


This essay discusses the production, funding, and circulation of Design Workshops (1940–44), a group of 16mm Kodachrome films produced at László Moholy-Nagy’s Chicago-based School of Design (formerly the New Bauhaus), to explore the role of colour theory and practice in the communicative agendas of Moholy and his corporate sponsor Walter Paepcke, chairman of the Container Corporation of America. As a symptomatic foray into the mid-century category of ‘communication’, the films collected as Design Workshops — at once documents of pedagogical theory and quasi-corporate promotional messages — involved moving images both in zones of pedagogical experimentation and in the more instrumental domains of public relations, packaging and brand management. In the case of Moholy-Nagy’s School of Design, colour experimentation and creative making in the synthetic materials of the post-war — Saran or plywood — were wedded to the inculcation of forms of democratic subjectivity (perceptual skills, epistemologies, creative capacities) that the artist saw as essential to post-war citizenship at mid-century. The essay demonstrates Moholy-Nagy and Paepcke’s overlapping investments in colour’s functional, communicative dimensions at the School, and argues that colour film production in Design Workshops fuelled a vanguard humanities vision at mid-century. The essay reads Design Workshops as an allegory of that vision and its limits, performing the work and pedagogical theory of the School for potential donors and funding agencies like the Rockefeller Foundation.



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Colour Communications: László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Paepcke, and the Humanities Program of Design Workshops
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Cinéma & Cie
Justus Nieland
2019/03/01
Michigan State University
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Colour Communications: László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Paepcke, and the Humanities Program of Design Workshops
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Colour Communications: László Moholy-Nagy, Walter
Paepcke, and the Humanities Program of Design Workshops
Justus Nieland, Michigan State University




Abstract

   This essay discusses the production, funding, and circulation of Design
   Workshops (1940–44), a group of 16mm Kodachrome films produced at László
   Moholy-Nagy’s Chicago-based School of Design (formerly the New Bauhaus), to
   explore the role of colour theory and practice in the communicative agendas of
   Moholy and his corporate sponsor Walter Paepcke, chairman of the Container
   Corporation of America. As a symptomatic foray into the mid-century category of
   ‘communication’, the films collected as Design Workshops — at once documents
   of pedagogical theory and quasi-corporate promotional messages — involved
   moving images both in zones of pedagogical experimentation and in the more
   instrumental domains of public relations, packaging and brand management. In
   the case of Moholy-Nagy’s School of Design, colour experimentation and creative
   making in the synthetic materials of the post-war — Saran or plywood — were
   wedded to the inculcation of forms of democratic subjectivity (perceptual skills,
   epistemologies, creative capacities) that the artist saw as essential to post-war
   citizenship at mid-century. The essay demonstrates Moholy-Nagy and Paepcke’s
   overlapping investments in colour’s functional, communicative dimensions
   at the School, and argues that colour film production in Design Workshops
   fuelled a vanguard humanities vision at mid-century. The essay reads Design
   Workshops as an allegory of that vision and its limits, performing the work and
   pedagogical theory of the School for potential donors and funding agencies like
   the Rockefeller Foundation.


   In his mid-century treatise Vision in Motion, Bauhaus master, multimedia
artist, and theorist of colour and light László Moholy-Nagy set forth a sweeping
argument for what he called ‘the new education’, demanding interdisciplinary
sensory training. Written largely in 1944 and published in 1947, the year
following his early death from leukaemia, the treatise revised and expanded his
previous works of media theory — chiefly Painting, Photography, Film (1925,
revised in 1927) and The New Vision: From Material to Architecture (1932) —
while framing them within an account of his research ‘laboratory for a new
education’, the School of Design in Chicago. Founded as the New Bauhaus in

                                               Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 32, Spring 2019
                                     Justus Nieland


