Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl (1903–1971)

German-born American architectural historian and critic. Born Dorothea Maria Pauline Alice Sibylle Pietzsch in Dresden, Germany, on October 29, 1903 (some sources cite 1893); died in New York City on January 8, 1971; daughter of Martin Pietzsch and Fanny Clauss Pietzsch; studied at the universities of Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig; married Lazzlo also seen as Laslo or László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946, a Hungarian-born artist), in 1932; children: daughters, Claudia Moholy-Nagy and Hattula Moholy-Nagy.

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy had several careers that were interrupted but never halted by marriage, motherhood, and the political upheavals that convulsed Central Europe in the 1930s. In Europe, she worked as an actress, writer, and artistic collaborator of her husband László Moholy-Nagy, one of the most innovative teachers at pre-Hitler Germany's Bauhaus school of design. After his death, she launched a successful career of her own in America as a teacher and writer, quickly becoming a major voice in the field of architectural history and criticism who was respected for her scholarship as well as for her astute, sometimes controversial, opinions.

Born Sibyl Pietzsch in Dresden in 1903, she grew up in an artistic and intellectual environment. Her architect father Martin Pietzsch was director of the Dresden Academy of Art, and the latest ideas in art, literature, and philosophy were discussed over the dinner table. She graduated from the prestigious Dresden-Neustadt Municipal Lyceum and went on to study at the universities of Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig. Soon drawn to a career on the stage, Sibyl appeared in various plays in Berlin, Breslau, and Frankfurt am Main. A versatile actress, she played in both parlor comedies and Shakespearean roles. She accepted a position as head of the dramatic department of the Tobis motionpicture syndicate, where most of her work centered on writing and upgrading movie scripts. During this time, she met Hungarian-born artist László Moholy-Nagy.

Born in a small village in southern Hungary, László was on the threshold of a promising career as an artist when he went into exile in 1919 after the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which he and many intellectuals had supported. After a brief stay in Vienna, he went to Berlin, where innovation in the arts flourished under the liberal regime of Germany's Weimar Republic. Within a brief time, László had joined a circle of avant-garde artists in Berlin which included such noted innovators as Raoul Hausmann and Hans Richter, leading exponents of the Dada philosophy, as well as the leader of the Dutch De Stijl group, Theo van Doesburg, and the Russian constructivist El Lissitzky. In January 1921, László married Lucia Schultz (Lucia Moholy ), who collaborated with him on many of his pioneering photographic projects, including the photogram technique, in which, by placing objects on photographic film or paper and exposing them to light, a cameraless image is created. By 1922, he had come to the attention of Walter Gropius, director of the famous Bauhaus school of design in Weimar. In April 1923, not yet 28, László joined the Bauhaus faculty as head of the school's metal workshop and was responsible for its preliminary course (Vorkurs), becoming the institution's youngest master teacher.

Starting in 1926, he began working with Sibyl Pietzsch of the Tobis film syndicate to produce a series of highly innovative motion pictures that remain cinema classics to this day. The first of these was Berliner Stilleben (Berlin Still Life), which would be followed by Marseille Vieux Port (The Old Port of Marseille, 1929) and Ein Lichtspiel: Schwarz, Weiss, Grau (Lightplay: Black, White, Gray, 1930), which features László's much-discussed Light-Space Modulator, a kinetic sculpture designed to display light. By 1929, László's marriage was in crisis, and he separated from Lucia. Sibyl's relationship with him, which had begun as an artistic collaboration, was now much more than that, and in 1932 the couple married. That same year, László, collaborating with Sibyl, released another innovative film entitled Grossstadt-Zigeuner (Gypsies of the Metropolis). The most interesting feature of the film was its reliance on jumpcut editing, which emphasized motion. By early 1933, the Nazis had come to power in Germany and progressive artists like the Moholy-Nagys found themselves on the losing side of what had been for years not only a political but also a cultural war. They were further endangered because László was considered Jewish by the new regime even though he had no religious affiliations and had been raised as a Calvinist Christian during his youth in Hungary.

By 1934, László had been able to reestablish his artistic career in Amsterdam, continuing his work in photography, particularly in the area of color processing. The Dutch rayon industry commissioned him to create an exhibition of its products and production methods. Nonetheless, economic prospects for refugees from Nazi Germany in the Netherlands were less than ideal, and, since Sibyl had by now given birth to two daughters, the family moved to London in May 1935. For the next two years, she concentrated on raising their children while her husband collaborated on three books, including one with John Betjeman, An Oxford University Chest. Informally, Sibyl provided advice to her husband on his various projects, which included production of films as well as display and art designs for the menswear store Simpson's of Picadilly. With war clouds gathering on the European horizon, the Moholy-Nagys were enthusiastic when László received an invitation from the Chicago Association of Arts and Industries in June 1937 to emigrate to the United States to take up an important post. Having been recommended by Gropius, who was now head of the Department of Architecture at Harvard University, László was appointed director of the New Bauhaus, American School of Design. With an innovator like László at its head, and backed by wealthy individuals such as Marshall Field as well as by a number of major Midwestern corporations, the school appeared to have bright prospects when its doors opened on October 18, 1937.

