Minneapolis Institute of Art

Untitled

László Moholy-Nagy

Date

1937–44

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Arts of the Americas

Institution

Minneapolis Institute of Art

László Moholy-Nagy was a leading figure of the Bauhaus, a modern art and design school founded by the architect Walter Gropius, as well as being a prominent member of the related New Objectivity Movement. Moholy-Nagy worked as a painter, graphic artist, photographer, and teacher, and he produced this image without a camera by arranging objects directly on a sheet of photo paper and exposing it to light. The resulting photogram is a negative shadow image with tonal variations. Although this process was used by photographers in the 1800s and popularized as a children’s amusement, 20th-century avant-garde artists revived it as a way to embrace abstraction and explore the optical properties of light. United States, Americas

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