Getty Museum
Olly and Dolly Sisters
Creator
László Moholy-NagyAmerican Photographer · 1895–1946
All works by this person →> The reality of our century is technology: the invention, construction and maintenance of machines. To be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century. Machines have replaced the transcendental spiritualism of past eras. > > --László Moholy-Nagy > > Perhaps more than any other artist in the Getty Museum collection, László Moholy-Nagy would have delighted in the presentation of his im
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1925
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
> According to the German art historian Irene-Charlotte Lusk, the title of this montage refers to the Dolly sisters, a dancing team popular in Europe and the United States from 1911 to 1927. The identical twins, Jenny and Rosie, appeared at the Moulin Rouge and in the Ziegfeld Follies and were known for both their beauty and their gambling prowess. In his autobiography, Charlie Chaplin mentions having dinner once in Los Angeles with the sisters, their husbands, and Diamond Jim Brady, their constant companion. The twins are interred at Forest Lawn in Glendale, California. > > László Moholy-Nagy has invented his own duo by changing the name slightly. One of the sisters represented by only a spot for her head, while the other is perched on a black sphere, her plumed skirt cascading around her. The starkness of this composition might lead one to think of it as unfinished, but the size of the print and its inclusion in the 1929 *Film und Foto* exhibition as well as in Franz Roh’s book *L. Moholy-Nagy: 60 Fotos* (1930) establish this as a completed work. The image is startling in its modernity and anticipates work by contemporary artists of the 1980s and 1990s. > > Katherine Ware, *László Moholy-Nagy*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 46. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.
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