Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was one of the first abstract artists to switch from painting to design for communication, his famous step was in 1923 of ordering a painting by telephone, using a colour chart and geometric grid to signal the "death of painting".

He was also part of an avant-garde in Budapest and after World War I he was strongly inspired by Soviet Constructivism. He moved to Berlin in 1921 and in 1923 was invited by Walter Gropius to join the Bauhaus in Weimar as a professor in the metal workshop. His soon showed interest in design for print, when he took charge of the typographic design of many of the school's publications, from 1925, the Bauhaus Books series.

With many of his contemporaries, including El Lissitzky, Herbert Bayer, Jan Tschichold and Kurt Schwitters, Moholy-Nagy advocated a modernist approach to graphic design, known as die neue typographie (the new typography). This recommended using lower-case alphabets with inks of primary colours and photographic illustrations, the aim was to creating a universal and democratic medium. His design philosophy was a curious combination of technological determinism, a belief in the social role of design and a mystical preoccupation with the properties of light.

                      

Moholy-Nagy wrote his first book, Malerei Fotografie Film (Painting Photography Film), published in 1925, he predicted the route that communication would take from a single image to a narrative form of film montage. He was also interested in extending the possibilities to combine typography with photography in what he called "Typophoto". As well as investigating the possibilities of rendering the familiar strange, through negative and positive photography, he experimented with photomontage and photograms (cameraless photography), which were used in various designs for posters, book covers and exhibitions. Something common in his work was to expose the elements of design such as structure, as he did in the advertisement for the Bauhaus Books list in 1925, in which he used the ingredients of typography for the design.

In 1928, Moholy-Nagy was an established designer in Berlin. He exposed his work at the German Werkbund contribution to the Societe des Artistes Decorateurs in Paris in 1930, an exhibition he co-designed with the Bauhaus associates, Gropius and Bayer. he emigrated to the Netherlands in 1934 and then England and the USA where he settled more permanently, he worked on publication design and exhibitions as well as industrial design.

                

In 1937 Moholy-Nagy became director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago, which has failed in 1938 and the following year he founded the School of Design

in the city. Despite confronting social and political upheaval throughout his life, Moholy-Nagy was one of the seminal figures in the transmission of modern design of his time.

Referance 

Livingston, A. I., 2003. Graphic Design and Designers. London: The Thames & Hudson.