Self-portrait: Lighting Cigarette
Artist
László Moholy-Nagy
(American, born Hungary, 1895 - 1946)
Date1926; printed later
MediumPhotogram
DimensionsImage and sheet: 13 13/16 × 10 1/8 inches (35.08 × 25.72 cm)
Credit LineGift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Object number2005.27.2794
On View
Not on viewCollections
DescriptionAbstract light colored image of what appears to be the silhouette of a face with exaggerated nose and lips against a black background.Exhibition HistoryAvant-Garde Photography in German 1919-1939. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, December 19, 1980 – February 8, 1981, no cat.
Faces: an Exhibition from the Hallmark Photographic Collection. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, September 16 -October 21, 1984, no. 43.
Rotation 9. The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, October 20, 2010 – March 13, 2011, no cat.
World War One and the Rise of Modernism. The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, January 9 – October 18, 2015, no cat.
For László Moholy-Nagy, seeing was an adventure. An important figure in the European New Vision avant-garde of the 1920s, he used a host of unusual techniques and approaches to reinvent visual experience, including photograms, photomontage, solarization, aerial perspectives, multiple exposures, and negative images. Here, Moholy-Nagy produced a camera-less image of himself lighting a cigarette (although some scholars believe the identity to be a colleague, Rudolf Blumner). Though a portrait, the abstraction of the photogram removes distinguishing and recognizable features, displacing identity. As Moholy-Nagy wrote: “The photogram conjures up as many interpretations as it has viewers.”
Sybil Moholy-Nagy;
with Inge Bondi, New York, NY by 1970;
Purchased from Inge Bondi by Hallmark Cards, Inc., Kansas City, MO, 1970;
Given by Hallmark Cards, Inc, to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 2005.
with Inge Bondi, New York, NY by 1970;
Purchased from Inge Bondi by Hallmark Cards, Inc., Kansas City, MO, 1970;
Given by Hallmark Cards, Inc, to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 2005.
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