The Paintings of Moholy-Nagy: The Shape of Things to Come (Field Guides) - Hardcover

Tsai, Joyce; Thomas, James Merle; Waentig, Friederike; Feinberg, Larry J.; Kahng, Eik

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300209975 ISBN 13: 9780300209976

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2015

Synopsis

László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) became notorious for the declarations he made about the end of painting, encouraging artists to exchange brush, pigment, and canvas for camera, film, and searchlight. Even as he made these radical claims, he painted throughout his career. The practice of painting enabled Moholy-Nagy to imagine generative relationships between art and technology, and to describe the shape that future possibilities might take. Joyce Tsai illuminates the evolution of painting’s role for Moholy-Nagy through key periods in his career: at the German Bauhaus in the 1920s, in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in the early 1930s, and as director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago in the last decade of his life. The book also includes an introduction to the history, qualities, and significance of plastic materials that Moholy-Nagy used over the course of his career, and an essay on how his project of shaping habitable space in his art and writing resonated with artists and industrial designers in the 1960s and 1970s. 

Distributed for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Exhibition Schedule:

Santa Barbara Museum of Art
(07/05/15–09/27/15)

About this title

About the Author

Joyce Tsai is assistant professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Florida, Gainesville. 

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300209975
• ISBN 13: 9780300209976
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160