City / Nature / Society: Moholy-Nagy’s Flower Photograms

László Moholy-Nagy was transfixed by the modern city. In his peregrinations from his rural beginnings, to 1910s Budapest and Vienna, to Berlin (1920s), to London (early 1930s), and finally to Chicago (1937-1946), his art always enlisted the metropolis: its forms, materials, energy, and in particular, its light. Light was a means of engagement into the modern for Moholy—for a time he sought to give up painting in order to “paint with light.” Photograms, registered only by means of light, particularly represented this quest. For them, he selected objects that he then rendered into abstractions in black, white and grays. The fragmented urban experience, as well as its materials and objects, gave form to his abstract art. Why then, did Moholy make flower photograms, representative of the natural world, a subject he did not otherwise substantially engage in? In contradistinction to his other photograms, the flower works are less abstract and their origins are clear in subject and object. Notably, the flower photograms span the entirety of his career, begun in Berlin, before his call to the Bauhaus, they continue to his time at the Bauhaus in both Weimar and Dessau, back to Berlin, in London, and finally throughout his time in Chicago, culminating in photograms of a ear of wheat and of roses.

Moholy’s flower photograms thus represent a unique place in his oeuvre. Crucially, beyond the flower photograms, there are few other representations of nature in Moholy’s artwork. Deceptively simple, they are amongst the most recognizable of the objects he set on paper, exposed to light, and fixed, resulting in an image of a ethereal plant glowing on a darkened background. Moholy’s other photograms tend to belie their origins in common household objects, trinkets, gear wheels, pieces of glass or fragments of paper; those resulting images in his photogram oeuvre celebrate geometrical forms—circles, quadrilaterals, and spirals—representing an abstract output which closely aligns with his photography, painting, sculpture, set designs, and pedagogical practices. This body of work was engaged in the abstract experience of the modern metropolis—epitomized by shifting shapes, overlapping planes, representations of modern materials—and with abstraction in modernism more generally. The flower photograms are materially ephemeral: a single take creates a unique print, conjured by light and shadow, while the bloom, having been plucked and once captured by the photogram process, is destined to wilt and die. And the larger ephemerality of natural world itself—ever fleeting, whether represented by diurnal time, location, weather or season—is seemingly embodied in the abstraction of these photograms.

Moholy began making his first photograms in Berlin, following a trip in the summer of 1922 with his first wife Lucia Moholy to the Rhön mountains of Germany. During this sojourn of several weeks spent in a farmhouse near the Loheland community (a group centered on natural living, healthful and artistic activities) the couple immersed themselves in the natural landscape and in the activities of their fellow community members. They were also engaged in intense discussions on the topic of production and reproduction which would result, upon their return to Berlin that fall, on both a body of photograms produced by Moholy, and the authoring of the canonical article, “Production-Reproduction,” published in De Stijl in 1922. In Loheland, Moholy learned the technique of flower photograms from a community member, Bertha Günther. Like Günther, Moholy’s earliest Berlin photograms are made with daylight printing-out paper, a process by which a treated piece of paper is exposed to the sun and fixed using a water bath. However, he quickly switched to darkroom photogram production, using the light from the enlarger to expose the flower and then fix the resulting image in chemicals, allowing him greater control over the process. Günther’s photograms are artfully arranged, but static, decorative compositions featuring previously dried and pressed blooms in which the beauty and structure of the flower is the main subject matter.