weimar republicconcept:movement bauhaus

Untitled (Photogram)

Cameraless photogram (gelatin silver photogram) by László Moholy-Nagy, c.1926. Bauhaus period. White geometric and organic forms on black ground created by placing objects directly on photosensitive paper. Multiple examples held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other collections.

Scholarly Significance

Anchor the Bauhaus photography cluster; Moholy-Nagy's photogram series embodies the Bauhaus thesis of light as artistic medium and the photogram as pure photography freed from representation.

Patronage Context

Produced at the Bauhaus Dessau; Moholy-Nagy was a Bauhaus master 1923–1928. No external patron; photograms were experimental works produced in the context of Bauhaus curriculum and theoretical research.

Notes

·Moholy-Nagy called his photograms 'Lichtbilder' (light pictures) to emphasize that light itself is the medium.
·The theoretical context is developed in 'Malerei, Photographie, Film' (Bauhaus Book 8, 1925) and 'The New Vision' (1930).
·The photogram technique was also practiced by Man Ray (Rayographs) and Christian Schad (Schadographs) in the early 1920s.
·German nationalist critics of the 1930s labelled Bauhaus work 'Entartete Kunst' (degenerate art); Moholy-Nagy emigrated to Chicago in 1937.
·The iconographic level is deliberately absent — the photogram rejects representational subject matter by design.