Art: Message in a Bottle

One day in 1920 a young Hungarian art student got mad at his work. He was sketching a routine, academic still life; it seemed to him “there were too many shapes pressed into a chaotic arrangement.” So he took scissors, cut away some parts of the study, turned it to an angle of 90°. Friends scoffed at his mutilated picture, but it gave him “a feeling of indescribable happiness.”

Thus toothy, ebullient Láózlo Moholy-Nagy took his first step on the straight & narrow path of “nonobjective” art. It was not always so delightful as it seemed at first. He often had the feeling that he “was throwing a message, sealed in a bottle, into the sea.” But gradually he decided that the prime tenets of abstract design—simplicity, harmony, contrast—could be applied to almost anything.

He took a job in Germany’s famed Bauhaus at Weimar, taught such subjects as “construction,” “texture,” and photography (which included the technique of making “photograms” without benefit of camera). His book, The New Vision* is a definitive work on the Bauhaus which, besides experimenting with geometric art, operated on the theory that artists should learn how to use 20th-century machines and materials to design useful and beautiful things for mass production.

Moholy-Nagy went on to international fame as a typographer and set designer. He printed everything in lower case, because he thought capital letters wasted time and effort. In England he designed futuristic architectural sets for the movie of H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come. In the machine-minded U.S., he burgeoned as an industrial designer. Among his designs: “air” curtains which send jets of air from the ceiling to keep out drafts; wrap-around tables to minimize reaching for food; and a meaningless “machine of emotional discharge,” which he designed for laughs.

Beyond Vanity. A drawing of this “machine” was included in a show of Moholy’s paintings and sculptures which opened in the Cincinnati Art Museum this week. Visitors smiled dutifully, but found the machine no more amusing and no less confusing than the rest of the show. Among Moholy’s proudest creations are his “space modulators”—abstract, painted sculptures of transparent plastic. They are unsigned, titled by numbers and letters only, “as if they were cars, airplanes or other industrial objects.” Explains Moholy: “My desire was to go beyond vanity into the realm of objective validity, serving the public as an anonymous agent.”

As an anonymous agent, Moholy has plenty of theories about art. Says he: “I don’t like the word beauty. It’s a depressing word. Utility and emotion and satisfaction, those are more important words. Those are the things design should give. Decisions should be made on the basis of refined, not brute, emotions. Art is the best education to refine emotions.”

To attempt to refine the U.S. public’s emotions, Moholy directs and spark-plugs Chicago’s Institute of Design, a U.S. version of the now defunct Bauhaus, which was closed by Nazi pressure in 1932. Recently installed in spacious new quarters, the Institute now has some 300 students and, for the first time in its eight-year history, a waiting list. And, to prove that it makes as much sense as nonsense, it has secured a long list of Chicago businessmen as backers, including top executives of United Air Lines, Container Corp. of America, Marshall Field & Co., Sears, Roebuck & Co. For the backers, the brave new Bauhaus is supposed to pay off in the form of broadly trained designers equipped to create new products for future markets.

Moholy and his young hopefuls have already designed a car that runs by sunlight; transparent partition walls filled with colored gases; plywood bedsprings; an infrared oven that cooks dinner at the table; a mechanical dishwasher with no motor; and a “beautyrest” chair in which the occupant has his head practically on the floor and his feet in the air (the answer to having your feet on the desk without being rude).

In Chicago, at least, Moholy’s message in a bottle has washed up on a favorable shore.

*Just reissued by Wittenborn & Co.; $3.