Albers & Moholy-Nagy

The whitney has an exhibit of two modernist graphic artists Josef Albers and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. Albers works was focussed on the interactions of colors with each other. Moholy-Nagy used geometric shapes like circles and lines intersecting with each other, and the colors that were created. Both artists were part of the Bauhaus School in Germany.

The Tate Modern hosted this exhibit before the whitney. This article talks about the exhibit.

Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy were two of the greatest pioneers of modernism in the twentieth century. This exhibition focuses on their individual accomplishments as well as the parallels in their work and examines their groundbreaking development of abstract art beginning in the early 1920s. Though their paths only overlapped for the five years between 1923 and 1928 when both were teaching at the Bauhaus, their artistic practice was informed by similar concerns, including an emphasis on material properties, the subversion of traditional boundaries between media and high and applied art, and a probing into the status of the work of art in an age of mass production. The artworks on view, including painting, sculpture, photography, film, and design objects, highlight each artist's most important and innovative work

Moholy-Nagy successfully sued for breach of contract in Chicago at the New Bauhaus School and used the money to open a new school, the Institute of Design, with a more overt industrial orientation.the Institute of Design. His holistic approach to education and belief in the transforming power of technology continued - with John Cage teaching music and university professors lecturing on maths and physics as part of the design curriculum. But the Bauhaus insistence on breaking down barriers between disciplines seemed doomed to fail in America. Architecture remained centred firmly on Mies's Illinois Institute of Technology, while Moholy's much smaller Institute of Design became synonymous with an experimental approach to photography which stemmed directly from Moholy's own preoccupation with light.

The ethos was experiment, experiment, experiment," says Barbara Crane, an acclaimed alumna of the school who now works with digital imagery. "Rather than aiming for the perfect shot, you developed your ideas through a series of images, with all your mistakes and accidents becoming part of the work."

Their is a book to go with the exhibit.

The beautifully illustrated book highlights the contrasts and correspondences in the lives and work of two of Modernism’s greatest innovators, Josef Albers (1888–1976) and László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1947). Beginning in the 1930s, Albers and Moholy-Nagy each developed a rigorously abstract language that condensed art to its visual fundamentals: line, color, texture, light, and form. This language experienced a creative explosion during their Bauhaus years, when both artists moved freely between media and disciplines. Essays by leading scholars follow the artists’ separate paths through to their emigration to the United States, where each continued to push tirelessly the conventions of artistic practice—Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and then at Yale University, and Moholy-Nagy in Chicago at the New Bauhaus School and the Institute of Design. As highly influential teachers, Albers and Moholy-Nagy became important catalysts for the transmission of Modernist ideas from Europe to America.

Info on the Whitney Exhibit
More here