshape modernist photography.

With the closure of the Bauhaus by the Nazi regime, Moholy-Nagy relocated first to Amsterdam and London before emigrating to Chicago in 1937, where he founded the New Bauhaus. Reorganized as the School of Design and eventually the Institute of Design, this school carried forward the Bauhaus program in the United States and became one of the most important centers of modernist design education in America. Alongside his teaching, he produced ambitious kinetic sculptures, painted works on Plexiglas, and continued his theoretical writing, publishing the important book Vision in Motion just before his death from leukemia in Chicago in 1946. His work is held in every major international museum.