As a professor at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, painter, photographer, and designer László Moholy-Nagy revolutionised art education, laid the foundations of his own media aesthetic called ‘new vision’ and played a key role in the internationalisation of the constructivist art movement. Through the creative use of light as a means of visual expression he found an art form that he saw as being capable of expanding human perception. Moholy-Nagy was interested in all possible forms and expressions of light. He was concerned with the problem of projecting onto smoke, fog, vapour, and artificial clouds. He was also interested in the technique of bending flat projection surfaces and proposed the idea of the multi-channel simultaneous cinema by using a number of projectors or a light-splitting prism placed in front of the film projector lens. Moholy-Nagy’s ideas on the creation of a virtual light space took physical form in his Light Prop for an Electric Stage, which was displayed in the A.E.G. section of the Werkbund exhibition in Paris in 1930. This kinetic sculpture – composed of a ball moving in a curved wire frame and a glass spiral on a rotating disc as well as various grids and perforated discs and sheets of mirror-polished metal – became the protagonist of Moholy-Nagy’s first abstract film. However, only the last sequence of the movie – originally conceived as a six-part film that explored the full range of possibilities as means of visual communication with light – was completed and can now be seen here. The film presented the visual experience created by the mechanical operation of Moholy-Nagy’s device by using techniques like floating images into each other, mirroring, multiplying and inverting them into their negatives. In Moholy-Nagy’s words, the theme of the piece is “the consciously designed pairing of light and shadow effects, and transposing our sense of space (the “spatial problem”) into the two-dimensionality of film”.

The painter, photographer and designer László Moholy-Nagy (1895, Bácsborsód – 1946, Chicago) revolutionised art education as a professor at the Bauhaus. He laid the foundations of the media aesthetics known as “new vision” and became an active player in international constructivism. His creative use of light, he argued, could help people to navigate the complexities of modern life, as the kinetics of light showed the known world from a new perspective.

Márton Orosz