László Moholy-Nagy 1895-1946

Gift of the photographer to Moshé Worobeitschik Raviv (Moï Ver)

Galerie Berinson, Berlin, 1980s

Benteler-Morgan Galleries, Houston

Acquired by the present owners from the above

This print:

László Moholy-Nagy: Frühe Photographien, from the Das Foto Taschenbuch series, Number 16 (Berlin, 1989), pl. 63

Other prints of this image:

László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago, 1947), fig. 226

Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy (London, 1987), pl. 79

Eleanor M. Hight, Picturing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and Photography in Weimar Germany (Cambridge, 1995), pl. 61

Andreas Haus, Photographs and Photograms: Moholy-Nagy (New York, 1980), pl. 40

Van Deren Coke, Avant-garde Photography in Germany, 1919-1939 (München, 1982), pl. 38

Daniel Wolf, The Art of Photography, 1839-1989 (New Haven, 1989), pl. 236

Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge, 1989), p. 92

The photograph offered here is the most important of a series of photographs that Moholy-Nagy took from the new Berlin radio tower, erected in 1926.  Moholy appears to have photographed from the tower over a period of nearly two years, from its opening in September 1926 until May 1928.  The present photograph was made during the winter of 1928, when snow helped to transform the landscape into an abstraction.  Moholy's use of the high vantage point was among several strategies he employed to 'unlock' the picture space established by traditional, eye-level perspective.  In this instance, at first glance, the image seems a complex study of black lines and shapes on a white background.  Only with scrutiny do walkways, lampposts, trees, and buildings become apparent.    

The present image is perhaps Moholy's most famous photograph made with a camera.  A ceaseless experimenter, Moholy influenced the visual culture of the 20^th century in incalculable ways, and the image offered here was recognized early on as one of his definitive statements.  In 1937, it was chosen by Beaumont Newhall for inclusion in The Museum of Modern Art's ground-breaking survey of the history of photography, 'Photography 1839 - 1937,' where it was listed in the catalogue as 'Berlin from the Wireless Tower.'  It was part of the Museum's 1940-41 inaugural exhibition for the newly-formed Department of Photographs, 'Sixty Photographs,' and was one of 8 photographs from that show reproduced in the Museum's Bulletin for December 1940/January 1941.  The print of the image offered here, a true early print, is matted to correspond to the cropping typically used by the photographer in published versions of the image, and in a later print he made in a small edition in 1941 (see below). Examination of the present print outside of its mat and frame shows a fuller version of the negative, including traces of the original black negative edges.  The print appears to have been hand-trimmed. 

As of this writing, only two early prints of this image have been located in institutional collections in the United States: a print in The Museum of Modern Art, acquired by them in Beaumont Newhall's purchase of Moholy's entire exhibition at New York's Delphic Studios in 1939; and a print in the Gernsheim Collection at the University of Texas at Austin (both noted by Haus, p. 66, cat. no. 40).  Another of Moholy's photographs from the tower in winter, with a less radical composition, are in the Julien Levy Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  A print of this somewhat more conventional image, formerly in the collection of the Gilman Paper Company, was sold in these rooms on 14 February 2006 (Sale 8165, Lot 35).

No early print of this image has been sold at auction in over two decades.  A later print of the image made in 1941, part of The Museum of Modern Art's 1941 American Photographs at $10 show, was sold in these rooms in April 1993 (Sale 6407, Lot 330).  For this project, Moholy-Nagy -- along with Charles Sheeler, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, and others -- contributed one photograph each to the exhibition, and agreed to make available to the public this same image in an edition of 10, at $10 per print. 

The early print offered here comes originally from the collection of Moshe Worobeitschik Raviv (1904 - 1995), the photographer best known for his dynamic 1931 book of photomontages of Paris, published under the name of Moï Ver (see The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photography Books of the Twentieth Century, New York, 2001, pp. 70-73). The print was given by Moholy to Raviv when the latter was a student at the Bauhaus around 1929.  In 1950, Raviv emigrated to Israel, where the present print was acquired by the Galerie Berinson, Berlin, around 1987.