In Focus: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy : Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum [Paperback]

Katherine Ware (Author)

Book Description

Series: In Focus | Publication Date: August 24, 1995

Hungarian born Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was influential not only as a photographer but also as a filmmaker, teacher, and painter. He taught at the Bauhaus in Germany and, after fleeing the Nazi regime, settled in Chicago, where he founded the Institute of Design. He pioneered the photomontage and created the camera-less medium of the "photogram." This book, the second in the Getty's In Focus series, features sixty reproductions from the Getty's outstanding collection of this important photographer's work--each described by Katherine Ware of the Museum's department of photographs. The book also includes the edited transcript of a recent colloquium that provides the historical and critical perspective necessary for understanding Moholy-Nagy's vital contribution to twentieth-century art. The colloquium participants were Charles Hagan, Thomas Barrow, Jeannine Fiedler, Leland Rice, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, and Weston Naef and Katherine Ware.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In 1937, painter, theorist, and photographer Moholy-Nagy brought his ideas and teaching to Chicago, where they influenced more than one generation of photographers. But his death at 51 cut off the stream of his work, and now photographers know his early writings on photography--he was the great twentieth-century theorist of the medium's possibilities--better than the images themselves. The Getty Museum corrects that situation by publishing 45 photographs with useful commentaries by curator Katherine Ware about his methods, themes, and social context. Moholy-Nagy wrote that the photogram (an image made on light-sensitive paper without a camera) was the most photographic work, yet his most interesting pieces are his fotoplastiks witty collages of photographic fragments set in imaginary spaces suggested by spare, geometric drawings. Twenty-five appear here and demonstrate Moholy-Nagy's ability to comment, with great visual elegance, on topics ranging from militarism and racism to sexual tension and marriage. The only cavil is that the small scale of reproduction here prevents easy reading of many of the details. Gretchen Garner

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: J. Paul Getty Museum; 1 edition (August 24, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 089236324X
• ISBN-13: 978-0892363247
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,074,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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