Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage. Design, Copies and Reproductions

Abstract

László Moholy-Nagy worked on the prototype for Light Prop for an Electric Stage for eight years, from 1922 to 1930, developing several sketches and designs. The final drawings and model were made with the collaboration of the Hungarian architect Stefan Sebök (István Sebők). The device was built by the AEG company, and it was displayed for the first time in the Werkbund exhibition held in Paris in 1930, where it appeared as an autonomous aesthetic object. This was clearly captured in the film Light Play: Black-White-Gray, in which Moholy-Nagy recorded its kinetic quality in the spirit of the abstract films developed at that time. The film clearly shows the motion of the lighting device as a formal exercise of abstraction using double exposures, special effects and close-ups. The Light Prop underwent several alterations over time to keep it working in a variety of exhibitions around Europe and America. In 1956, after Moholy-Nagy passed away, his widow, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, donated it to the Harvard Busch-Reisinger Museum, where it has remained ever since. After further damage caused by inappropriate restoration and its mechanical instability, the Light Prop was reconstructed in 1969 for the exhibition From Pigment to Light, celebrated at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York (Tsai et al. 2017). The idea of a copy emerged during the planning of this exhibition to preserve the legacy of Moholy-Nagy’s knowledge. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy finally approved this idea in 1970, allowing the production of two copies, one for the exhibition and the other for the 35th Venice Biennale (1970). Both reproductions were kept and sent to the Bauhaus Archive in Darmstadt and the Van Abbemuseum, where the original device had suffered repeated damage during the KunstLichtKunst exhibition (1966). The essay attempts to trace the timeline of modifications from the original device to the reproductions.