Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: Moholy-Nagy – Experiment in Totality (1950–)

“This biography of the Constructivist leader László Moholy-Nagy illustrates his struggle for a total approach to seeing-teaching-creating. Written by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, László’s second wife and lifetime collaborator, she witnessed many of the defining moments of the Bauhaus movement and its migration to the United States and its continuation as the Chicago New Bauhaus and Institute of Design. An excellent first-person account.”

With an Introduction by Walter Gropius
Publisher Harper & Brothers, New York, 1950
262 pages

Second edition
Publisher MIT Press, 1969
xviii+259 pages

PDF (1950)
Internet Archive (1950, multiple formats)
PDF (2nd ed., 1969, added on 2020-1-3)

László Moholy-Nagy: The Art of Light (2010) [Spanish]

An artist and thinker of astounding energy and ability, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was a true world citizen of the early twentieth century, an ambassador-at-large for Constructivism, Suprematism, Dada and the Bauhaus. He brought the same Constructivist optimism to every medium he tackled, from plexiglass and light sculpture to typography to his photographic experiments in color to his Suprematist canvases, his influential pedagogy at the Bauhaus and at the Institute of Design in Chicago. Moholy-Nagy’s concept of the arts as a totality, his pedagogy and his confidence in the new industrial culture that would level distinctions between art and craft led him into all fields of creative production. The ultimate modernist Renaissance man, Moholy-Nagy was prolific in so many realms that his detractors inevitably charged him with dilettantism. This accusation ignores his very real innovations in photography–for example his photograms–and light sculpture, as well as the fact that the artist’s aims possessed a conceptual unity in their common aspiration to make an “art of light.”

László Moholy-Nagy: The Art of Light presents Moholy-Nagy’s work in all of its glorious unity and diversity. Including more than 200 works, from painting, photography (black and white and color) and photograms to collages, films and graphic design, it emphasizes his greatest years of productivity, from 1922 to the end of his life. The Art of Light is the new definitive volume on this hero of modernism.

László Moholy-Nagy: El Arte de la Luz
Book coordination: Doménico Chiappe, Luisa Lucuix
Editor: Emilio Ruiz Mateo
Publisher: La Fábrica Editorial / Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid
ISBN: 8492841257, 9788492841424
264 pages

exhibition (Madrid, 2010)

PDF

Franz Schulze: Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (1985/1989) [Italian]

Schulze’s acclaimed biography is the first full treatment of the master German-American modern architect. Schulze traces Mies’s European career in its progression to avant-garde modernism—where his work was materially rich but of modest scale—to his second maturity and world renown in the United States, where he invented a new architectural language of “objective” structural expression. Among the authors’ most exciting new discoveries is the massive transcript of the early-1950s Farnsworth House court case, which discloses for the first time the facts about Mies’s epic battle with his client Edith Farnsworth. The book reveals new information about his relationships with women, including the nature and breakup of his marriage to the wealthy Ada Bruhn, his close professional and personal ties to the gifted designer Lilly Reich, and new details from a series of illuminating interviews with his American companion, Lora Marx. This edition also gives voice to dozens of architects who knew and worked with (and sometimes against) Mies—many of them from the unique oral history collection of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Architecture.

This comprehensive biography tells the compelling story of how Mies and his students and followers created some of the most significant buildings of the twentieth century.

Originally published by University Of Chicago Press, in association with the Mies van der Rohe Archive of the Museum of Modern Art, 1985
Translated to Italian by Mara De Benedetti, published as Mies van der Rohe by Editorial Jaca Book spa, Milan, April 1989, ISBN 8816600888, 344 pages.

publisher

PDF (no OCR)