Decorating Work, Switzerland

László Moholy-Nagy played a key role at the Bauhaus in both Weimar and Dessau from 1923 to 1928, and at the New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design) in Chicago from 1937 until his death in 1946. Early in his career he was associated with Constructivism in Vienna and the Dada movement in Berlin. His major contribution to avant-garde photography was "the new vision" ("das neue Sehen"), in which he advocated a new approach to the medium, proposing the use of such techniques as the manipulation of light in cameraless photograms; negative prints, sharply angled points of view, and radical cropping in camera images; and the introduction of drawn elements, text, and mass-produced images in photomontages.
"Decorating Work, Switzerland," also referred to as "Disembodied House," shows the photographer's allegiance to several Constructivist principles, including a floating, unfixed perspective and its plastic configuration of space, such that a house painter, seen from below, becomes but one design element in a geometric composition. While the image is playful in the mode of Bauhaus student photographers, it poses an interesting question: Would Moholy-Nagy, who adhered to the stripped-down industrial style of the Bauhaus, have taken the photograph a day or two later, when the quaint painted decoration of the windows had been completed?