Main content
Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 6
Lesson 2: Bauhaus- The Bauhaus, an Introduction
- The Bauhaus and Bau
- The Bauhaus: Marcel Breuer
- The Bauhaus: Marianne Brandt
- Feininger, Cathedral for the Bauhaus
- Klee, Twittering Machine
- László Moholy-Nagy, Photogram
- Moholy-Nagy, EM1, EM2, and EM3 (Telephone Pictures)
- Moholy-Nagy, Composition A.XX
- Moholy-Nagy, Climbing the Mast
© 2024 Khan AcademyTerms of usePrivacy PolicyCookie Notice
Moholy-Nagy, EM1, EM2, and EM3 (Telephone Pictures)
László Moholy-Nagy, EM1, EM2, and EM3 (Telephone Pictures), 1923, porcelain enamel on steel, 95.2 x 60.3 cm, 47.5 x 30.1 cm, and 24 x 15 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) Speakers: Dr. Elizabeth Otto and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Moholy-Nagy is trying to say that the artist who comes up with the concept and the engineer who makes it are both important and worthy sources, that's fine and valid. But if so, why is the engineer not credited with the creation of this piece as well? It seems hypocritical to not give them credit for the creation of this piece.(6 votes)
- I don’t understand this video(2 votes)
- From the author:If you could be more specific, perhaps I can help.(2 votes)
Video transcript
(piano music) - [Steven] We're in the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York at an exhibition
devoted to the work of the great Hungarian avant garde artist, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. And we're looking at three enamel images. I can't call them paintings,
I can't call the sculptures. They're not quite science. - [Elizabeth] These are often referred to as the telephone pictures. Moholy-Nagy claimed that he created these entirely without touching
them or even seeing them. - [Steven] When we think about painting the hand of the artist is
almost like their signature. It is their presence in the object. So what does it mean
to create a work of art where there's a distance. - [Elizabeth] This is
a moment when artists are trying to rethink
what it is to be an artist and part of that is to think of art as completely a product
of the mind and the eye and not at all having to do with the individual artist's hand. This is presented almost
like a display in a store. - [Steven] So this is an
inexpensive mechanical process. - [Elizabeth] And the
reason he called them telephone pictures is that
he sat down with craft paper and plotted out how these
pictures should look, what color should be in what square, called up a technician in a factory who had the same graph paper
and other modern technology and the technician was able
to plot out the same squares and then manufacture the pictures
in three different sizes. - [Steven] So, he's
dissolving the distinction between the fine artist and the engineer. - [Elizabeth] And one of the
major projects of the Bauhaus, the institution to which
Moholy-Nagy is most closely linked was that it would dissolve what, the founder of the Bauhaus
Walter Gropius called, "the arrogant distinction "between the craftsman and the artist". And when Moholy-Nagy comes in in 1923, the Bauhaus is in the
midst of a big change away from craft and towards technology. The new slogan is "Art and
technology, a new unity". And Moholy-Nagy is brought
in as the embodiment of this. - [Steven] You do see
the scientific rigor. And although the image
itself seems very simple this white field with two black stripes, a red stripe, a yellow bar and then something a little
bit more complicated, perhaps either a yellow horizontal that has been outlined in red,
or yellow in front of red. He's creating complex spaces, what is in back of what,
what is in front of what, are all of these elements the
same size but further away, dissecting the queues that we've learned over the 500 years since the Renaissance and how we depict an
image on a flat surface. - [Elizabeth] And right at the same time Moholy-Nagy is creating paintings that are exploring some
of the same problems. How are we to orient ourselves
in relation to this picture is one of the questions
I think it poses to us. Is this a space of imagination, is it a representation or
is it just something flat? Is it an industrial object, is it a picture to have in your home, is it something to help you
contemplate a new utopia that hasn't yet been imaged but Moholy-Nagy was very
interested in himself? All of these things I think
are in these pictures. - [Steven] Because it's not paint that's been applied to the surface, most of the surface is as
deep as everything else. There is a uniformity to
the depth of each color. One is not so much on top of the other with the possible exception of the yellow, which seems to bold out and actually write
physically on top of the red. - [Elizabeth] Which I wonder, is that communicated in
the telephone conversation or is that a quirk of this technology because after all it is still somebody putting bits of pigment onto a surface and it's heated up so
it'll stay for forever but beyond that it's a lot like
painting in some way still. - [Steven] Except at the
distance of a telephone call. (piano music)