Hungarian-American painter, photographer, designer, filmmaker, pedagogue — the Bauhaus figure who did most to push the school toward a fully technological understanding of its mission and who, after the Nazis drove the school's faculty abroad, founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago (1937), later the Institute of Design, and transplanted the pedagogy into American soil. Born László Weisz in a small Hungarian town, wounded on the Italian front in the First World War, radicalized by the brief 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, he arrived in Weimar in 1923 on Gropius's invitation to replace Itten as director of the Vorkurs and of the metal workshop.
Moholy was the Bauhaus's great theorist of vision. His core argument — developed in Painting Photography Film (Malerei Photographie Film, 1925, vol. 8 of the Bauhausbücher), in the posthumous Vision in Motion (1947), and above all in teaching — was that the new technical media of photography, photogram, film, light projection, and typography constituted a genuinely new way of seeing, not a debased version of the older arts, and that the designer's training had to reckon seriously with what these media could do. His "Telephone Paintings" (1922) — paintings ordered by telephone from a sign factory, allegedly by specifying color-code numbers — prefigure conceptual art by forty years. His photograms (cameraless photographs made by placing objects directly on sensitized paper) remain among the durable Bauhaus visual achievements.
He followed Gropius to England in 1935, and in 1937 moved to Chicago to found the New Bauhaus at the invitation of the Association of Arts and Industries. The school struggled financially, reopened as the School of Design in 1939, merged with the Illinois Institute of Technology after his early death from leukemia in 1946, and became the institutional stem of American design education on the Bauhaus model — a lineage that runs through Buckminster Fuller, through IIT under Mies, through Black Mountain, into the whole American design profession.