The Telephone Paintings: Hanging Up Moholy

Throughout his career as an artist and teacher, the Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy explored the relations between art, science and technology. In 1922, in one of the first attempts to utilize telecommunications technology for the production of art, he ordered five enamel paintings from a Berlin sign factory in order to generate art by telephone. The author reviews the theoretical implications of Moholy’s readymade gesture. The paper includes an analysis of both László Moholy-Nagy’s and Lucia Moholy’s biographical accounts of this event.