A 21st–Century Take on Moholy-Nagy’s Photograms
Professor Willem Henri Lucas's Design for the Guggenheim's "Moholy-Nagy: Past and Future" poster
Design Media Arts Professor Willem Henri Lucas was one of four designers commissioned to design posters for the Guggenheim's "Moholy-Nagy: Past and Future" exhibition. As a memento of the exhibition, the museum is offering each poster as a free download.
"The artist László Moholy-Nagy, who helped establish the principles of Modernist design and design education, holds a special place in the design world. To honor his contributions to their discipline, we invited four designers—Kelli Anderson, typography firm Commercial Type, Willem Henri Lucas, and the Guggenheim’s own Jen Wang, Designer, Interactive—to create a poster that bears a quote from the artist’s writings and responds conceptually to his ideas. We are pleased to offer each poster as a free download—a memento of the Guggenheim’s exhibition Moholy-Nagy: Future Present. Below, we present the original design from Willem Henri Lucas.
When designer Willem Henri Lucas, who works as a professor of design at UCLA, received the brief to create a poster inspired by Moholy-Nagy, he immediately turned to the artist’s 'photograms.' Moholy-Nagy coined the term in 1925 to describe his work using camera-less photography. By placing various objects against light-sensitive paper, Moholy-Nagy was able to create ghostly abstractions, where everything from a small model of the Eiffel Tower to his own hands were transformed into evocative, otherworldly shapes and compositions.
Lucas says, '“I have always been a fan of Moholy-Nagy’s photograms because they explored new techniques and ‘painting with light.”' Turning to 21st-century tools, he made his own light experiments using an open scanner. Like Moholy-Nagy, he tried a range of random objects from his workspace—bottles, thread, utensils, and eggs—and manipulated the resulting images in Photoshop, with the goal of referencing 'Moholy-Nagy’s collage technique by layering [the] imagery.' The final 'scannogram' (as Lucas playfully calls it) conveys the idea of juggling raw eggs—'a risky thing to do” notes Lucas, “but I think Moholy-Nagy was a risk taker and very experimental.'"— Caitlin Dover, June 22, 2016
Read the full article at the Guggenheim website.