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a unique object, on gelatin silver paper, with white ink re-touching, signed 'L. Moholy = Nagy,' titled, dated '1926,', inscribed 'original,' and with reproduction instructions 'diesen fleck mit weiss wegretuschieren,' 'weg! ' and 'Linie weg' by the photographer in ink and numbered '12a' and ruled with crossed diagonal lines and with a reduction notation line marked '16.3' by the photographer in red pencil and with directional notations 'Haut' and 'Oben' in an unidentified hand in ink and the photographer's 'foto moholy-nagy' stamp on the reverse, 1926

PROVENANCE

The photographer to an associate

Acquired by William Larson from the above, 1973

Acquired by Eugene and Dorothy Prakapas from the above, 1980
EXHIBITED

Galleries of the Claremont Colleges, Claremont, California, Photographs of Moholy-Nagy from the Collection of William Larson, 4 April - 8 May 1975, and thereafter to:

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 9 July - 7 September 1975

University Art Museum, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 28 September - 2 November 1975

Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego, 16 October - 28 November 1976

Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia, 13 December 1976 - 23 January 1977

Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, 7 February - 20 March 1977

Tyler Museum of Art, Tyler, Texas, 4 April - 15 May 1977

Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, 30 May - 10 July 1977

Detroit Institute of the Arts, 25 July - 4 September 1977

Center for the Visual Arts Gallery, Illinois State University, Normal, 19 September - 30 October 1977

Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 14 November - 25 December 1977

J. B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, 9 January - 19 February 1978

Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, 6 March - 16 April 1978

Baltimore Museum of Art, 1 May - 11 June 1978

Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, North Carolina, 26 June - 6 August 1978

New Orleans Museum of Art, 21 August - 1 October 1978

Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, 16 October - 26 November 1978

Art Gallery, Camden College of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, 11 December 1978 - 21 January 1979

Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, 5 February - 18 March 1979

South Dakota Memorial Art Center, Brookings, 2 April - 14 May 1979

Indiana University Museum of Art, Bloomington, 25 May - 9 July 1979

Wellesley College Museum, Wellesley, Massachusetts, Moholy-Nagy: Photography and Film in Weimar Germany, 10 April - 10 June 1985, and thereafter to:

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2 November 1985 - 5 January 1986

The Art Institute of Chicago, 31 January - 13 April 1986

Institut Valencia d'Art Modern, Centre Julio González, Valencia, Spain, László Moholy-Nagy, 11 February - 7 April 1991, and thereafter to:

Fridericianum Museum, Kassel, 21 April - 16 June 1991

Musée Cantini, Marseille, 28 June - 15 September 1991
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

L. Moholy-Nagy, 60 Fotos, pl. 27 (almost certainly this photogram)

Rice and Steadman, Photographs of Moholy-Nagy from the Collection of William Larson, p. 43 (this photogram)

Hight, Moholy-Nagy: Photography and Film in Weimar Germany, pl. 18 (this photogram)

Institut Valencia d'Art Modern, László Moholy-Nagy, pl. 84 (this photogram)

Musée Cantini Marseille, László Moholy-Nagy, p. 212 (this photogram)

See also:

Ludvik Soucek, László Moholy-Nagy, pl. 30

Haus, Moholy-Nagy: Photographs and Photograms, pl. 144

Heyne, Neusüss, and Molderings, László Moholy-Nagy: Fotogramme 1922 - 1943, pls. 47, 48, and 49, and p. 173, cat. entry 82, and p. 174, cat. entry 83
CATALOGUE NOTE

This photogram with a diagonal shape is one of the most significant, and recognizable, of Moholy's Dessau photograms. Its concise shapes form a delicate, dynamic Constructivist composition, set forth in a seemingly endless range of subtle greys, whites, and blacks; its decisive lines and angles reflect the precision of the technological age. As Franz Roh stated, in his introduction to Moholy's volume 60 Fotos, 'The "constructivist" Moholy appears most strongly in the photogram.' The present photogram's inclusion in 60 Fotos, its placement within the volume, and its likely inclusion in the 1929 Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart, signal its importance within Moholy's oeuvre.

