Getty Museum
Behind the Back of God/Between Heaven and Earth
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
- 1925
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
> Like László Moholy-Nagy’s *The Structure of the World* ([84.XM.231.2](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/37761/laszlo-moholy-nagy-das-weltgebaude-american-1925/)), this piece *Between Heaven and Earth* (also known as *Behind the Back of God*) is characteristic of Moholy’s mature montage style. The events pictured here unfold in a kind of filmic, stop-action sequence emanating from a circle that could represent the mouth of a cannon. From out of this aperture emerges a figure with flailing arms who is melded with a person using a blowgun. A child tumbles midway; another form lands in the sunflower-like fireman’s net below. The three lines create a sense of velocity and suggest marionettes being manipulated by a higher power. > > Katherine Ware, *László Moholy-Nagy*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 34. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.
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