László Moholy-Nagy

The criss-crossed diagonal lines and overlapping planes Moholy drew on the stone for this red and black lithograph from 1923 are remarkably similar to those in his photograph of a ship deck from around 1925.

This detail of a pulley and cable from the same photograph echoes the shapes in a perforated metal disc that appears in a photogram by Moholy from 1939.

Other details from the ship deck photograph, such as this pair of steel cylinders covering coils of cable, suggest that Moholy was attuned to the abstract patterns all around him. His delight in pure geometric forms is also evident in Segments of Circle with Cross, a woodcut made around the same time.

Composition (Cross and Circle) belongs to a series of small relief prints made around 1923, in which the artist carved the white lines away from a block of wood or linoleum. The railing that partly obscures a pulley in his photograph on the left underscores the concerns Moholy addressed in the print, for overlapping forms and varying degrees of opacity and transparency.

Moholy's 1925 photograph of a painter on the façade of a building also has compositional similarities with his contemporaneous prints, such as this color lithograph from 1923. Note the artist's interest in the rectangular shapes of the windows and the stark linearity of the building's roof and left side. In the print, he translates these forms into pure geometric abstraction, again with an eye for transparency and overlapping forms.