The Bauhaus Of Weimar, Germany

The Bauhaus of Weimar, Germany was opened with the hope that it would represent the future of the fine arts and the development of new art media. Although it only existed from 1919 until 1933, Bauhaus was one of the most influential art schools, not only because of the art produced, but also because of the staff who taught and ran the school. One of the most influential artists and staff members was László Moholy-Nagy. With his forward-thinking mindset towards the integration of technology and industrial concepts into art, Nagy can be viewed as the most important member of the Bauhaus instructors. László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian-born artist who was relatively unknown in the realm of formal art until his first showing at Szeged in 1919.

The Bauhaus would be closed in 1933 with the end of the Weimar Era and the beginning of great unrest in Germany. However, Moholy-Nagy did not stop his work, and looked to evolve his style on his own. Beginning in 1929, he sought to move into a new medium- short film. While he was limited by the technology of the time and the growing censorship of German nation, he still made incredible strides in this field with works such as “Lichtspiel Schwarz Weiss Grau” (Moholy-Nagy 23). However, he was not so quick to give up on his dreams of instructing future artists. When he immigrated to Chicago in 1937, Maholy-Nagy took the position of director at the New Bauhaus, where he attempted to integrate his education with the old curriculum of Bauhaus. This new school closed just a year after opening, with widespread financial difficulty and student unrest being the primary causes. Moholy-Nagy continued to work for commercial entities, but died of Leukemia at the age of

I can claim kinship with the concept of utilizing geometric shapes in my works in the same way that Maholy-Nagy had. I employ space and focus in my works in order to bring my pieces into greater relief with their backgrounds. I also use geometric shapes in order to bring about clean, direct messages within my art that does not rely upon heavy contextualization to be successful. However, my work has been most deeply affected by the work that Maholy-Nagy did with light. His groundbreaking use of light to add depth in his photograms has been of particular interest to me, and I have used his techniques in both color and black and white pictures to capture my subjects in terms of artistic and emotional depth. I find that using light is one of the best ways to evoke better colors, and allows me to work with shadows to give every piece more significant and poignant features. Of course, the area of my ideology which I share the most with Maholy-Nagy is in the integration of technology into art. As a person who works mostly in graphic design, I use the latest cameras and digital manipulation techniques on a computer to evoke my artistic expression. This is in line with Maholy-Nagy’s beliefs that machines must be used to further art media, and that these machines must be embraced by artists or their art will be overtaken by those who do use machines. In all of these ways, Laszlo Maholy-Nagy