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a unique object, on printing-out paper, carte-postale, titled, dated '1922,' and inscribed 'original!!' by the photographer in red pencil and with his 'moholy-nagy/ berlin-chbg. 9/ frederciastr. 27 atelier' studio stamp on the reverse, 1922

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

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

Rice and Steadman, Photographs of Moholy-Nagy from the Collection of William Larson, p. 47, top illustration (this photogram)

Institut Valencia d'Art Modern, László Moholy-Nagy, pl. 56 (this photogram)

Musée Cantini, Marseille, László Moholy-Nagy, p. 186 (this photogram)

See also:

Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts, Vol. 4, No. 4, March 1923

Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Photographie Film, p. 63

Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film, cover illustration and p. 71

Hight, Moholy-Nagy: Photography and Film in Weimar Germany, pl. 16

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Moholy-Nagy and the New Vision, pl. 2

Heyne, Neusüss, and Molderings, László Moholy-Nagy: Fotogramme 1922 - 1943, p. 155, cat. entry 11

Haus, Moholy-Nagy: Photographs and Photograms, pls. 110 and 130

Molderings, Collection Photo Poche: László Moholy-Nagy, pl. 1
CATALOGUE NOTE

This exceedingly early carte-postale photogram, on printing-out paper, is the original of a Moholy image that has been widely reproduced, both during Moholy's lifetime and after. It was published within months of its creation, in the March 1923 issue of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts, along with three other Moholy photograms. These four plates in Broom constitute the earliest publication of Moholy's cameraless images. Of keen interest to photograph historians, this same issue of Broom also reproduced four Rayographs by Man Ray, and thus almost certainly represents the first time the work of these two painter-photographers appears together in a single volume. Finally, the March 1923 Broom contained one of the earliest of Moholy's essays on photography in English, entitled 'Light: A Medium of Plastic Expression.' In this brief text, Moholy argues that a new vision in photography will come about only when traditional lenses and traditional perspective are discarded in favor of devices that can utilize and control light through mirrors, fluids, crystal, metals, and other substances; or, when 'light-compositions' are created directly on light-sensitive plates, discarding apparatus altogether. For further discussion of this highly important issue of Broom, see Lot 80.

The photogram offered here was one of only four Moholy photograms chosen by the artist for inclusion in his seminal volume of two years later, Malerei Photographie Film (Munich, 1925). This was No. 8 in the Bauhausbücher series, a planned series of 50 volumes initiated by Moholy and Gropius at the Bauhaus in 1923. Malerei Photographie Film is regarded by many as Moholy's most significant book: in the volume's detailed essays, he sets forth his theories on the power of the photographic medium, in its many incarnations, to extend, and ultimately transform, human vision. One of the most important books by a photographer in the modern era, Malerei Photographie Film was published in a later German edition, and also in Russian; the English edition has remained continuously in print. Praising the book, David Levi Strauss has commented that 'Moholy's futurist enthusiasm for the fusion of art and technology and "the new culture of light," which would replace hand work (including painting) with eye and mind work (optics: photography and film) is still infectious' (The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, p. 44). The photogram offered here was reproduced not only as a plate in the later English edition, Painting Photography Film (London and Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969), but was also used as the American edition's cover illustration.

In Painting Photography Film, the present photogram is offered as an example of the new cameraless vision, a 'light-composition' in which light has been 'sovereignly handled as a new creative means.' It is placed in three different contexts to demonstrate the expanding and revolutionary uses of photography that were at the heart of Moholy's visual philosophy. In the book's essay entitled 'Photography,' Moholy laments the fact that there has been no real progress in photography since the time of Daguerre; and that with 'the exception of X-ray photography,' the medium has followed the lead of traditional painting since its invention. In Painting Photography Film, the present photogram is paired with an X-ray photograph of a triton shell on a facing page, and is followed on the next page by an X-ray photograph of a sectioned chambered nautilus, whose swirls echo the concentric circles of the photogram's spiral shape. In another of the book's essays, 'Production Reproduction,' the present photogram is grouped with astronomical, X-ray, and lightning photographs as examples of images that exploit the essential light-sensitivity of the photographic plate. And finally, in 'Photography without a Camera: The Photogram,' an essay whose language repeats many of the same thoughts and phrases in Moholy's Broom text, the four photograms in Painting Photography Film are referred to as images which demonstrate 'scope for composing in a newly mastered material.'

Eleanor Hight and other commentators have pointed out that Moholy's very earliest photograms, with their overlapping circular and rectangular shapes, show the influence of Kurt Schwitters, the Dadaist collagist (Moholy-Nagy: Photography and Film in Weimar Germany, p. 50). Two of the Moholy photograms reproduced in Broom do appear collage-like, with overlapping and sometimes transparent forms in a flattened, two-dimensional space (cf. Neusüss and Heyne, figures 6 and 10). The photogram offered here, however, is one of Moholy's earliest transitions to something far more 'photographic,' using light to create a third dimension and a sense of immediacy. The letters that appear in the upper half of the photogram also represent a nascent example of Moholy's use of typophoto, a concept that is discussed in regard to Moholy's design for a Broom title page in Lot 80. Hight has proposed that the inverted initials MO that appear in the photogram are a nickname for Moholy and represent a visual pun within the image (ibid., p. 53).

Dr. Franz Roh, who provided the text for an early anthology of Moholy's photographic work, 60 Fotos (Berlin, 1930), owned a mural-sized print of this photogram, sold at Sotheby's Belgravia, 24 October 1975, Lot 300, and again in these rooms on 5 May 1988, Sale 5706, Lot 391, with the title 'Telegraphed Cinema.' This was one of a group of mural-sized enlargements of Moholy photograms that were created specifically for an early exhibition (cf. Neusüss and Heyne, p. 150). Another example, also from a Painting Photography Film image, was offered in these rooms on 5 April 2000, Photographs from the Collection of 7-Eleven, Sale 7448, Lot 49.