Dolls on the Balcony

Moholy-Nagy took this photograph in 1926 while on holiday in Ascona, Switzerland, with Oscar Schlemmer, a fellow instructor at the Bauhaus, and the Schlemmer family. It was published in 1927 in the second revised and English editions of Moholy's "Painting, Photography, and Film" with the caption, "The organisation of the light and shade, the criss-crossing of the shadows removes the toy into the realm of the fantastic." The image projects a Constructivist organization of space in the way vertical and horizontal surfaces are unified in a single plane by an overall pattern of light and shade. The insistent presence of the grid conveys a deeply ominous feeling, the disjunction between its shadows and the vulnerable bodies of the two caged dolls creating a sense of foreboding violence more typical of Surrealism than of the mechanized utopias of Constructivist art.