Picturing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and Photography in Weimar Germany.

Were he alive last year, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy would not only have had the opportunity to observe the centennial of his birth with the rest of us, he would also, no doubt, have been astonished by the wide scope of reappraisal his career has undergone on this timely occasion.(1) This re-reception, which ranged between affirmation and critique, included the publication of two important books: Eleanor Hight's Picturing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and Photography in Weimar Germany, and Louis Kaplan's Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings. To varying degrees both books suggest that some rethinking of Moholy's achievement is due, given the growth of scholarship on Weimar photography and its cultural and political contexts over the past fifteen years or so. If both scholars agree about this point, however, they nevertheless demonstrate little or no compatibility in their respective approaches to the topic.

Picturing Modernism fashions itself as a comprehensive historical and contextual examination of Moholy's photographic theory and practice during his years in Germany (1920-33). In her first chapter Hight notes that, following his flight from the Nazis in 1933, Moholy's photographic work was primarily driven by commercial concerns rather than by his former utopian desire to found a new vision. She therefore excludes that body of work from her discussion. Her basic complaint regarding previous scholarship is that the complexity and richness of Moholy's photography has generally been obscured by what she terms its "formalist/modernist" reception, represented in Germany by Franz Roh and in the United States by Beaumont Newhall. To the extent that these men championed …