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Lot Essay
Moholy-Nagy was one of the most dedicated teachers at the Bauhaus, embodying the school's Utopian idea to unify art and industry. His devotion to instilling a deep understanding of the essence of man-made materials made him the ideal leader for the metal workshop, from which several iconic Bauhaus objects would emerge. As he writes in "Material," a chapter from his seminal work The New Vision first published in the US in 1938, "The synthetic approach to structure is introduced by experience with the material, the amassing of impressions often appearing unimportant at first" (New York, 2005, p. 23).
Many of the ideas that Moholy-Nagy explored at the Bauhaus he brought with him in 1937 to Chicago, arriving on the coat tails of architect Walter Gropius. CH3 Al, from 1938, is part of the CH painting series and not only demonstrates his ongoing dedication to metal work but also his explorations in the spatial possibilities afforded by a flat surface, using the qualities of the media to effect sophisticated patterns of layered transparency and tactile variety. The floating forms of the abstract composition in CH3 Al are painted in, overlapped, and spliced apart with the precision of a design master who understood exactly how to marry the properties of aluminum with expression of line and sophisticated contrasts of pigment.
Moholy-Nagy joined the Bauhaus in 1923 as a painter, but his experiments throughout several media in the subsequent years made him a truly modernist Renaissance man. The scholar Kristina Passuth writes that, ultimately, "behind his achievements in painting, graphics, design, photography, writing and teaching there lay a new interpretation of the role of art. The reason for Moholy-Nagy's desire to become, in his own words, a 'total' man, for his abandoning traditional easel painting and his attraction to every technical innovation, was that he insisted on an art which would be in close contact with life" (Moholy-Nagy, New York, 1985, p. 74).
Many of the ideas that Moholy-Nagy explored at the Bauhaus he brought with him in 1937 to Chicago, arriving on the coat tails of architect Walter Gropius. CH3 Al, from 1938, is part of the CH painting series and not only demonstrates his ongoing dedication to metal work but also his explorations in the spatial possibilities afforded by a flat surface, using the qualities of the media to effect sophisticated patterns of layered transparency and tactile variety. The floating forms of the abstract composition in CH3 Al are painted in, overlapped, and spliced apart with the precision of a design master who understood exactly how to marry the properties of aluminum with expression of line and sophisticated contrasts of pigment.
Moholy-Nagy joined the Bauhaus in 1923 as a painter, but his experiments throughout several media in the subsequent years made him a truly modernist Renaissance man. The scholar Kristina Passuth writes that, ultimately, "behind his achievements in painting, graphics, design, photography, writing and teaching there lay a new interpretation of the role of art. The reason for Moholy-Nagy's desire to become, in his own words, a 'total' man, for his abandoning traditional easel painting and his attraction to every technical innovation, was that he insisted on an art which would be in close contact with life" (Moholy-Nagy, New York, 1985, p. 74).