László Moholy-Nagy was born in Bacsborsod, Hungary on July 28, 1895. He began drawing and watercolor painting while recuperating from a wound suffered in World War I as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army.

In 1920 Moholy moved to Berlin, associating with many avant-garde artists of the period. In 1922, in collaboration with his first wife Lucia (Moholy), he produced his first photograms that explored the themes of transparency and light, concerns derived from his abstract paintings of the period. Whether Moholy had prior knowledge of similar experiments by both Man Ray and Christian Schad is still debated. In 1923 Moholy joined the faculty for the Staatliche Bauhaus, first in Weimar and later in Dessau.

While at the Bauhaus, Moholy and Lucia continued their experiments with photograms (experiments he would continue throughout his career), and Moholy also began to photograph with a camera.

In 1928, Moholy left the Bauhaus and moved again to Berlin. There he worked with publications, exhibition and stage design, and helped organize the 1929 exhibition, Film und Foto. With the rise of the Nazis, Moholy fled Germany in 1934, emigrating first to Amsterdam, and later to London. In London, Moholy worked in graphic and commercial design, provided photographic illustrations for several books (Street Markets of London and Eton Portrait), and designed lighting effects.

In 1937, through the assistance of Walter Gropius, Moholy-Nagy was invited to Chicago to direct a new design school. The New Bauhaus, as Moholy named it, lasted only one year, closing in 1938. In 1939, Moholy and some of the staff of the New Bauhaus opened The School of Design, which continues to this day as the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Moholy had taught photography informally to students at the German Bauhaus, but now made it an integral part of the curriculum at the School of Design. He was instrumental in the spread of photographic education in the United States. Moholy-Nagy died in Chicago on November 24, 1946 at the age of 51.

The Museum's holdings represent a variety of materials, the earliest being a crayon drawing of a man, dated 1918. The collection is made up of 24 gelatin silver prints, 1 Vivex color print, 24 gelatin silver photograms, 4 "photoplastics" (montages), and 3 negative image gelatin silver prints. Related work, such as photographs of stage sets, exhibit designs, sculptures, and copies of paintings (?), are also part of this collection.

The majority of Moholy's work was acquired through purchase in 1956 from Sybil Moholy-Nagy (Moholy's second wife). One additional photograph (a Vivex color print) was given to the Museum by Dr. Walter Clark in 1953. Many of Moholy-Nagy's published works are held in the museum's library collection.

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