László Moholy-Nagy: the godfather of conceptual art

Yet Moholy’s greatest achievements were as a teacher. Where artists from time immemorial have complained about having to supplement their income through teaching, Moholy saw teaching as an art form in its own right, a means of propagating not just a new art, but a new vision: one based on time and movement as well as on form and space, and on the artistic possibilities of modern technology – a way of seeing and thinking that could be applied not only by artists, but would allow every member of society to fulfill the creative possibilities of living in the modern world.

“Moholy created a new kind of art education for the technological era,” says Leyla Daybelge, co-author of the recently published Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain. “He threw out the old beaux arts idea of the student imitating the “master” in favour of a more collaborative approach in which pupil and teacher fed off each other’s creative energies.”

Indeed, as Moholy himself told his wife Sybil, while watching a cricket match on Hampstead Heath in 1937, “No money one makes in the industry and no fulfilment from exhibitions or public recognition can equal the satisfaction of teaching.”

But how did this great international modernist, come to find himself in such a quaint and quintessentially English setting?

Born on a farm near Szeged in southern Hungary in 1895, Moholy studied law in Budapest, before being called up into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1915. He began writing poetry and drawing to fill in time while serving as an artillery officer in horrific conditions on the Russian front.

On discharge, he moved to Berlin, intent on becoming an artist, and despite limited experience and “abominable” German, the irrepressible Moholy had no trouble launching himself to the forefront of the city’s avant garde: “He was a consummate networker,” says Hattula.

Following an exhibition of his cubistic paintings at the influential Sturm gallery, he was offered a position at the Bauhaus in 1923, at a point when the school’s founder and director, the architect Walter Gropius, was in the process of shifting the school from its original craft orientation towards a more technological approach.

Dressed for the role of artist-technocrat-teacher in blue boiler-suit and severe scientist’s spectacles, Moholy was put in charge – alongside the painter Josef Albers – of the all-important Foundation Course, where students were divested of their preconceived ideas through training in new materials (plastics and steel, rather than marble and bronze) and exercises in basic form and conceptual thinking.

While the older Bauhaus masters – such as the painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky – cultivated a “typically German dignity and remoteness”, Moholy was delighted if he was mistaken for a student.

Moholy left the Bauhaus after only five years, as the school’s existence became untenable in the build-up to the Nazi take-over in 1933. He joined the flood of artists and intellectuals leaving Germany, spending a year in Amsterdam before arriving in London with his wife and young daughter in tow in May 1935.

Much has been made of the creatively fertile modernist scene in Thirties Hampstead, when three Bauhaus luminaries – Moholy, Gropius and the architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer – lived in the Isokon Building, a futuristic apartment block near Belsize Park tube station, with Mondrian, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth all living close by. Nonetheless London must have seemed parochial compared to what Moholy was used to: the world-changing agendas of the Bauhaus set aside in favour of providing stylish packaging for luxury brands such as Simpsons of Piccadilly. The technocrat-artist who claimed that “there are no class distinctions before the machine”, found himself providing photographs for a book on Eton and collaborating with the fogeyish poet John Betjeman. With a second child on the way, he and his young family moved from the stylish, but cramped Isokon to a comfy semi in Golders Green.

While Sybil, his wife, was irritated by the “clannishness” of English upper class men and the coldness of their wives, her husband, she noted in a later memoir, regarded such people with a kind of anthropological fascination. “He hadn’t come to England to judge the English (but) to promote a new vision, and he was grateful for each clue towards the right approach.”

As Moholy threw himself into every bit of work that came his way, each project fed creatively into the next. Commissioned to create a city of the future for the H.G. Wells fantasy film Things to Come, he produced Perspex models which he re-photographed for his own work, leading into his Space Modulators, ground-breaking amalgams of painting and sculpture.

But even the unflaggingly positive Moholy-Nagy was discouraged when his contribution was all but cut from the film. And while he had discussions about starting a British Bauhaus with artist Ben Nicholson and Royal Festival Hall-architect Leslie Martin, his powerful urge to teach remained frustrated in Britain. It was hardly surprising that he seized the opportunity to move to Chicago in 1937, to run a new design school on Bauhaus lines, to be funded by the industrial barons of the Mid-West.

When Gropius and Breuer were shown Moholy’s syllabus for the new school, the so-called New Bauhaus, in which physics, philosophy and psychology were to be taught alongside art and design skills, they begged him to narrow its focus, if only for practical reasons. “Thank God it’s already printed,” said Moholy. Nothing was going to sway him from his goal of training a new kind of intellectual-designer capable of tackling the fundamental problems of 20th century life: nothing that is except the industrial barons who pulled the plug when they realised what a Bauhaus-style education would actually entail.

"They were industrialists looking to design to improve their profit margins,” says Lynn Warren of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. “When they saw the strange objects the students were producing, and experienced the informal atmosphere where it was hard to tell who was a teacher and who a student, they got worried."

Undeterred Moholy and Sybil set up a new college, the School of Design, for which he tirelessly sought new backers from America’s wealthy elite, a process he found difficult despite his apparently unshakable confidence – “how much hurt pride and self-conscious embarrassment I’ve had to hide,” he told his wife. All the while he went on producing his own art: long-exposure studies of moving car headlights which amount to a kind of abstract expressionist colour photography; detailed, semi-figurative paintings inspired by the atomic bomb, produced while he was on his deathbed in 1946. Leukemia finally railroaded Moholy’s belief in the future at the age of 51.

The School of Design still exists, now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. But the country that most enthusiastically took on Moholy’s open-ended, experimental approach to art education, from primary to post-graduate level, wasn’t America, or Germany, but – ironically – Britain.

Bauhaus-inspired reforms in post-war British art schools created fertile conditions for everything from Bridget Riley’s Op Art painting to the YBAs and Alexander McQueen’s mind-bending fashion designs. It’s a creative legacy we’re in the process of throwing out with the ongoing abandoning of art in schools and the undermining of the all-important Foundation Course. Moholy-Nagy must be spinning in his grave, though were he alive today I’m sure he’d have found a way to create a positive outcome from even these dire circumstances.

László Moholy-Nagy is at Hauser & Wirth, London until Sept 7 hauserwirth.com