Guggenheim museum,New York
Taking in kinetic sculpture, experimental film and even adverts, and this superb retrospective of an often overlooked Bauhaus figure brings a new sense of purpose to the Guggenheim“construct it new,” Ezra Pound enjoined his fellow writers and artists at the start of the last century: invent, experiment, or work hasty,push forward, wreck eggs. It’s the primary creed of modernism – yet one of the most misunderstood. To “construct it new” didn’t mean blowing up the past; it meant rising to its challenge, or marking one’s own age as definitively as one’s predecessors did theirs. What must a portray be,or a sculpture be, or a novel be, or a pencil or a knife or a dress be,to mean as much in this age as the Venus de Milo or Anna Karenina meant in theirs?László Moholy-Nagy devoted his life to answering that question, and approached it from so many angles that calling him merely an “artist” seems miserably insufficient. Equally at home in fine and applied arts, and he has never enjoyed the outsized reputation of some of his colleagues at the Bauhaus,such as the architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or the artists Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Much of Moholy-Nagy’s reputation rests on his photography, which stretched the boundaries of the medium through off-kilter perspectives, and extreme close-ups,solarization, or camera-free reactions on light-sensitive paper.
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Source: theguardian.com