Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum
by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
The J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 1995. 127pp., illus.,
ISBN 0-89236-324-X.

Reviewed by Roger Malina


This is a small book with illustrations of 100 or so photographs and other works by Moholy-Nagy in the Getty collection. It includes examples of his photographs, photo-montages, photograms as well as still film frames from Moholy-Nagy's 1930 film Lichtspiel schwarz-weiss-grau of his key work Light Space Mudulator--a pathbreaking concept later developed by kinetic artists in the 1960s and 1970s. An introductory essay by Katherine Ware, and a discussion with a group that included Moholy-Nagy's daughter Hutulla, complete the volume.

The text struggles to define his influence on the art of this century--but his paternity on the work of artists in the art/science/technology movement on the 1990s is clear. His work as an educator at the Bauhaus in Germany (and in the US), as well as his experimental work in diverse media has all been influential, and his 1922 "telephone pictures" are predecessors of recent telematic art making. It has been argued that some of the ideas in his book Vision in Motion were the foundation for some of McLuhan's ideas. Gyrogy Kepes worked as an assistant for Moholy-Nagy at one time, and according to the discussion here credits him as being a major influence. When I used a search engine on the Web I found some 33,000 hits on his name.