László Moholy-Nagy b. 1895, Bácsbársod, Hungary; d. 1946, Chicago László Moholy-Nagy is most closely associated with the Bauhaus in Germany, where he taught from 1923 to 1928. He played a fundamental role at that school of art and design, propagating the values of international Constructivism: research and experimentation with new technologies, active engagement with the modern world, and furtherance of utopian abstraction. Forced by right-wing political pressure to leave the Bauhaus, Moholy continued a transnational existence that had begun when he emigrated from his native Hungary in 1919. He worked as an exhibition designer, a typographer, and an art director for companies and publications in Berlin (1928–33), Amsterdam (1934), and London (1935–37), before landing in Chicago as director of the New Bauhaus, known from 1944 as the Institute of Design. Photogram (Fotogram), 1925 Gelatin-silver print photogram, 10 x 8 inches (25.4 x 20.3 cm) Moholy-Nagy praised the photogram, or cameraless photograph, as an arena for experimental composition "in which light must be sovereignly handled as a new creative means, like color in painting and sound in music." The idea of "handling light" comes through with literal force in this work, in which fingertips (probably the artist's) glow with a brilliant, luminous energy. Two hands have been brought together from opposite directions to leave this ghostly double imprint, such that the shadowy hand serves as a picture frame in which to view its whitened counterpart. It is as if the first hand were not only a tool for working with light but itself a photosensitive surface. Within this utopian circuit, hands appear as both the source of creative emanations and the means to fix them in visible form. —Matthew S. Witkovsky