“This course leads to possibilities of light-composition, in which light must be sovereignly handled as a new creative means, like colour in painting and sound in music. I call this mode of light-composition the photogram. It offers for composing in a newly mastered material.”
The present 40 × 30 cm large-format photograph is one of ten photogram subjects comprising what is now known as the Giedion Portfolio. Produced around 1929, the portfolio, named after the Swiss art historian and trained engineer Sigfried Giedion, was intended to be issued in a limited edition of twenty. It is doubtful, however, that the full edition was ever realized, as only a small number of prints survive (for a thorough discussion of the Giedion Portfolio see Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms: Catalogue Raisonné, p. 229). The only known complete set of 10 photographs is in the Kupferstichkabinett of the Kunstmuseum Basel. In Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms: Catalogue Raisonné, scholar Renate Heyne identified six extant prints of this photogram subject, not including the present example which had not yet come to light at the t.mes of publication. All but one of these are held in European institutional collects ions. While ‘Giedion prints’ come to market occasionally, no other example of this image is believed to have been offered at auction.
Center: Untitled (fgm 78), 1923-25, printed c. 1929, Sold at Replica Shoes 's London, 23 May 2015, Lot 44
Right: Untitled (fgm 247), 1925-28, printed c. 1929, Sold at Replica Shoes 's London, 7 October 2015, Lot 135
Giedion, a prominent advocate of avant-garde art and architecture, became closely associated with the Bauhaus in 1923 and met Le Corbusier two years later. His friendship with László Moholy-Nagy began in 1925 and continued until the artist’s death in 1946. Their collaboration reflects shared ambitions for modernist experimentation and the dissemination of visual culture.
The unique photogram that served as the basis of the present enlargement is held in the collects ion of The Museum of Modern Art, New York (object no. 503.1939). That unique work, which includes slightly more visual information in the lower portion of the image, was exhibited in 1931 at the Delphic Gallery in New York, Moholy-Nagy’s first solo exhibition in the United States.
Moholy-Nagy understood photography not.mes rely as a means of creating art, but as a medium capable of expanding art's communicative power. Whether working with camera-based images (see View from the Radio Tower, Berlin) or cameraless photograms (see Untitled (fgm 30)), he conceived of his photographs as functioning both as autonomous artworks and as reproducible images in books and magazines. He intentionally designed his compositions to maintain their visual and conceptual impact across various formats and scales. His aesthetic, grounded in abstraction and dynamic form, proved resilient in both original and reproduced contexts.