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Dimensions: measurements note 4 7/8 by 6 7/8 in. (12.4 by 17.5 cm.)
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Provenance: Property of a Midwestern collectorSotheby's New York, 1 and 2 November 1988, Sale 5766, Lot 380Acquired by the Quillan Company from the above
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Literature: Jill Quasha, The Quillan Collection of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Photographs (New York, 1991), pl. 1 (this print)Related images:László Moholy-Nagy: Photographies, photomontages, photogrammes (Paris, 1998), pl. 23Renate Heyne, Floris M. Neusüss, and Herbert Molderings, László Moholy-Nagy: Fotogramme 1922-1943 (Essen: Museum Folkwang, 1996), p. 181
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Notes: Throughout his long and multi-faceted career as a designer, sculptor, printmaker, filmmaker, and teacher, László Moholy-Nagy worked continuously as a photographer. As Floris Neusüss, the Moholy authority, has so beautifully expressed it, 'In his youth, Moholy had already developed an almost ecstatic relationship to light.' Moholy's photograms are perhaps the purest and most spontaneous records of this ecstatic relationship, and they informed his work in all other areas. Calling himself a Lichtner, a 'light-painter' or 'light manipulator,' Moholy worked with the photogram over a course of three decades, beginning in Germany in 1922 and continuing throughout his work in Chicago in the 1940s. The photogram offered here, on printing-out paper, was exposed by Moholy in daylight, and created by him not over a period of seconds, but over a period of minutes. The daylight paper allowed Moholy to see the image as it evolved, giving him the opportunity to move, alter, or create new forms and compositions as the image emerged. In his 1928 essay, Photographic Manipulations of Light, Moholy praised the use of daylight paper for photograms, for 'within a short time one can observe the formation of the contours of the object and its shadow on bright layers in a dark ground' (quoted in Bauhaus Photography, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, 1982, p. 126).
