László Moholy-Nagy and Chicago’s War Industry: Photographic Pedagogy at the New Bauhaus

Abstract

László Moholy-Nagy came to Chicago to head the New Bauhaus in 1937 after the Nazis closed the school in Dessau. By the time the USA became involved in the war, investors had forced the school to change its name from the New Bauhaus to the American School of Design – a change that resulted directly from US ambivalence toward foreign, and especially German, influence. Of course, the school’s name was not the only change brought by the war. A study of the wartime context of Chicago industry and politics, as well as the school’s unique photographic pedagogy based on the photogram and its application to visual war strategies, reveals a fascinating attempt to convert an interdisciplinary Bauhaus curriculum based on the melding of art and industry into an artistic contribution to Chicago’s war industry. This article investigates how the interdisciplinary pedagogy of the Bauhaus was influenced by its new context in the heart of US industrial markets, and how the war affected both the city and the course of the school, its faculty and students. The article discusses how photographic pedagogy was adapted from its modernist origins to address the most pressing question facing the art school – namely, how artists could productively contribute to wartime efforts. Pedagogy based on mastering light and shadow was directly applied to new theories of combat vision and camouflage techniques developed by the faculty alongside numerous military guest lecturers, while students and faculty used art as a source of catharsis, producing haunting wartime images of destruction.