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| László Moholy-Nagy by Lucia Moholy c1925 |
Originally László Weisz, her father changed his name to Nagy, that of his mother’s Christian lawyer, after his Jewish father abandoned the family. He later added Moholy after Mohol the town in which he grew up. After serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War he studied art in Budapest, and in 1923 became an instructor at the Bauhaus. When the Nazis came to power he left Germany first for Amsterdam, and then in 1935 for London where he lived in the ISOKON building in Belsize Park, before moving to Farm Walk in Hampstead Garden Suburb.
While trying to
establish an English version of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy worked as a designer
for Simpson's of Piccadilly and London Transport. He was commissioned by John
Betjeman, the assistant editor of the Architectural Review, to photograph
contemporary architecture, and published his own documentary photography studies:
Street Markets in London and Eton Portrait. He made a
documentary film, Life of the Lobster, and special effects for the director Alexander Korda.
Although a supporter of the short lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, and
a habitué of extreme left wing circles, Moholy-Nagy was never a member of the Communist Party. In 1918 he had joined the Hungarian Reformed
Church and in London was known to the comrades as ‘Holy Mahogany’, perhaps because
of his attendance at St Jude’s.
The family
moved to the United States in 1937 where László established himself as one of
the major artists of his period with works today in many of the world's leading
galleries. He died in 1946. In Budapest in 2006 the Hungarian
University of Arts and Design was renamed the Moholy-Nagy University.
Claudia Moholy-Nagy,
baptized at St Jude’s on 21st March 1937, died in 1971.
