László Moholy-Nagy

Biography

Shortly after he left the military in 1918 he decided to become an artist and he adopted the surname Moholy-Nagy. He moved to Berlin in the spring of 1920, where he was actively involved in the art scene. Besides paintings, drawings, and sculptures, he also began to create photograms, photographic images made without a camera, as well as camera photographs. From 1923 to 1928 he taught at the Bauhaus design school in Weimar and Dessau. In 1928 he moved back to Berlin where he began to make short silent b/w films. He took up color photography when he moved to Holland in 1934. The following year he moved to London. Alexander Korda of London Films asked him to design the special effects for Things to Come, which were not used in the film after all. He moved to Chicago in 1937 to direct a design school. When that closed, Moholy-Nagy opened his own school based on Bauhaus principles, the School of Design in Chicago. In 1944 it was reorganized and renamed The Institute of Design and is now a department of the Illinois Institute of Technology. During his years in Chicago he produced books, art, photograms, b/w and color camera photographs, and short color films. In 1945 he was diagnosed with leukemia and died the following year at the age of 51.