Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
Author: Louis Kaplan
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 1995-05-24
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780822315926

Marking the centenary of the birth of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), this book offers a new approach to the Bauhaus artist and theorist’s multifaceted life and work—an approach that redefines the very idea of biographical writing. In Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Louis Kaplan applies the Derridean deconstructivist model of the "signature effect" to an intellectual biography of a Constructivist artist. Inhabiting the borderline between life and work, the book demonstrates how the signature inscribed by "Moholy" operates in a double space, interweaving signified object and signifying matter, autobiography and auto-graphy. Through interpretative readings of over twenty key artistic and photographic works, Kaplan graphically illustrates Moholy’s signature effect in action. He shows how this effect plays itself out in the complex of relations between artistic originality and plagiarism, between authorial identity and anonymity, as well as in the problematic status of the work of art in the age of technical reproduction. In this way, the book reveals how Moholy’s artistic practice anticipates many of the issues of postmodernist debate and thus has particular relevance today. Consequently, Kaplan clarifies the relationship between avant-garde Constructivism and contemporary deconstruction. This new and innovative configuration of biography catalyzed by the life writing of Moholy-Nagy will be of critical interest to artists and writers, literary theorists, and art historians.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
Author: Joyce Tsai
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2018-04-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520290674

"Laszlo Moholy-Nagy is the first monograph on Moholy to attend to the fraught but central role painting played in shaping his aesthetic project. His reputation has been that of an artist far more interested in exploring the possibilities offered by photography, film, and other new media than in working with what he once called the 'anachronistic' medium of painting. And yet, with the exception of the period between 1928 and 1930, Moholy painted throughout his career. Joyce Tsai argues that his investment in painting, especially after 1930, emerged not only out of pragmatic and aesthetic considerations, but also out of a growing recognition of the economic, political, and ethical compromises required by his large-scale, technologically mediated projects aimed at reforming human vision. Without abandoning his commitment to fostering what he called New Vision, Moholy came to understand painting as a particularly plastic field in which the progressive possibilities of photography, film and other emergent media could find provisional expression."--Provided by publisher.

Dada and Surrealist Film

Dada and Surrealist Film
Author: Rudolf E. Kuenzli
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1996-07-29
Genre: Design
ISBN: 9780262611213

This groundbreaking collection of thirteen original essays analyzes connections between film and two highly influential twentieth-century movements.

A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes

A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes
Author:
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 735
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1136806202

A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes recognizes that change is a driving force in all the arts. It covers major trends in music, dance, theater, film, visual art, sculpture, and performance art--as well as architecture, science, and culture.

Exile and Social Thought

Exile and Social Thought
Author: Lee Congdon
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2014-07-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400852900

Embroiled in the political events surrounding World War I and the failed Hungarian revolutions of 1918-19, a number of intellectuals fled Hungary for Germany and Austria, where they essentially created Weimar culture. Among them were Georg Lukács, whose History and Class Consciousness recast Marxism and challenged even those who repudiated its politics; Bela Balázs, who pioneered film theory and collaborated with film-makers G. W. Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl, and Alexander Korda; László Moholy-Nagy, who codirected the Bauhaus during its heyday in the mid-1920s; and Karl Mannheim, whose Ideology and Utopia was the most widely discussed work of noncommunist social theory during the Weimar years. In this collective portrait combining intellectual history with biographical detail, Lee Congdon describes how Hungarian thinkers, each in a different way, passionately advocated the need for community in a Europe torn by war and revolution. Whether communist, avant-gardist, or Catholic convert, each thinker is examined within the vast tapestry of his works, his cultural and intellectual milieu, and his experience as an exile. Despite the ideological differences of these men, Congdon reveals how their personal destinies and social goals often merged. Since many were assimilated Jews, he argues that their thinking on society was inextricably intertwined with their youthful sensitivity to anti-Semitism in Hungary and with the isolating limitations of their lives in Germany and Austria. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.