Unfortunately, both László and his prominent business supporters had been too optimistic about the chances of transplanting the ideas of Weimar Germany's design visionaries to an America still not completely free of a depression mentality. The United States was not yet ready for such new concepts, and—with the nation's economy fragile at best despite more than five years of New Deal legislation—the New Bauhaus, American School of Design was forced to close its doors in December 1938. In turn, László opened the School of Design (later known as the Institute of Design, or "I.D.") in Chicago in 1939. Funding for the "I.D." came from his own limited resources and support from the Container Corporation of America's Walter Paepcke.

Sibyl collaborated with László during the war years and also began a teaching career of her own. Starting in 1941, she headed the humanities division at the School of Design, teaching courses that investigated the history of architecture and current issues in architectural theory and practice. László's achievements during this period included designing the Parker "51" pen and developing an art program for the rehabilitation of wounded war veterans. He was continuing his work, which included experiments with the new material of Plexiglas, when he became ill and was diagnosed with leukemia in July 1945. László did not stop working and was honored with a retrospective exhibition—the only one in his lifetime—at the Cincinnati Museum of Art which opened in February 1946. He was sworn in as a naturalized U.S. citizen in April and would live less than another year, dying in Chicago on November 24, 1946. In the final months of his life, László and Sibyl worked together on his last book, Vision in Motion, which she saw through the editorial process. Published posthumously in 1947, Vision in Motion was quickly recognized as a standard treatise for art and design education throughout the world.

After the initial shock of his death had passed, Sibyl, whose experience in the art world was rich and varied, determined to continue with her own career. She needed to support her daughters and was confident that she would be able to make significant contributions of her own. Sibyl resigned from her assignment at the Institute of Design and from 1947 through 1949 was an associate professor of art at Bradley University. In 1950, she published her first major work, an account of the life of her late husband. Entitled Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, the book was well received. It became a classic study of László's life, work, and aesthetic philosophy, and appeared in a second edition in 1969.

By the early 1950s, Sibyl was well established in a career as a teacher and writer. She lectured at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1949 through 1951. Many readers looked forward to her articles in the architectural press which invariably revealed strong opinions, persuasively expressed. At New York City's Pratt Institute, where she became a professor of the history of architecture in 1951, she was seen by her students, in the words of William H. Jordy, as "an eloquent historian and sharp critic of architecture and design." Scarcely a month went by without an article of hers appearing in Progressive Architecture or other leading professional journals. Never one to mince words—and fearless when it came to taking on the high priests of architecture—she was one of the first to raise basic questions about both the aesthetic quality and social utility of modern architecture. Her comments on the sterile glass and steel towers of Mies van der Rohe's 1951 Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings were remarkably prescient, noting that the units stifled human impulses for interaction through their unrelenting uniformity, how little privacy they provided, and how much they lacked the quality of simple humanity in their lightless and airless bathrooms and kitchens, impassable dining bays, and living rooms facing each other.

Speaking at a session of the Symposium of Modern Architecture held at Columbia University in 1964, she was one of the first to publicly accuse van der Rohe, who was at that time still alive and enjoying immense international prestige as one of the founding fathers of modern architecture, of having collaborated with the Nazi regime before he left Germany for the United States in 1937. As an anti-Nazi German of impeccable credentials, Moholy-Nagy characterized van der Rohe as having been "a traitor to all of us and a traitor to everything we had fought for." Van der Rohe had been the only leading Bauhaus artist to sign an appeal to German artists and intellectuals, urging them to support Hitler and his regime, that was published in the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter in 1934—an act that Moholy-Nagy continued to regard as nothing less than "a terrible stab in the back for us."

In the last years of her life, Moholy-Nagy felt some sense of accomplishment that derived from her life and ideas. She attempted to pass on her own and her husband's ideals to the next generation, not only in her books and articles but also through lectures and interaction with students at the Pratt Institute, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other centers of architectural excellence. She wrote several books that received an enthusiastic reception from both architectural circles and a more sophisticated reading public. A few days before her death in New York City on January 8, 1971, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy received word that she had been named "critic of the year" by the American Institute of Architects.

sources:

"Architectural Criticism: Four Women," in Progressive Architecture. Vol. 58, no. 3. March 1977, pp. 56–57.

Bauhaus-Archiv. Bauhaus Berlin: Auflösung Dessau 1932, Schliessung Berlin 1933, Bauhäusler und Drittes Reich. Berlin: Kunstverlag Weingarten, 1985.

Hochman, Elaine S. Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich. NY: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989.

Hofner-Kulenkamp, Gabriele. "Versprengte Europäerinnen: Deutschsprachige Kunsthistorikerinnen im Exil," in Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch. Vol. 11, 1993, pp. 190–202.

Jordy, William H. "The Aftermath of the Bauhaus in America: Gropius, Mies, and Breuer," in Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969, pp. 485–526.

Kostelanetz, Richard. Moholy-Nagy. NY: Frederick A. Praeger, 1970.

Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl. Carlos Raul Villanueva and the Architecture of Venezuela. NY: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964.

——. "The Diaspora," in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Vol. 24. March 1965.

——. Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment. NY: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968.

——. Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969.

——. Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture in North America. NY: Schocken Books, 1976.

Passuth, Krisztina. Moholy-Nagy. NY: Thames and Hudson, 1987.

"Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Architectural Critic, Is Dead," in The New York Times Biographical Edition. January 9, 1971, p. 75.

collections:

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy Papers, Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia