Utopian modernist and Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy hadn’t had a comprehensive museum retrospective of his work in 50 years until the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, put together “Moholy-Nagy: Future Present,” an exhibit that brings together more than 300 works from around the globe, many of which have never been shown publicly in the United States. It will be on view through January 3 at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to Los Angeles later that year for the last leg.
Moholy-Nagy, who was born in Austria-Hungary in 1895 and died in Chicago in 1946, was a restless innovator who saw art as a means to transform the way we lived. He viewed technology as key to this effort, and experimented in a wide range of media, such as cameraless photographs, which he called “photograms” (see below), and using industrial materials in painting and sculpture. “Future Present” includes examples of his films, photomontages, graphic and stage design, as well as paintings and sculpture, all of which demonstrate how Moholy-Nagy strove to radically reshape the role of the artist in the modern world.
