The New Bauhaus opened in Chicago in October of 1937 under the leadership of László Moholy-Nagy, one of most versatile and enthusiastic of the original Bauhaus faculty, who would go on to spend the final decade of his life in the United States. He felt so thoroughly assimilated in his new homeland that on visiting New York in 1945 he was astonished to find French refugees intent on returning to Europe at the first possible moment.

His contributions to American design were immeasurable, but the reciprocal relationship with his new compatriots was no doubt one of the reasons his integration was so successful. “When I came to this country ten years ago” he wrote a few weeks before he died, “I had to relearn completely my ideas about design. I had thought that European measures could be applied to America immediately with the same results as over there…I never would have believed that a grown-up person could learn as much as I had to learn in this country” (Moholy-Nagy, Transcript of Conference on Industrial Design, A New Profession, November 11, 1946).

The abstract language of Moholy-Nagy was intended to be completely free from all elements reminiscent of nature in order that he could work with nothing but the peculiar characteristics of colors and their pure relationships. The present work executed in his final year is a supreme example of a lifelong interest in the vocabulary of Constructivism and de Stijl: simple geometric forms, balance, line and primary colors.