£9,375
MODERN MADE: Modern British & Post-War Art, Design & Studio Ceramics | 650
Auction: 29 October 2021 at 11:00 BST
initialled and dated (lower right), and inscribed 'For Molly' (lower left), pen, ink and pastel on paper
Provenance:
A gift from the Artist to Jack & Molly Pritchard, England and thence by descent to the present owners.
“We might well call the scope of his contribution ‘Leonardian,’ so versatile and colorful it has been.” (Walter Gropius, 1946)
Described by the art critic Peter Schjeldahl as “relentlessly experimental” due to his innovative work in painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, writing, theatre and film, László Moholy-Nagy was the epitome of what the Bauhaus represented working alongside the likes of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.
In 1937, on the recommendation of Gropius, Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago and became the director of the newly formed IIT Institute of Design known as the ‘New Bauhaus’. It would go on to become one of his most significant accomplishments and what historian Elizabeth Siegel named ‘his overarching work of art’.
The present work is dated 1938, a year after he moved to Chicago. It was a gift to Isokon Furniture Company founder Jack Pritchard and his wife Molly. Moholy-Nagy and his wife Sibyl moved to the Lawn Road Flats in London (also known as the ‘Isokon Building’), where the Pritchards were resident, after arriving in Britain from Germany in May 1935. Moholy-Nagy designed numerous promotional materials for Isokon, including the logo for the Isokon firm itself, based on the outline of a plywood chair.
Composition uses the vocabulary of de Stijl and Constructivism in its primary colors, line and simple geometric forms. It embodies the abstract language that Moholy-Nagy was aiming towards in his intention to be free from elements redolent of natur,e in order to work only with the particular characteristics of colours and their inter-relationship. In this way Moholy-Nagy is investigating a number of the themes in this work that he had been exploring in London prior to his move to America. By exploring the limitless potential of colour and simple forms, he hoped to instil Composition with a sense of the enigmatic and emotion, stating 'My belief is that mathematically harmonious shapes, executed precisely, are filled with emotional quality, and that they represent the perfect balance between feeling and intellect' ('Abstract of an artist', in R. Motherwell, ed., Lázsló Moholy-Nagy, Documents of Modern Art, New York, 1947).