Other Andrew Otwell Art History papers

Moholy-Nagy and Chicago

© Andrew Otwell, 1997

James Sloan Allen offers a usable chronology in his The Romance of Commerce and Culture of László Moholy-Nagy's experiences in the US. Allen discusses the artist's relationship with his friend and patron, Walter Paepcke, and the evolution of the art school Moholy founded in Chicago in 1937. While Allen generally alludes to the friction between Moholy's idealism and the corporate climate of Chicgao in the 1930's and 1940's, he fails to fully discuss some of the subtleties of that relationship. Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Moholy's wife and partner in running the Chicago schools, reveals somewhat more about her husband's feelings toward the city and corporate sponsorship in her posthumous biography of him. Her account can be woven with Allen's to provide a richer picture of the last fifteen years of Moholy's life.

Moholy gave a lecture in Chicago on the opening of the first incarnation of his new school, the New Bauhaus, in September 1937. Moholy's optimism was clear in the tone of this lecture, though he had already begun to realize the degree to which his new backers were unfamiliar with Bauhaus theory.[1] Moholy clearly intended to "sell" his ideas in the 1937 lecture, "we don't want to add to the art proletariat that already exists . . . we don't want to teach what is called 'pure art,' but we train what you might call 'art engineer.'"[2] "Pure art" here is a pejorative term, implying an art that had no potential for profitable use. Eventually it would become clear that Moholy's ideas about what constituted a program to train an "art engineer" were in fact less practical than his backers had hoped.

Moholy wisely continued to pitch his ideas and his school as practical solutions to problems in business and industry.[3] He called art the means by which scientific discovery could be reconciled with human needs and desires; by implication, profits would not be merely social, but financial. However, Moholy had also begun to run into opposition to his ideas. He emphasized often the importance of collaboration between students and teachers and between artists and industry.[4] The idea of genuine collaboration may have seemed threatening to corporate culture, which relies on the chain-of-command and hierarchical structure. Collaboration seems to be not conducive to the rapid production of saleable ideas, and I suspect that Moholy's unceasing commitment to it played no small part in his conflicts with his backers.

Moholy may have realized some of his problems soon after the opening of the school. The artist had arrived in America rather naive about finances and about the nature of corporate sponsorship, as Allen describes. Moholy was shocked to find during the first difficult year of operation that the appearance of a corporate name on the New Bauhaus literature in no way implied that the company would give money to the school.[5] When the New Bauhaus closed after barely one year of operation, Moholy became even more committed to both his pedagogical ideas and to the importance of his efforts in Chicago. He voiced his optimism in a letter to his wife in 1939, during one of his fund raising trips: "[Chicago] is a smeared-over sketch which I have to clean up and set straight. Do you understand that?"[6] By the time of his death, less then ten years away in 1939, Moholy's attitude would change significantly.

A contradiction between Moholy's public statements and his pedagogical practice appeared in 1941, after Moholy and his wife had reopened the School of Design with an all-volunteer faculty. As the existence of the school was again threatened--this time by World War II, which took both students and materials--Moholy carefully recast his programs to contribute to the war effort. He suggested a method of camouflage for Lake Michigan, a program of research into replacement material for metal bedsprings, and an Occupational Therapy course for wounded veterans.[7] Despite the apparent practicality of these plans, it is clear that Moholy seemed almost entirely unable to muster up the necessary urgency that they required. He was no more likely in 1941 to change the slow pace of the School of Design's program than in 1937. His Vision in Motion, written during the middle 1940's, is filled with pages of studies by students and faculty on the play of light on various materials, or the effect of changing textures, but virtually no designed objects such as chairs or tables. Complaints about this situation by the administrators of the school were valid: Sybil Moholy-Nagy admits that even by 1945, "no immediately saleable products had been turned out by the workshops. . . ."[8]

