Moholy-Nagy: Future Present Hardcover – May 31, 2016 by Matthew S. Witkovsky (Editor, Contributor), Carol S. Eliel (Editor, Contributor), Karole Vail (Editor, Contributor), Julie Barten (Contributor), Sylvie Pénichon (Contributor), Carol Stringari (Contributor), Stephanie D'Alessandro (Contributor), Jennifer King (Contributor), Olivier Lugon (Contributor), Elizabeth Siegel (Contributor)(Art Institute of Chicago )

An unprecedented study of an important 20th-century artist and his diverse body of work

László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) became notorious for the declarations he made about the end of painting, encouraging artists to exchange brush, pigment, and canvas for camera, film, and searchlight. Even as he made these radical claims, he painted throughout his career. The practice of painting enabled Moholy-Nagy to imagine generative relationships between art and technology, and to describe the shape that future possibilities might take. The author  illuminates the evolution of painting’s role for Moholy-Nagy through key periods in his career: at the German Bauhaus in the 1920s, in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in the early 1930s, and as director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago in the last decade of his life. The book also includes an introduction to the history, qualities, and significance of plastic materials that Moholy-Nagy used over the course of his career, and an essay on how his project of shaping habitable space in his art and writing resonated with artists and industrial designers in the 1960s and 1970s. 

This exceptional book offers a fresh and extensive examination of the work of pioneering artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946). The first major American survey of his oeuvre in nearly a half century and the most extensive English-language book on the artist in thirty years, the catalogue offers an integrated presentation of Moholy’s production across a range of art forms including painting, sculpture, photography, graphic design, film, advertising, and theater.

Distinguished scholars offer new insights into Moholy's materials and working methods; the relation among writing, administration, and art making in his practice; and his influence on contemporary art. Particular emphasis is given to Moholy's American years and his leadership of the Chicago Bauhaus as well as his reception as a painter.


Over 300 works are illustrated in color, including the artist's early paintings and photograms, his whimsical photomontages---all of which are reproduced together here for the first time---and late works in Plexiglas. Beautifully designed and produced, with a PVC plastic jacket printed on the inside and a foil stamped casewrap, the book is a marvelous tribute to this phenomenally innovative artist.