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拍品专文
Sigfried Giedion was a German-speaking Swiss historian of art and architecture. He and his wife, Carola, were close friends of Lucia and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, often spending summers together vacationing during which they would seek out inspiring buildings and structures that Giedion wanted to see. In his essay, 'The Old Bridge, The Historian, and the New Photographer,' Olivier Lugon writes that 'Giedion was present at a key moment in Moholy’s artistic development, in the summer of 1925, when the two men and their spouses traveled to Belle-Ile-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany. It was during this trip that Moholy began to work intensively with a camera—he had previously concentrated on photograms and photomontages—and discovered the potential of bird’s- and worm’s-eye views.'
According to Giedion himself, he recalls 'I remember Moholy taking a photograph of the terrace from a window high above it which annulled the perspective as it forced objects and proportions into the two-dimensional plane. No interesting motif—this concrete slab, a railing, a few chairs, a round table. But it was a completely new beginning. The camera had never been used like that before.'
The following summer, while vacationing in Ascona, Switzerland on the northern shore of Lake Maggiore near the Italian border, Moholy made a number of images that stand out from this period. Several were made on the balcony of a residence and feature the artist Oskar Schlemmer in repose, Schlemmer’s two daughters asleep, or dolls on a blanket. All utilize the bright raking light, the shadows cast through the grating of the balcony, and strong angles. The present lot, made on that same trip to Ascona, and also made from a bird’s-eye view, features a diagonal wall split evenly in light and dark, and in the shadow of which sit and stand two little boys, gazing up in curiosity at the picture-maker.
A print of this image is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, and a variant (reversed) is in the Eastman House collection, Rochester.
According to Giedion himself, he recalls 'I remember Moholy taking a photograph of the terrace from a window high above it which annulled the perspective as it forced objects and proportions into the two-dimensional plane. No interesting motif—this concrete slab, a railing, a few chairs, a round table. But it was a completely new beginning. The camera had never been used like that before.'
The following summer, while vacationing in Ascona, Switzerland on the northern shore of Lake Maggiore near the Italian border, Moholy made a number of images that stand out from this period. Several were made on the balcony of a residence and feature the artist Oskar Schlemmer in repose, Schlemmer’s two daughters asleep, or dolls on a blanket. All utilize the bright raking light, the shadows cast through the grating of the balcony, and strong angles. The present lot, made on that same trip to Ascona, and also made from a bird’s-eye view, features a diagonal wall split evenly in light and dark, and in the shadow of which sit and stand two little boys, gazing up in curiosity at the picture-maker.
A print of this image is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, and a variant (reversed) is in the Eastman House collection, Rochester.