In Focus: László Moholy-Nagy

Katherine Ware

Hungarian-born László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) was influential not only as a photographer but also as a filmmaker, teacher, and painter. He taught at the Bauhaus in Germany and, after fleeing the Nazi regime, settled in Chicago, where he founded the Institute of Design. He pioneered the photomontage and created the camera-less medium of the photogram.

Almost fifty reproductions from the J. Paul Getty Museum's outstanding collection of the work of this important photographer—each described by Katherine Ware—serve as an exciting introduction to Moholy-Nagy's work. The book includes the edited transcript of a recent colloquium that provides the historical and critical perspective necessary for understanding Moholy-Nagy's vital contribution to the art of the twentieth century.

The colloquium, chaired by New York Times writer and critic Charles Hagen, included Thomas Barrow, a photographer and teacher of studio art at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque; Jeannine Fiedler, a scholar who has worked at the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin; Leland Rice, a photographer and independent curator from northern California; Hattula Moholy-Nagy, the photographer's daughter and an archaeologist living in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Weston Naef and Katherine Ware, curator emeritus of photographs and former curatorial assistant, respectively, at the J. Paul Getty Museum.