László Moholy-Nagy

signed, dated, and annotated 'gallalith picture' [sic] and 'gz IV' in pencil on the reverse, 1932

This photograph is on glossy, double-weight Agfa-Brovira paper. It is in generally excellent condition. In high raking light, a few superficial surface scratches are visible. The edges are lightly worn, and the corners are bumped. On the reverse of the print are 2 thin paper-tape remnants along the upper edge, and a remnant of dried adhesive in the lower left corner. When examined under ultraviolet light, this print does not appear to fluoresce.
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The photograph offered here shows Moholy’s galalith painting, GZ IV, a Constructivist composition that demonstrates the artist’s exploration of transparency and overlapping and intersecting geometric planes.  Galalith was an inexpensive plastic patented in 1906.  Moholy employed galalith not only as a filter through which to enhance a painting or drawing on paper, but also, as in GZ IV, as the canvas itself, etching into the plastic and applying layers of oil paint to transform color and texture.

In Abstract of An Artist (1944), Moholy writes about his experimentation with synthetic media in the early 1930s: ‘In working with these materials – uniformly colored, opaque or transparent plastics – I made discoveries which were instrumental in changing my painting technique.  This had inevitable repercussions on my thinking concerning light problems. . . By producing real radiant light effects through transparent dyes on plastic and through other means, one has no need for translating light into color by painting with pigment’ (reprinted in Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, London, 1985, pp. 381-82). 

At the time of this writing, the original galalith painting, GZ IV, has not been located.  Other photographs of this painting in the collection of the Moholy-Nagy Foundation suggest the original work measured 15½ by 19½ inches.