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The Art of Light is a superb review of the work of one of the 20th century ́s most influential artists, László Moholy-Nagy ¿ an artist who conceived the various forms of art as a whole. Moholy-Nagy wanted to be a "total artist", simultaneously theoretical and practical, creating in various media and trying to overcome the separation between art and life. His was a radical, experimental art, without sacrificing any artistic practice and wandering from painting, to photography, to films. He also gave great importance to education and believed that man is the only builder of his existence. He was convinced of the importance of art and its ideological and educational functions. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: The Art of Light presents Moholy-Nagy's work in all of its glorious unity and diversity. Including more than 200 works, from painting, and photograms to collages, films and graphic design, it emphasizes his greatest years of productivity, from 1922 to the end of his life.

In Focus: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy reproduces almost fifty of the artist's photographs, with commentaries on each by katherine Ware, an Assistant Curator in the Musuem's Department of Photographs. Included as well is an edited transcript of a colloquim on Moholy-Nagy's work, with comments by Thomas Barrow, Jeannine Fiedler, Charles Hagen, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Weston Naef, Leland Rice, and Katherine Ware. A chronology of significant events in the artist's life is also provided.

This volume - investigating the work of a particular photographer, in this case, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy - comprises a 4000-word essay by an expert in the field, 55 photographs presented chronologically, each with a commentary, and a biography of the featured photographer.

Throughout his career Moholy-Nagy produced brilliant works in painting, film, photography, sculpture, set design and typography. A leading proponent of the Bauhaus School, he strove to apply artistic principles to every aspect of daily life. This companion volume to a retrospective features 170 works from all phases of Moholy-Nagy's career. Essays on his involvement with the Bauhaus School; his late paintings; his photographs, photograms, and photosculptures; and his accomplishments in the field of graphic art are complemented by numerous color illustrations. The book also documents the reconstruction of a never completed work, The Room of Today, which incorporates the most important themes Moholy-Nagy brought to his art. Readers viewing his work for the first time, along with those already possessing a deep appreciation for his art, will celebrate this long-overdue volume.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was one of the most ardent seekers of the `New Vision' among the early twentieth-century avant-gard artists. His ongoing preoccupation with the phenomenon of light defined all periods of his artistic creativity, and his strength lay in his effortless skill translating light and spatial dimensions from one medium to another. In the early 1930s the first color processes became widely available. After he had mastered the different fields of black/white photography, it was only to be expected that Moholy would focus his creative energy on the next hot issue among photographers: color photography. Not only in his Dutch and English emigration years, but also at the New Bauhaus and the Institute of Design in Chicago, color photography for Moholy proved to be one of his most important media of artistic production. But until now, with a few exceptions, his work in the field of color photography is unknown. This book presents 100 works - advertisements, portraits, urban views, New Bauhaus studies, and abstract compositions-from the early days of Moholy's experimentation with color in 1934 until his death in 1946. A foreword by Hattula Moholy-Nagy, an introductory essay and extended captions by Jeannine Fiedler, a chronology and bibliography will present the history of color photography and the significance of these works in Moholy's own oeuvre.

Ghostly photograms from a Bauhaus teacher and pioneer of the medium László Moholy-Nagy was one of the Bauhaus' most influential teachers; his photographic skills, as well as his writing on the subject, helped to secure the medium's integral place in modern art. One of Moholy-Nagy's most notable contributions was his extensive exploration--from 1922 through 1943--of the aesthetic possibilities of the photogram (he coined the term). These ghostly traces of objects placed on photographic paper during exposure are part of a prolific legacy that included painting, sculpture and stage design. Moholy-Nagy's photograms have become emblematic of the medium, though they have yet to be fully critically explored. This well-illustrated catalogue raisonné is the first to feature all of his known photograms--nearly 450--in chronological order. This exhaustive volume examines the artistic, technical and biographical circumstances under which the works were created, places them in relation to other parts of Moholy-Nagy's practice and analyzes selected pieces at length. László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) taught at the Bauhaus for five years, founding The School of Design in Chicago, which became the Illinois Institute of Technology, in 1939.