1937, the School sought to wed the practical needs of business and industry
to the vanguard pedagogical ideals of the Bauhaus, which Moholy updated in
Vision in Motion with an anxious eye to the post-war world.1 ‘The biological
evolutionary progress of man’, Moholy argued there, ‘was possible only through
the development and constructive use of all his senses, hands, and brain,
through his creative ability and intuition to master his surroundings; through his
perceptive power, conceptual thought, and articulated emotional life’.2 Because
Moholy understood humanity’s inherent multisensory facility with media as the
motor of its evolutionary progress, the new education would minister to primary
human needs for media literacy, and intervene through ‘the development of
man’s capacities’, especially his ‘ability to express himself in different media’.3
   Vision in Motion’s high-minded humanities ambitions at mid-century clarify
the philosophical stakes of one contemporaneous product of Moholy’s media
pedagogy at the School: the group of 16mm Kodachrome films known today as
Design Workshops (1942–44), which documented the School’s far-flung activities
during the war. The Design Workshops mark the realization, as well as stakes,
of Moholy’s longstanding desire for colour film production at the School and
document a range of students’ experimental work across media: from textiles,
drawing, painting, and furniture design, to photography, photograms, camouflage,
kinetic assemblages, and light modulators. Moholy shot and edited the films and
travelled with them as he promoted the School across the US, from the corporate
boardroom to the artist’s branch of Chicago’s local CIO union. ‘Since we can’t
afford to advertise’, he told his wife Sibyl, ‘I have to be the advertisement’.4 At
an institution like the School of Design, then, colour film was a utopian medium,
a way of training students for Chicago’s flourishing non-theatrical film industry,
and a pragmatic, rhetorically sophisticated PR tool.
   Just as Moholy took advantage of the convenience and portability of
Kodachrome slides for his lectures, so too the Design Workshops films function
as a kind of mobile exhibition of the diverse products of the students’ training
at the School in media as well as various materials, from plywood chairs, to
wooden springs, plastic jewellery, and novel synthetic materials of the post-war
period. One of these — Saran — is introduced at the end of a series of shots of
brightly-hued textiles from the weaving workshop. In this sequence, the textiles’
haptic quality merges with their visual appeal, perhaps a gesture to a Bauhaus
synesthetic ideal, and one impossible to communicate as fully without the rich
chromatic saturation of Kodachrome. These entwined senses are addressed by
the blocking of students like Juliet Kepes, daughter of School instructor György
Kepes, shown handling variously coloured samples, turning them towards the


1
  László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald & Co., 1947), p. 63.
2
  Ivi, p. 20.
3
  Ivi, pp. 14, 20.
4
  Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969),
p. 213.

70
                                    Colour Communications


camera as an exhibitionary device; and we see a hand caress another bright red
textile mounted for display on the wall. We then cut to a close-up of yet another
student-made textile — this one a dense weave of purples, blues, yellows, and
reds — superimposed with a title that reads: ‘Plastic materials such as Saran from
the Dow Chemical Company are tested either alone or in combination with other
materials.’ Display of student craftsmanship in weaving merges seamlessly with
product placement, a deft bit of packaging not only for Dow’s plastic, but also for
a School keen to promote a humanities vision that insisted on the usefulness —
for industry — of the students’ capacities in various media with their integrated
‘senses, hands, and brain’.
   In sequences like this, where Kodachrome abets the synergistic cross-
promotion of corporate sponsor and educational institution alike, Moholy’s
chromatic functionalism seems to have learned a lesson from the School’s most
reliable champion and benefactor, Walter Paepcke, the visionary chief executive
of the Container Corporate of America (CCA), a Chicago-based paperboard
firm. Like his corporate patron Paepcke, Moholy increasingly understood
colour as having what I’ll call a functional, communicative value within a larger
administrative art of packaging that was practiced in a highly competitive media
environment, which demanded all the chromatic resources of good design.5
In this essay, I turn to the production, funding, and circulation of Design
Workshops to explore more carefully the role of colour theory and practice in
the intersecting communicative agendas of Moholy and Paepcke at the School
of Design, which became the Institute of Design in 1944 amidst a significant
curricular and administrative restructuring, with Paepcke as the chairman of its
Board of Directors.6 As a symptomatic foray into the expansive mid-century
category of ‘communication’, the films collected as Design Workshops involved
moving images both in zones of pedagogical experimentation and in the more
instrumental domains of publicity, packaging, and brand management. In the
case of Moholy-Nagy’s School of Design, colour experimentation and creative
making in the synthetic materials of the post-war — Saran and plywood — was
wedded to the inculcation of forms of democratic subjectivity (perceptual skills,
epistemologies, creative capacities) that the artist saw as essential to post-war
citizenship at mid-century.
   The opening of Design Workshops announces this emphatically, as we fade
from the title ‘Design Workshops’, stencilled on a sheet of glossy plywood,
to a bright-orange piece of paper, aflame, bearing a quotation from Moholy
himself: ‘The Bauhaus education is a new and powerful correlation of all creative
processes.’ This bold colour scheme (white typography on orange) shifts, in a cut


5
  As Neil Harris has demonstrated, packaging emerges as a ‘whole culture’ in the US in the 1920s
and 1930s, an interdisciplinary juncture in a new professional culture of consumption. Neil Harris,
Art, Design, and the Modern Corporation (New York: Smithsonian Institution, 1984), p. 17.
6
  Alain Findeli, ‘Design Education and Industry: The Laborious Beginnings of the Institute of
Design in Chicago in 1944’, Journal of Design History, 4.2 (1991), 971–1113.

