László Moholy-Nagy

I took the train from Penn Station to New Jersey to see art historian Oliver A.I. Botar’s small, potent exhibition about the formative years of Bauhaus artist and teacher László Moholy-Nagy. It turned out to be Homecoming weekend, and a train ride into college country was no quiet trip. As we rocketed out of Manhattan past the New Jersey industrial landscape, the train was jammed with clusters of youth, coolly rambunctious, popping champagne, wearing new fashion.

The rowdy mood, at least, felt appropriate. For “Technical Detours,” although serious in tone and research, channels the wild energy and sense of experiment that I like to associate with 20- year-olds. Twenty is precisely the age of Moholy-Nagy when he first began drawing, leaving law school to serve as a sergeant in the Hungarian army in 1915 and producing quick, casual studies of military life. Eight years later, in 1923, he was asked by Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus school, solidifying his position in the foremost art and design movement of the 20th century. The sheer speed of that career arc suggests the degree to which a study of the period was needed.

Compressed neatly into a corner of the Jane Vorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, the exhibition attempts to explain Moholy-Nagy’s achievement in part through his ability to match a remarkably adventuresome practice with rigorous critique and in part through the verdant cultural scenes with which he had contact in Budapest, Vienna and Berlin. “Technical Detours” works by comparison, using over 200 documents and original artworks produced by Moholy-Nagy and his set between 1918 and 1923 to track the progress and influences of the young artist.

Perhaps most striking is the sense of stylistic turmoil embraced by the young artist. From early literary aspirations as a poet, profoundly influenced by Hungarian modernist Endre Ady, to his early drawings that experiment with auxiliary lines to produce new spatial dynamics, Moholy-Nagy appears as dream student: curious, disciplined and mobilized equally by aesthetic and social concerns. I was especially excited to learn of Moholy-Nagy’s exposure, through his wife Lucia and their visits to women’s communes in the Rhön mountains, to German body culture and pre-eminent feminist practices, values that surely informed his later pedagogy. Then there is the strategic play with identity that launches this flurry of productivity, when in 1918 the artist converts from Judaism to Calvinism and takes the gentry-associated name Moholy in what the curator understands as an ambitious move to position himself within a national cultural landscape. Here is a complex portrait of Moholy-Nagy as cultural omnivore, relentlessly digesting genres, techniques and environments in ways that make the coherency of terms like “modernism” and “postmodernism” wither.

Of special interest are the early postcard drawings, made cheaply on the move, documenting everyday scenes from military life or Budapest café society. We see the artist as a young man grappling with representational techniques and the familiar as highly accessible content. Equally wonderful are the set designs produced for Walter Hasenclever’s play Die Menschen, 1920, that demonstrate a curiosity towards the live arts, 3-D space and psychological expression. These prefigure his interest in perception as an effect of human mobility, an interest later manifested in his kinetic sculpture and museum installation design work.

Considerable impact lay in the abundance of small magazines and journals on view—among them, Lajos Kassák’s Ma (Today), Iván Hevesy’s Jelenkor (Present Age) and Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm. Alternately showing his work and that of his peers, displaying his determination to publish and a sense of what he was reading, these publications are deftly arranged to convey the artist’s liberal approach to aesthetics and the early work’s thematic continuity with Moholy-Nagy’s later investigation of new technologies. At the same time, the journals record a scene in the making, an explosion of poetics and politics in revolutionary Hungary whose power and excitement are simply invigorating to recall.

But the show’s DNA lies in the painting Architektur I or Konstruktion auf blauem Grund (Architecture I or Construction on blue ground), 1922, a series of bars and arcs floating against a blue backdrop and animated by the tension of colour, rather than traditional means of perspective or figuration. That Architektur I constitutes a radical departure for Moholy-Nagy is clear, but the added pleasure lies in a second image discovered by the curator on the painting’s verso, painted over by the artist shortly after its making in 1920 or 1921 and restored for this exhibition. Eisenbahnbild mit Ackerfelder und 3, as Botar names the unwanted image, imagines a stylized, gridlike, farm field overlaid with Dada-esque insertions of floating wagon wheels and electrical towers; taken together, the paintings announce the artist’s decisive arrival at a new style, that of International Constructivism.

“Technical Detours,” a phrase taken from Moholy-Nagy’s writing that identifies technology as a sorry alternative to the pure beam of the mind in action, does much to complicate our understanding of the artist as pre-war technophile. One feels Botar’s love of subject in the attention to dating works and mapping relations between contemporaries in the Hungarian avant-garde, the quiet thrill of academic detective work. This is mirrored in the accompanying historically rich catalogue, which parallels the exhibition in short chapters that spiral and overlap in time and content. It might be tempting to argue with the exhibition’s most basic premise, that of explaining Moholy-Nagy’s sudden leap in any way, much less through youthful trial and error. Botar, instead, demonstrates the value of the early work not as juvenilia, but as the product of a wondrous approach to art, adept at assimilating difference and incongruity. ■

“Technical Detours: The Early Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered,” curated by Oliver A. Botar, was first exhibited at the Art Gallery of The Graduate Centre at CUNY in New York from February 28 to April 22, 2006. It was then exhibited at the Jane Vorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey from September 1 to October 31, 2006.

MJ Thompson is a writer living in Brooklyn and Montreal.