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Moholy-Nagy: To End in a Book (1992)

Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir a un livre [Everything in the world exists to end in a book].

—Stéphane Mallarmé

I’ve long ranked L. Moholy-Nagy among the greatest modern artists, not only for the value of his individual works but for the incomparable quality of his esthetic adventure, with exploratory consistency, through several media. Because he excelled at several nonadjacent arts, among them painting, kinetic sculpture, photography, film, book design and writing, Moholy should be considered a modern exemplar of the polyartist. Asked to identify a single work that epitomizes his achievement, that represents the sum of his imagination and intelligence, I would choose, without intending to deprecate anything else he did, not a work of primarily visual art but the big book written in Chicago that, appearing posthumously, concluded his short life as only a book can do.

—Vision in Motion (1946)

Vision in Motion is first of all one of the major critical essays about artistic modernism, documenting as it does the new developments not only in painting and sculpture, but in photography and even literature. The general intelligence as well as the quality of Moholy’s insights is so great that you frequently pause and take notes or mark profusely. Take this passage on modernist painting:

But in analyzing the paintings of these various groups one soon finds a common denominator, the supremacy of color over “story”; the directness of perceptional, sensorial values against the illusionistic rendering of nature; the emphasis on visual fundamentals to express a particular concept.

Or this on modernist sculpture:

In the successive stages of sculptural development the main characteristic is the reduction and lightening of the heavy mass so that even the normal characteristics of the material disappear. This is most effectively realized on the “mobile” or moving sculpture. Here the problem of virtual volume relationships is posed.

Or this on classic photography:

The photogram exploits the unique characteristic of the photographic process—the ability to record with delicate fidelity a great range of tonal values. The almost endless range of gradations, subtlest differences in the gray values, belongs to the fundamental properties of photographic expression. The organized use of that gradation creates photographic quality.

Or this forecasting of the principles of computer sound composition:

To develop creative possibilities of the sound film, the acoustic alphabet of sound writing will have to be mastered; in other words, we must learn to write acoustic sequences on the sound track without having to record real sound. The sound film composer must be able to compose music from a counterpoint of unheard or even nonexistent sound values, merely by means of opto-acoustic notation.

Or this on the politics of art and the function of art education:

Art may press for the sociobiological solution of problems just as energetically as the social revolutionaries do through political action. The so-called “unpolitical” approach of art is a fallacy. Politics, freed from graft, party connotations, or more transitory tactics, is mankind’s method of realizing ideas for the welfare of the community.

To my mind, the concluding section on “Literature” is one of the strongest in the book, identifying as it does the most extreme modernist developments as we know them to this day. (It is not for nothing that I reprinted it in a 1982 anthology on The Avant-Garde Tradition in Literature.) The highest point of this chapter is Moholy’s pioneering analysis of Finnegans Wake, which was published only a few years before. Not only did he understand Joyce’s extraordinary work better than anyone else writing at that time, but Moholy also provided a chart that, as it uses his favorite visual forms of the rectangular grid and circles, remains to this day the most succinct (and inspired) presentation of the Joycean technique of multiple references:

(Need it be said that no other modern artist wrote as well about literature?) What Moholy established in Vision in Motion was a model of writing about all the arts as a single entity, to be called art, whose branches (literature, painting, etc.) were merely false conveniences conducive to specialization and isolation.

Though he had come to America only a few years before, Vision in Motion was written in English, in contrast to his earlier criticism that was originally in his second language, German (and thus translated by other hands for their appearance here), or Hungarian. Though his spoken English was reportedly imperfect, the prose in Vision in Motion is (or was made) remarkably vigorous and clear, as the above examples demonstrate. Indeed, you can feel Moholy’s thrill in communicating his favorite post-Bauhaus ideas in yet another language new to him for a new audience in his adopted country; you can feel his evident pleasure in writing an American book as a newly American artist. As a Hungarian critic perceived, “Each line, each analogy, each phrase in the book is, in spite of the influence of the Bauhaus tradition, one hundred per cent American.”

What he understood back in the 1940s was that kinesis would become a predominant quality in contemporary visual art and thus that much innovation would occur in areas between the old arts. As a result, Moholy became a remarkably prophetic guide to the future. In writing my 1968 book on happenings, kinetic theater and other mixed-means events, I found myself citing him often. Two decades later, in writing an essay on the esthetics of holography, I turned to Vision in Motion again, for conceptual insight into a medium that didn’t arrive until twenty years after his death! Though I have read the book perhaps two dozen times, every time I return to it I find myself, amazing though it seems, recording an insight that escaped my attention before.

It is scarcely surprising, remembering Moholy’s pioneering realization of Bauhaus book design, that Vision in Motion should represent the epitome of his book-making style in all respects but one (the use of serif typography, rather than the sans-serif he traditionally favored). Its blocks of type, both roman and bold, with different widths, are distributed among shrewdly selected rectangular illustrations, usually in close proximity to commentary about them, under the assumption that text and image should be seen together. The pictures included modern masterpieces along with examples of his own works and, generously, those of his students. For all of its intelligence about modern art in general, Vision in Motion is also an “artist’s book,” or book-art of the highest order, about Moholy’s rich esthetic experience, and needless to say perhaps it is a book that only he had enough experience to write and design as well. If we accept the revelations of Conceptual Art that a prose description of artistic experience could constitute, in and of itself, an esthetic object, then Vision in Motion has yet other resonances that not even Moholy could have foreseen.