Composition (Intersecting Diagonals) (Komposition [sich schneidender Diagonalen])

The prints the Hungarian painter László Moholy-Nagy are few in number, and were made during a short period between 1919 and 1925. Initially working in an Expressionist manner, Moholy-Nagy moved to Berlin where he shifted his art toward a purely geometric abstraction inspired by the Russian revolutionary art of Constructivism. His Constructivist works functioned both as formal experiments and as metaphorical visions of the new society of socialist ideology.

In 1922, the artist affirmed these principles: "[Constructivism] expresses the pure form of nature, the direct color, the spatial rhythm, the equilibrium of form….Constructivism is the socialism of vision.”   

Moholy-Nagy's print imagery consists of overlapping and intersecting lines, circles, squares, and other hard-edged geometric shapes set as diagonally oriented floating planes in an immaterial space.  He usually printed his engravings by hand and only a few proof impressions of a particular print exists, as the artist seldom published these works in “official” editions.