Getty Museum

Der Abschied

Date

1924

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> László Moholy-Nagy’s use of photomontage was undoubtedly stimulated by his association with the Berlin Dadaists, particularly Raoul Hausmann. The Dadaists declared themselves “anti-art,” and instead of drawing or painting a picture would assemble an image from preexisting elements, such as photographs or reproductions from popular magazines. The montage technique was a revolutionary way to represent and comprehend the urban culture of the twentieth century. Such *fotoplastiks*, as Moholy called his photographs of montages, “are grounded in that kind of cerebral and ocular gymnastics which most city dwellers are compelled to perform day by day,” he wrote in the 1928 article “Fotografie ist Lichtgestaltung” (Photography is creation with light). > > In this humorous artwork Moholy-Nagy used pictures from a variety of sources and augmented the composition with painting before photographing the whole construction. An industrial landscape is the background for this melodramatic farewell scene of the sort seen in popular postcards and movies of the 1920s. The characters are more involved in their own exaggerated posing than in leave-taking, despite the train thundering below them; the two dogs seem to echo their respective moods. The pastiche quality of this piece suggests that it may have been made at the beginning of Moholy’s work with photomontage, which he would employ extensively throughout his career. > > Katherine Ware, *László Moholy-Nagy*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 14. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.

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