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Lot Essay
On December 2, 1941, just five days before Pearl Harbor and six days before the United States declared war on Japan, the Museum of Modern Art installed three exhibitions aimed at getting its visitors to consider various forms of inexpensive art as holiday gift ideas. The three exhibitions, Useful Objects Under $10, Silk Screen Prints Under $10 and American Photographs At $10 were based on a sale exhibition held the previous year of silk screen prints. The photography exhibition was considered "an experimental project". The arrangements with the exhibiting artists were such that all proceeds were to go to the artists and the photographers, made known to the public through the Museum's press release and probably in the exhibition as well. The Museum earned no commission.
Each corresponding curatorial department was made responsible for the selection and for corresponding with their respective artists. Beaumont Newhall chose nine photographers who were asked to produce their submission in an edition of ten prints each. Aside from Moholy-Nagy, the roster and the titles were: Ansel Adams, Utah Farm, 1941; Berenice Abbott, Midtown, 1933; Walker Evans, Interior, Cape Cod, 1931; Helen Levitt, Tacubaya, Mexico City, 1941; Arnold Newman, Violins, 1941; Charles Sheeler, Bucks County Barn, 1915; Brett Weston, Ocean, 1939; and Edward Weston, Yosemite Snow, 1938.
The results were decidedly mixed. As might be expected, Abbott's New York view sold the most at four copies. Moholy sold just one print, the work offered here.
The purchaser of From Radio Tower, Berlin was the thirty-one year old first director of Industrial Design at MoMA, Eliot Noyes. A 1938 masters candidate from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Noyes (1910-1977) had studied at Harvard with Moholy's former Bauhaus colleagues, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer with whom he would soon be employed. He was thus well versed in Moholy's modern aesthetic of the "New Vision". Recommended for the museum position by Breuer and Gropius, Noyes held a two year tenure from 1940-42, during which time he organized the first Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition and exhibition. He would go on to have an illustrious career as a master of corporate industrial design. He is well remembered for his career at IBM where he instituted America's premiere integrated corporate design system and, most notably, for designing the iconic Selectric typewriter in 1961.
Given Noyes' training, it is no wonder he would support his mentor's associate by purchasing From Radio Tower, Berlin. Moholy's inclusion in Newhall's exhibition is an interesting foil to the balance of photographers exhibited. In an era of world turmoil and a high influx of war scarred refugees, Moholy, director of the School of Design in Chicago, was but a recent immigrant himself. For Newhall to have included him in an exhibition devoted to specifically to American photographs by the unsentimental, cerebral and formal example of high European Modernism must have been somewhat of a risk. In a letter from Newhall to Moholy, held in the Museum's exhibition files and dated January 14, 1942, the curator regrets that only the one print sold and he was shipping the remaining nine back to him under separate cover.
Christie's is grateful to Ms. Susan Kismaric, Curator, Department of Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, for her assistance in the research into the history of this photograph.
Each corresponding curatorial department was made responsible for the selection and for corresponding with their respective artists. Beaumont Newhall chose nine photographers who were asked to produce their submission in an edition of ten prints each. Aside from Moholy-Nagy, the roster and the titles were: Ansel Adams, Utah Farm, 1941; Berenice Abbott, Midtown, 1933; Walker Evans, Interior, Cape Cod, 1931; Helen Levitt, Tacubaya, Mexico City, 1941; Arnold Newman, Violins, 1941; Charles Sheeler, Bucks County Barn, 1915; Brett Weston, Ocean, 1939; and Edward Weston, Yosemite Snow, 1938.
The results were decidedly mixed. As might be expected, Abbott's New York view sold the most at four copies. Moholy sold just one print, the work offered here.
The purchaser of From Radio Tower, Berlin was the thirty-one year old first director of Industrial Design at MoMA, Eliot Noyes. A 1938 masters candidate from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Noyes (1910-1977) had studied at Harvard with Moholy's former Bauhaus colleagues, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer with whom he would soon be employed. He was thus well versed in Moholy's modern aesthetic of the "New Vision". Recommended for the museum position by Breuer and Gropius, Noyes held a two year tenure from 1940-42, during which time he organized the first Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition and exhibition. He would go on to have an illustrious career as a master of corporate industrial design. He is well remembered for his career at IBM where he instituted America's premiere integrated corporate design system and, most notably, for designing the iconic Selectric typewriter in 1961.
Given Noyes' training, it is no wonder he would support his mentor's associate by purchasing From Radio Tower, Berlin. Moholy's inclusion in Newhall's exhibition is an interesting foil to the balance of photographers exhibited. In an era of world turmoil and a high influx of war scarred refugees, Moholy, director of the School of Design in Chicago, was but a recent immigrant himself. For Newhall to have included him in an exhibition devoted to specifically to American photographs by the unsentimental, cerebral and formal example of high European Modernism must have been somewhat of a risk. In a letter from Newhall to Moholy, held in the Museum's exhibition files and dated January 14, 1942, the curator regrets that only the one print sold and he was shipping the remaining nine back to him under separate cover.
Christie's is grateful to Ms. Susan Kismaric, Curator, Department of Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, for her assistance in the research into the history of this photograph.