The present photogram was one of only eight photograms Moholy chose to reproduce in 60 Fotos, the definitive anthology of his own photographic work, published in Berlin in 1930. The photograms are interspersed throughout the volume, each reproduced on one page of a double-page spread. The seven other photograms are paired with a Moholy photograph or photoplastik on the facing page. A photogram with a circle and curving shapes (Haus, pl. 133), for instance, is paired with the photoplastik 'Jealousy.' A very early photogram of collage-like elements is paired with Moholy's negative photograph of a cat. The photogram offered here, however, is the only photogram in the volume that is paired with another photogram, and in this instance, the facing photogram is significant: a 'self-portrait' photogram of Moholy himself, titled 'Moholy legt seinen Kopf auf lichtempfindliches Papier' ('Moholy lays his head on sensitive paper') (see illustration on page ___).

It is believed that the 60 photographs, photograms, and photoplastiks which comprise the 60 Fotos volume were selected from the larger group of 97 Moholy images that were shown in a special room at the Film und Foto exhibition at Stuttgart in 1929. If so, it is possible that the photogram offered here was the actual object included in the exhibition. The photogram offered here is almost certainly the actual object that was used for reproduction in the 60 Fotos volume: the vertical reduction notation of '16.3' [cm] marked on the reverse, in pencil, corresponds to the vertical length of the reproduction of this image on the 60 Fotos page.

Moholy's instructions to the engraver are clearly marked on the reverse, and correspond diagrammatically to areas on the recto of the image. Moholy asks that a spot near the center be removed?'weg!' ('out!' or 'off!'); and that a minor line or scratch, extending from the top edge, also be taken away?'linie weg' ('Line out'). The photographer has also instructed that a spot on the square shape at the top of the diagonal be re-touched: 'diesen fleck mit weiss wegretuschieren' ('touch out this spot with white ink'). In the reproduction of the present photogram in the 60 Fotos volume, one can just ascertain the area that has been touched with white ink. Another example of Moholy's instructions to a printer, on the reverse of the photogram Diagram of Forces, is reproduced in Rice and Steadman, p. 35, where Moholy writes 'for the cut maker: please print it hard so that you get some white.'

The object used in the photogram is likely to have been a three-dimensional construction made by one of the Dessau Bauhaus students. Several scholars have pointed in particular to a suspended plastic sculpture of intersecting planes and cubes created in 1924 by the student Irmgard Sörenson-Popitz. This was used as an illustration by Moholy in his Von Material zu Archiketur (Munich, 1929), published in English as The New Vision (e.g., Neusüss and Heyne, p. 173, cat. entry 82; and Hight, Picturing Modernism, p. 85). As Neusüss and Heyne have commented, the sculpture itself could not float entirely in space, but was of necessity always attached to a wire or other hanging device. In his photograms, Moholy was able to free the object from its moorings, and have it exist completely within the photographic space. In addition to the photogram offered here, several photograms used this, or a similar, hanging construction, as the essential compositional device; among them are three in the Museum Folkwang, Essen, reproduced in Neusüss and Heyne, pls. 47, 48, and 49; and one in a private collection, reproduced in Rice and Steadman, p. 42.

In his introduction to the 60 Fotos volume, Franz Roh warned the reader not to judge the subtle qualities of a photogram by the reproduction offered in a book. The complexities of the photogram process, he wrote, produce results that

'appear like weird spheres of light, often of marvelous transparency, that seem to penetrate space. Sublime gradations, from gleaming white through a thousand shades of grey down to the deepest black, can be produced thus. And by intersection either extreme nearness or the most distant distance is suggested. One must not judge results of photography by the cliché-productions in books. One must have had the original pictures in hand (as in art), for the best reproduction loses some of the preciseness which is decisive.'

The photogram offered here is proof positive of Roh's cautionary words. The subtleties of this original object in particular defy reproduction, with slender layers of tone and shadows of movement that exemplify the best of all photogram work.