Ubu
16 East 78th Street
Through Dec. 22
Painter, photographer, graphic designer, Bauhaus educator and writer-theorist, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was one of the most influential artists of his time; yet today he is only hazily remembered. This extensive sampling of small works shows why.
One reason is that while he always followed the imperatives of Constructivist abstraction, he worked in so many different media that no singular visual achievement has come to be associated with his name. Promiscuously inventive, he started exploring photograms -- of which there are many in this show -- at the same time as Man Ray, and he created kinetic light sculptures (represented here only in photographs) that would influence sculptors of the 1950's and 60's.
But he was not deeply original. Perusing the prints, drawings, collages, small paintings, photographs, book covers and posters in this show -- all stamped by a lucid, linear geometry -- is like walking through a hall of mirrors that palely reflect many other, more interesting artists: El Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Mondrian, Man Ray, Kandinsky, Klee and even Duchamp.
Moholy-Nagy had a vision, but that is another problem. As a writer and teacher (at the Bauhaus and later, the New Bauhaus, which he founded in Chicago in 1937) he promoted a fusion of art, science, technology and industry. This makes him a godfather to commercial artists, industrial packagers and architects, but not for today's fine art world where fantasies of anti-technocratic idiosyncrasy prevail. Moholy-Nagy's ideology shows most palpably in a formalism that, while not unplayful, has a bland, corporate impersonality. KEN JOHNSON