Moholy never wavered from his convictions that good design and the idealistic concepts of Modern Art could change man's needs and attitudes, the means of production, and the relationship of man and machine. But he was clearly more passive about instigating those changes than he would admit. Perhaps this attitude was a reaction to the profit-driven goals of the Chicago businessmen with whom Moholy came in contact, though more likely it was his interest in the process of education and of design rather than in its results. In any case, by 1944, when the School was renamed the Institute of Design and given a new administrative staff, Moholy had become adverse to the influence exerted by the "profit economy" on art and art education. His wife wrote "[Moholy] no longer held the optimistic belief that each businessman is a potential student."[9] Moholy wrote in a 1946 catalog that "the success theory of the profit economy pays a high premium to the anti-artist. . . . [this is] a society which does not care for its productive members, except if immediate technological or economic applications with promising profits are in sight."[10]

Moholy became resolved to this scenario as his disagreements with the new administration of the Institute grew more frequent. He called the businessman "quite a romantic. . . . he still thinks in terms of Horatio Alger stories and the fast and furious successes that'll make him the financial page." Moholy In 1946, he seems to have at last realized the insurmountable differences in attitude between himself and the businessman: "There is a basic misunderstanding [between industry and art] . . . an insidious paternalism involved that strangles creative independence."[11] Even Chicago by this time had lost its original appeal as something Moholy could "clean up." He said of it in 1945 that "creative people don't seem to thrive in the Chicago atmosphere. . . . There's no stamina [by supporters of new ideas] because there are no convictions."[12]

Moholy's attitudes towards business are revealed in Vision in Motion. Vision in Motion deals at length with the impact of the Industrial Revolution on society. Moholy writes that by introducing methods of production designed to maximize profit, the Industrial Revolution damaged the intellectual and moral capacities of man by reducing him as a worker to simple repeated tasks which required no skill or thought.[13] These changes were accepted without question, and have become entrenched in our society on a worldwide scale. The result to art has been that it too has been reduced to a mere technical skill, without sincere expression.[14] The artist even delivers a scathing criticism--in all italics--of industrial design's "forced obsolescence" as causing "cultural and moral disintegration." A similar tone is struck in the 1947 fourth edition of Moholy's 1928 book, The New Vision.[15] In both books, Moholy discusses the importance of new methods of education, which would not be simply vocational, but broad cooperative systems that valued intellect and emotion equally. Vision in Motion and The New Vision are both essentially textbooks, with outlines of courses and objectives and illustrations of the work or students and teachers.

While Moholy's objectives are surely as idealistic as ever, he presented them in Vision in Motion in a profoundly different way than he had less than ten years earlier to the potential backers of the New Bauhaus. Where he had once offered art as a practical solution to business problems, he now saw the two systems as irreconcilable, preferring to remake the entire educational system to effect revolutionary changes in attitude. The artist's strong emphasis on expression in Vision in Motion seems significant in this light: Moholy hardly mentions it at all in The New Vision, consistently connecting design with technical progress and the use of new materials.[16] Moholy notes in his introduction to The New Vision that personal emotional expression is valuable only "if it carries with it an 'objective' meaning for all people. Upon this depends his contribution to the development of culture."[17] This implication that expression must be accompanied by a significant and measurable contribution to culture contrasts with a similar one in Vision in Motion. There, Moholy wrote that "'Art' may be the result of an inner drive, a relieving catharsis, an elimination of inhibitions and conflicts." These personal functions are very valuable, Moholy continues, "but only the person who is able to rise beyond private sensations and translate his intuitive grasp of the unadulterated problems of his time into imagery, into a coherent expression . . . can be 'best.'"[18]The goals here are subtly different: what had to be a "objective" in 1928 has become necessarily an "expression" in 1947. Though each is a contribution to culture, "expression" in Vision in Motion clearly remains an individual act, not one subordinated to--or even in partnership with--business and its problems.

The changes in Moholy's attitude can certainly be linked to his experiences in Chicago. He ran up against the will of corporate executives and the power of their money, he came to realize that he was unable to change either. Vision in Motion indicates a retreat into rather traditional attitudes towards art and art making: that personal expression, not saleable productive function, was the primary goal of the artist.

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