Moholy-Nagy has bequeathed to us a wealth of art works and writings, which embrace the whole range of the visual arts.
We might call the scope of his contribution "Leonardian", so versatible and colorful has it been.
- Walter Gropius, Architect

László Moholy-Nagy is an artist who worked in a broad range of media rivaling that of even Leonardo da Vinci and eventually succeeded in bringing new vision to 20th-century art.

Amidst the uncertainties and turmoil brought on by the emergence of socialism and the two World Wars in the first half of the 20th century, Moholy-Nagy would follow an artistic career that led him from his native Hungary to Austria, then Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain and finally to the United States, in an ongoing quest of creative experimentation in search of a fusion of art and technology that would continue to produce new artistic value.

Working in the media of painting, photography, sculpture, graphic design, stage art and film, he consistently employed innovative ideas that produced a unique artistic realm of light and motion. Besides his work as an artist employing multiple media, Moholy-Nagy also distinguished himself as an educator, first at the Bauhaus school of arts in Germany and eventually as the director of the New Bauhaus school founded in the Chicago. In this capacity he was influential in implanting new theories of art and a new philosophy of arts education among artists of the next generation.

Thanks to a generous lending of valuable works from the family collection of The Moholy-Nagy Foundation and other domestic and foreign collections, this exhibition is able to present Japan's first full-scale retrospective of Moholy-Nagy's artistic career. The roughly 270 works in this exhibition, many of which are being shown publicly for the first time, include drawings and Constructivist works from the artist's early years in Hungary, the kinetic sculpture Light Space Modulator that would become one of his representative works, “Photograms” produced without using a camera and colorful paintings from the artist's late years in America.

Highlights

1. Japan's first full-scale Moholy-Nagy retrospective

The first introduction of the work of Moholy-Nagy in Japan came quite early on, beginning with a series of photographs in the Asahi Graph magazine in 1926. Actual works have been shown in Japan consistently since 1971, primarily in exhibitions dealing with the Bauhaus. Of the artist's writings, the books Painting, Photography, Film and From Material to Architecture (both from the Bauhaus Books series) were published in Japanese translation in 1992.
Due perhaps to his broad range of artistic activity in painting, photography, film and graphic design and the resulting difficulty in presenting a consistent image of the artist, there has been no attempt in Japan until now to present a full-scale retrospective of Moholy-Nagy's work. In this exhibition of some 270 works, including numerous important works from the family collection of The Moholy-Nagy Foundation that have never been exhibited in Japan before, we are proud to present a definitive overview of the art of László Moholy-Nagy.

2. A laboratory of visual experimentation: Art of Light and Motion

Despite the diversity of the media he used, Moholy-Nagy's artistic activities throughout his career consistently sought a fusion of art and technology that created an "art of light and motion" enabling new vision and ways of seeing. Through repeated experiments employing new materials such as plastic and metals to transmit or reflect light, and with "Photograms" that created images directly on photographic paper by placing objects between the paper and the light source without using a camera, and through his work in film and theater stage art, the artist pursued a new realm of relationships involving light, motion and space. A representative product of this ongoing artistic quest was a kinetic-sculpture device he called the Light Space Modulator, which was perfected over the course of eight years of conceptual development.

3. The Light Space Modulator: Kinetic sculpture, play of light

When Moholy-Nagy first displayed the Light Space Modulator in 1930, he explained the concept behind it in the following words.

Rich lighting effects can be produced by means of regulatable artificial light. Electric impulses make it possible to realize different precalculated movements which may be repeated without change. According to their present relationships, light and movement have again become elements of creation. Fountains, water play, and scenery in the age of the Baroque can be renewed in a creative way by light displays and mechanical-electric kinetic displays.

During the decade of the 1920s when Moholy-Nagy was working on the Light Space Modulator, the newly achieved availability of a constant supply of electricity was changing people's lives and brightening them in ways that reached to the very soul. We can only imagine the surprise and joy with which people greeted this new blessing of technology. Of course, we must also note the importance of the work of Moholy-Nagy as one of the first artists to incorporate the blessings of light and motion produced by electricity in his works. In today's world with its renewed awareness of the effects and role of electricity, we can look back and speculate about the impact Moholy-Nagy's kinetic sculpture had at the time and, certainly, we can also see it as one of the first buds of what we know as media art today.