Original in a White Coat

THE disciplined design with which Walter Gropius refashioned architecture Laszlo Moholy-Nagy sought to extend to every visible element in the human environment. The two men had been kindred spirits ever since Gropius visited Moholy's first exhibition in Berlin in 1922, and invited the young Hungarian expatriate to join his staff at the newly formed Bauhaus. Moholy's acceptance sealed a friendship, rooted in a rare meeting of minds, that was to last until his death at 51 in 1946.

It was at the Bauhaus that Moholy's career took its essential form. If Gropius was the founding father, Moholy was the radical activist who translated idea into experiment. His assignment was the metal workshop, but by no means did he confine himself to metals. Murals, photography, films, ballet and stage designs, light and color, typography and layout all commanded his attention. He experimented with plastics in a day when they were considered a poor substitute for genuine materials, painted on aluminum, created complicated "light-space modulators" (see color opposite) that anticipated the light and kinetic sculptures of the 1960s. One day he ordered three geometric paintings from a sign factory by telephoning color and size specifications.

His purpose was to prove the relevance of mass-production technology to the artist's aims. How prescient that idea was can be measured by the fact that today the practice is a matter of course for many artists.

Last week Moholy's rare gifts as teacher, artist, designer and intellectual stimulus were remembered in a 127-piece retrospective exhibition at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art.* On view was a wealth of paintings, constructions, photographs, films, typographic and industrial designs touching upon every stage of Moholy's development as an artist, and documenting his conception of art not as object but as pure functionalism.

Harmonious Environment. Like his colleagues at the Bauhaus, Moholy believed that in creating a more harmonious environment he could bring out nobler aspects in the human profile. The ugly realities of Nazism cut the experiment short, but in 1937 Moholy-Nagy tried to reactivate the Bauhaus in Chicago. The student's first year, proclaimed the catalogue, would be devoted to his "spiritual preparation." Chicago was not Dessau, and the school folded in a matter of months. Moholy regrouped, and the following year opened the School of Design, which, with financial support from industry, emerged over the next decade as one of the finest of its kind in the U.S. Today the school is merged with the Illinois Institute of Technology.

To view Moholy within the limits of his paintings and constructions is to see but one aspect of an immensely versatile personality. Some of his more visionary notions were industrial designs--an engine fueled by sunlight, a motorless dishwasher, an infra-red oven that would cook dinner at the table. The creation of beautiful objects per se was never his intent. "I don't like the word beauty," he often declared. "Utility and emotion and satisfaction, those are more important words." At one point, he even foresaw a day when paint and brushes would be discarded, though he conceded that easel painting did, after all, provide a platform for the play of ideas.

Seen thus, his work is a catalogue of insights. "Art," he posited, "is the best education to refine the emotions." His own contributions to that refinement were hard, bright geometry, the equalizing of old and new materials, the applied and the fine arts. These qualities appeal not so much to the often fickle eye but to the intellect. "He was the original artist in a white coat," says the Museum of Contemporary Art's Jan van der Marck, "one of the first to place art in a laboratory situation."

* The show will travel later this year to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the University Art Museum at Berkeley, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

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