ABSTRACT
The paintings of László Moholy-Nagy have hardly ever attracted the kind of attention his other works have garnered. He secured his reputation as an artist less on the strength of his paintings and more on the theoretical ingenuity of his various experimental projects. He ordered enamel panels from a sign factory and exhibited them as EM1, EM2, and EM3 at a show of his paintings at the Galerie der Sturm in 1924.1 Derived from the German word for enamel, Emaille, the title emulated the language of industrial production, mimicking its seemingly anonymous and systematic logic. The critic Adolf Behne argues in an article from 1924 that these works, in their radically reduced aesthetic vocabulary, suggest a future when art would no longer remain the domain of the privileged but would become accessible to all. Anyone, Behne muses, might one day be able to place a telephone call to order paintings as durable as street signs, factory direct.2 MoholyNagy integrated this imaginative scenario in his retrospective account of the works’ origin twenty years after the fact, an account which inaugurated their more common name, the Telephone Pictures.3 At the Bauhaus, where Moholy-Nagy taught from 1923 to 1928, he flaunted his enthusiasm for photography and was seen by his fellow masters as an enemy of painting.4 He declared on several occasions, most notably in Painting, Photography, Film (1925), that in the face of new technologically sophisticated media, and of photography especially, painting cannot help but become an anachronism.5 In these years, he would claim that not only was painting doomed to obsolescence but art, narrowly understood as an autonomous realm of
creative activity, must too be abandoned.6 Moholy-Nagy would stop painting altogether in 1928 in order to focus on developing new technologies that would enable artists to work with the possibilities of light.
