I love to dabble,” László Moholy-Nagy stated in 1946. “That is what made me what I am today. I was educated as a lawyer, but because I dared to dabble with plastics and wood and so on, I gained a wide experience . . . . Today I am 25% a scholar, and 75% an artist and a what-not.”

Dabbler or no, Moholy had an extraordinary career. Over a period of roughly thirty years, he made important contributions to painting, sculpture, photography, and film. He served on the faculty of the Bauhaus and founded his own design school in Chicago. He was also a versatile designer, working in typography, creating stage sets and advertising displays, and making notable contributions to industrial design. He invented the Vista Dome passenger car for the B & O Railway Company, for example, and also designed the Parker Pen.

Moholy’s career might best be described as a series of aesthetic adventures, and in his own view these many diverse activities came to be focused on a single interest—the expressive possibilities of light. “The capacities of one man seldom allow the handling of more than one problem area,” he wrote in 1944. “I suspect this is why my work since [the beginning of my career] has been only a paraphrase of the original problem, light.” This preoccupation with light naturally made photography a medium of central importance to him.

During his years of residence in Germany (1920-53), Moholy devoted considerable energy to