Untitled (Scandinavia),

1930

<p>LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY numbers among the most inventive photographers of the fertile 1920s, along with Man Ray, August Sander, and Albert Renger-Patzsch. Of these, Moholy-Nagy and his technologically oriented "New Vision" may have enjoyed the widest and deepest influence. Moholy-Nagy taught at the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1928 and, after 1937, in Chicago, where his New Bauhaus (by 1944, the Institute of Design) became a conduit for the transmission of modernist ideas and teaching methods to North America. Not only as a painter, photographer, filmmaker, designer, and sculptor but also as an author, educator, curator, and polemicist, Moholy-Nagy had access to young, active audiences who were eager to put his ideas to the test. </p> <p>In 1930, Moholy-Nagy made his best photographs during an ocean voyage to Scandinavia. In a well-known image from that trip, he looked nearly straight down onto a group of sailors maneuvering a gangplank; his overhead perspective turned the mundane scene into a compelling abstract pattern.</p> <p><em>Untitled (Scandinavia) </em>works quite differently. Abstraction, here, results not from a bird's-eye or worm's-eye view, or any such New Vision formula, but from the dark ship's mast or funnel that Moholy-Nagy allowed to fill, or obliterate, the vertical center of the image. This radical framing choice fragments the human world on the docks beyond, shoving it to the edges of the scene. In his 1929 book, <em>From Material to Architecture</em>, Moholy-Nagy had argued that the camera, by restructuring the process of picture-making, had called a whole new pictorial vocabulary into being.</p> <p><em>Untitled</em> reads like a mordantly literal illustration of the book's conclusion: "Openings and boundaries, perforations and moving surfaces, carry the periphery to the center and push the center outward. A constant fluctuation, sideways and upwards, radiating, all-sided, announces that man has taken possession, so far as his human capacities and conceptions allow, of imponderable, invisible and yet omnipresent space." </p> <p>Photographic space, in this simple yet audacious image, is recognizably the normal space of daily experience, but it has tricks up its sleeve that draftsmen had never imagined. The artist would have been conscious of echoes between his picture and Alfred Stieglitz's <em>The Steerage</em> (1907), the preeminent model for abstract photography in Moholy-Nagy's formative years. Stieglitz, looking down from a ship's first-class deck at the passengers below, had discovered there "a picture of shapes, and underlying that, the feeling I had about life." <em>Untitled</em> deals dispassionately in ideas more than feelings. But like Stieglitz before him, Moholy-Nagy takes the functional, unornamented space of nautical architecture as an invitation to redefine the visual language of the photograph as a personal memento, as a lucid dissection of public space, and as a signpost to formal possibilities in modern art.</p> <p><em>Joel M. Smith,</em> Curator of Photography </p>