László Weisz was born in 1895 in Bácsborsód, Hungary. In 1915 he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. While a soldier he produced his first drawings. In 1918 he was discharged from the army and devoted himself to painting. He then fashioned a new name for himself, Moholy-Nagy, using his uncle Gusztáv Nagy’s family name and the place name Mohol. In 1919 he fled the White Terror to Vienna, and in 1920 he proceeded to Berlin. He there befriended such artists as Richard Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch and George Grosz, and later Kurt Schwitters and El Lissitzky. He had his first solo exhibition at the gallery Der Sturm. Moholy-Nagy further developed his Constructivist imagery and became familiar with the technique of the photogram. In 1923 he was appointed a teacher at the Bauhaus, which he then left in 1928 to return to Berlin. He began experimenting with film in 1929, and a year later produced the Light-Space Modulator, a kinetic Light Art object. In 1932 he came into contact with the artists’ group Abstraction-Création, and exhibited with it. In 1937 he emigrated to Chicago, where he became the director of the New Bauhaus – American School of Design. He died in Chicago in 1946.
