Hattula Moholy-Nagy didn’t really get to know her father–Hungarian-born designer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the man who brought the Bauhaus movement to Chicago–until she was almost 40. He’d died in 1946, when she was barely a teenager.
In 1956, when she came to the University of Chicago to pursue a master’s in anthropology, she remembers visiting the buildings on Ontario and State and Rush where her father’s school had been and the family’s apartment on Astor Street. But the memory of her father was fading fast. “I was preoccupied with academic work,” she says. And besides, her mother was the keeper of the Moholy legacy, giving lectures and overseeing the publication of his work.
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Then in 1971 Sibyl passed away, and Hattula’s sister, Claudia, died unexpectedly. “I’d been living in Switzerland, married with kids,” says Hattula. “All of a sudden I became the executor of the estate, which included hundreds of paintings and photographs and countless correspondences. I realized that I’d better learn enough about my father to be an authority. And that’s what I’ve been doing, more or less, for the past 30 years.”
He’d been born in 1895 in a small village in the south of the waning Austro-Hungarian Empire, the second of three sons who survived infancy. Both parents’ families were landed gentry. Moholy’s father left when the children were young, and his mother took them to live with her family. An uncle became his guardian–the first in a succession of “male mentors and female handmaidens who shepherded my father’s career.”
When Hitler came to power in 1933 Moholy started planning the family’s move to England. “He took a job in Amsterdam,” says Hattula. “I have my mother’s letter cautioning him not to take Dutch and English lessons at the same time. Then he went to London to learn more about color photography.”
Hattula fondly recalls the circle around her father–pioneers such as Nathan Lerner and Gyorgy Kepes (some of whose photos will be exhibited at the Stephen Daiter gallery through May 25). She interviewed many of these people in her effort to understand her father. “I remember him in bits and pieces,” she says. “I saw him making hundreds of 35-millimeter color slides that encompassed portraits, travels, and my favorites–light abstractions, probably his best work. He shot a series of shorts at the school. He wrote a definitive book about his aesthetics titled Vision in Motion. Did I mention that he was a prolific writer too? He was tireless, even in his final year.”
