He started to study law in Budapest, but due to the first world war his studies were interrupted. During the war he prepared numerous paintings of the everyday scenes of the army, which were later premiered in the exhibition called „War artists”. This was the moment when he changed his family name for the second time, adding the Moholy („from Mohol”) tag as well, remembering his stepfather. After the defeat of the Hungarian Soviet in 1919 he left first to Vienna, where he met the circle of Hungarian avant-garde artists led by Kassák, and later to Berlin, where he met his first wife, Lucia Schultz, who introduced him to photography. He became internationally aknowledged after 1922, the year in which his illustrations made for the avant-garde magazines, together with an exhibition with László Péri and a book in common with Kassák were extremely well accepted.

In 1923 Walter Gropius, leader of the Bauhaus school invited him to collaborate with world famous artists like Paul Klee or Vaszilij Kandinszkij.  Although Moholy-Nagy’s name is less known then theirs, he became one of the most important theoreticians of the school of expressionistic design and industrial integration with his book Painting Photography Film (1925). Beside the three „traditional” arts, he became proficient and innovative in the fields of typography, sculpture, photoplastics, photograms, light art, theatre sets and industrial design.

During the nazi era he moved with his second wife and their daughters to Amsterdam, London and finally Chicago, where he became director of the New Bauhaus. After the closing of the school (which was due to financial problems), in 1939 he founded his own School of Design, which later became a part of the Illinous University being the first institution in the US to offer PhD in design. Moholy-Nagy unfortunately died a few years later in leukemia (similar to Béla Bartók). His opera magna, which includes his ars poetica and the curriculum of the school of design, titled Vision in Motion was published posthumously. In 2006 the Hungarian University of Art and Design was named in his honour.

The exhibition at the Ludwig Museum presents his diverse life achievement with Moholy-Nagy’s photography, films and works ‘made with light’ in central focus. One of the most exciting parts of the exhibition is the compilation of all Moholy-Nagy’s films, shown together here for the first time and according to the artist’s original conception. This ambitious and large-scale show of Moholy-Nagy’s oeuvre presents more than 200 pieces and documents from over twenty museums around the world, as well as private collections. After Madrid, Berlin and The Hague, the exhibition arriving in Budapest is complemented by photographs and publications from Hungarian collections. Thanks to László Moholy-Nagy’s family, valuable documents which have not been seen in any of the earlier locations also have been added to the exhibition.