While researching in the Berlin Art Library, the two professors Petra Eisele and Isabel Naegele from Mainz stumbled upon 78 original exhibition panels by the Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy, who had been sleeping in the depot for about 90 years. This rediscovery culminated in the Bauhaus year 2019 in an exhibition and a publication on ‹Moholy-Nagy und die Neue Typografie›.

On the occasion of the exhibition ‹Bauhaus und die Fotografie. Zum Neuen Sehen in der Gegenwartskunst›, which also revives two historical exhibition spaces of the painter, photographer and designer László Moholy-Nagy, the editors Prof. Dr. med. Petra Eisele and Prof. dr. Isabel Naegele discuss the project in the Kunsthalle Darmstadt in a dialogue conversation.

Ten years after the founding of the Bauhaus, which he had left the previous year, Moholy-Nagy designed a concept based on the central question «Where is the photographic development going?» two rooms for the legendary Werkbundschau ‹Film und Foto› (FiFo), which opened in Stuttgart in May 1929 and traveled from there to Japan over the next two years. The exhibits, hanging and color design of Moholy-Nagy's exhibition rooms, which varied slightly from station to station and are also only documented in fragments, have now been partially reconstructed for the first time and can be viewed in the Darmstadt exhibition as a material 1:1 partial reconstruction and as a virtual tour will.

Just one month before FiFo in 1929, the ‹ring neue werbegestalter› opened an exhibition on the ‹Neue Typografie› in the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts, today's Martin-Gropius-Bau. László Moholy-Nagy, who had made a name for himself as a designer in Berlin after leaving Dessau, was invited to exhibit in a room of his own. For this, he designed 78 panels on the future and development of the New Typography since the turn of the century, for which he used his own designs, as well as printed advertising material by colleagues from the Bauhaus environment. Moholy-Nagy's contribution entitled «Where is the typographic development going?» - viewed in retrospect - formed an overture in terms of concept and design to his rooms in the film and photo exhibition, where the Bauhaus master varied the question «Where is the photographic development going?». Like his exhibition rooms on the history and future of photography, his presentation on the status and development of New Typography was also to be forgotten - until it was rediscovered by Petra Eisele and Isabel Naegele.

The 78 originally preserved panels from Moholy-Nagy's exhibition on New Typography were on view in the Berlin Art Library until mid-September 2019 and were extensively documented and commented on in a book for the first time. In a dialogical conversation, the two editors Petra Eisele and Isabel Naegele will report on October 24th in the Kunsthalle Darmstadt on the historical and current connections between these two rediscovered exhibitions by the Bauhaus master.

Prof. Dr. Petra Eisele (* 1966) studied art history and German studies at the University of Trier and earned her doctorate at the Berlin University of the Arts for postmodern design development since the sixties. After a research stay at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA, she was appointed Professor of Design History and Design Theory at Mainz University in 2006.

Prof. Dr. Isabel Naegele (* 1962 in Plainfield NJ / USA) first studied and obtained a doctorate in human medicine from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main and worked as a doctor. She completed her second degree in Visual Communication at the HfG Offenbach. After working at Intégral Ruedi Baur, Paris, and Studio Dumbar, The Hague, she has held the Chair of Typography and Fundamentals of Design at Mainz University of Applied Sciences since 1999.

Please note: the Event is being held in German.

Event in cooperation with the Institut für Neue Technische Form e. V. (INTeF).

Funded by the Bauhaus heute Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.