The university board decided to rename the university after Moholy-Nagy at the end of 2005, after concluding that the term ?applied arts? no longer appropriately defines the broad range of education offered by the university, university spokesman Gábor Rosta told the Hungarian News Agency (MTI). The university?s scope includes not just crafts, but the full range of contemporary design, ranging from architecture to visual communications. Considering the unity of object, image and space ? a unity espoused by Moholy-Nagy ? the university aims to encourage students to see connections across all subjects.
The artist's descendants have agreed to the renaming of the university.
A special university council meeting was held to mark the change of name on 30 March, Rosta said. And on 29 March, the Örökmozgó cinema showed Moholy-Nagy's films, including ?Black-White-Grey? and ?City Gypsies? as well as a 40-minute film portrait of the artist.
Moholy-Nagy was born in Bácsborsod, near Hungary?s present-day border with Romania, in 1895. A versatile, truly avant-garde personality, Moholy-Nagy experimented with the most diverse of art forms. Moholy-Nagy was a student of the Hungarian Royal Applied Arts School, the predecessor of today?s University of Applied Arts, for one semester, after which he switched to the study of law.
Moholy-Nagy moved to Vienna in 1919, then to Berlin, where he met representatives of Dadaism and Russian constructivism. From spring of 1923, Moholy-Nagy taught in Weimar's Bauhaus school at the invitation of Walter Gropius. Moholy-Nagy produced some of his best-known abstract paintings, photos, and photograms during the period. The artist presented his ?Light Space Modulator?, an early type of kinetic art, in Paris in 1930. Moholy-Nagy later used the device in his abstract film ?Black-White-Grey?.
Moholy-Nagy moved to Amsterdam in 1934, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, and to London in 1937. In 1937, again at Gropius's invitation, Moholy-Nagy left Europe for the United States to become the director of the New Bauhaus-American School of Design in Chicago. But the school was forced to close because of a lack of funds after just one year. In 1944, Moholy-Nagy founded his own school, under the name Institute of Design, where he taught until his death in November 1946. In 1945 he published his monumental work Vision in Motion, a summary of his life experience as an artist.
Source: MTI
