ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author questions assumptions about Moholy Nagy’s legacy to American modernism. Charting aesthetic and political alignments at the Bauhaus, she considers how its collectivist and anti-individualist values altered once transposed to the American context of the Chicago Institute of Design. Art photography, although long since legitimated by all the conventional discourses of fine art, seems destined perpetually to recapitulate all the rituals of the arriviste. For the German Left - still in traumatized disarray after the abortive Communist revolutions of 1918/1919, the range of Russian art therein represented was greeted as a frontline communique of vanguard practice. To the twenty-seven-year old Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, an exile from the Hungarian White Terror, then painting in a dadaist/abstractgeometrical vein, the constructivist work in the exhibition struck with the force of revelation. Walter Gropius, the director of the Bauhaus, hired Moholy to become an instructor in the metal workshop, making him the exact counterpart of Rodchenko at Vkhutein.