                                                                                                71
                                        Justus Nieland


to a closer framing on the same sentence, to light blue on black, before a pulsing
bar of orange light emerges to focus our attention by spotlighting the phrase
‘creative processes’. These eye-catching shifts in colour are echoed as we cut to
a shot of a Chicago city street at night, where a superimposed stoplight changes
from red, to orange, to green, followed by a close-up of a green light reading
‘GO’. Having quickly summarized his pedagogical philosophy, immersed us in a
dynamic urban scene, and summoned a range of materials and media (plywood,
typography, paper, coloured light, celluloid) essential to the School’s ethos,
Moholy cuts to an exhibition where the students’ work at the School will now
double the film’s own chromatic exhibitionary labours. Colour, these films will
show us, was an essential element of an ambitious program of post-war Bildung
predicated equally on the design of forms and the design of subjects.
   In doing so, Moholy joined bleeding-edge colour theory at the School of Design
to the instrumental communicative paradigms around colour proper to the spheres
of advertising, public relations, wartime mobilization, and post-war planning. As
we’ll see, this chromatic domain of what began to be called ‘functional colour’
in the 1930s was also essential to Walter Paepcke’s contemporaneous managerial
efforts to remake the corporate identity of the CCA as a modern packaging
firm, one that marshalled the talents of a host of modern designers in Moholy’s
ambit. Without collapsing important philosophical differences between Moholy,
the visionary Bauhaus master, and Paepcke, the canny paperboard executive,
this essay demonstrates their overlapping investments in colour’s functional,
communicative dimensions at the School of Design, and argues that colour
film production in Design Workshops fuelled a vanguard humanities vision at
mid-century that depended on the humane art of packaging. Design Workshops
functioned as a kind of allegory of that vision and its limits, performing the work
of the School — its pedagogical philosophy and its very utility as an educational
institution — for potential donors and funding agencies.
   Tracking the circulation of Design Workshops, the essay builds upon recent
scholarship on the role of filmmaking at both the Bauhaus and its American
incarnation at the School of Design, which intersected with the broader terrain
of Chicago’s booming non-theatrical film industry.7 By bringing Paepcke
and Moholy together through their shared attention to colour’s functional,


7
  See Findeli’s overview of the vast literature on the New Bauhaus. On the relationship between
the New Bauhaus and Paepcke’s CCA, see James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and
Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Lara N. Allison, Perception and Pedagogy: Design,
Advertising, and Education in Chicago, c. 1935–55 (PhD dissertation: Columbia University, 2009).
On film and moving-image media at the New Bauhaus, see Elizabeth Siegel, ‘Vision in Motion:
Film and Photography at the Institute of Design’, in Taken by Design: Photographs from the
Institute of Design, 1937–1971, ed. by David Travis and Siegel (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago
in association with the University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 214–23; and Amy Beste, “All Roads
Lead to Chicago”: Encyclopedia Britannica Films, the Institute of Design, and Nontheatrical Film
(PhD Dissertation: Northwestern University, 2012).

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communicative value, I extend the work of recent film historians who have turned
to industrial and so-called ‘useful’ cinema to trouble easy distinctions between
avant-garde aesthetics and the domain of advertising.8 In Moholy’s case, colour
filmmaking and colour practices at the School allowed him to continue in the US
a range of aesthetic experiments in new colour technologies and processes begun
in the course of his earlier work as an artist and commercial designer in Europe.
Even as his theoretical writing on colour circa 1937 sought to divorce colour
from its ‘naturalistic-illusionist meaning’, colour of a decidedly functional variety
became part of what Elizabeth Siegel has dubbed the ‘new tools of the modern
artist’ used during Moholy’s Chicago period, skills that ‘came to encompass all
the components of administration’.9 Just as Moholy’s expanded administrative
media practice now included course catalogues and syllabi, so too did it depend
upon the communicative value of 16mm Kodachrome as a promotional device,
fundraising strategy, and a craft-based articulation of a vanguard humanities
agenda.10
   As a work of PR, deftly packaging the School’s animating interdisciplinary
and intermedial ethos, Moholy’s Design Workshops echoed Paepcke’s own
commitment to colour as a tool of corporate communication — a way of
branding an organization’s public identity through ‘institutional advertising’ in a
competitive media environment.11 This functional value of colour design applied
equally to the organizational forms of corporations and of schools, as was also
the case with the original Bauhaus. The School’s persistent financial troubles and
political pressures yielded an urgency about communicating the School’s message
to the world, and the use of bold colour in the new typography — what Moholy
described ‘communication in its most intense form’ — played a key role in the
range of marketing materials developed for ‘the construction of the Bauhaus
brand’.12 As colour communications, Design Workshops were also caught up in
broader arguments at mid-century about the very nature of the humanities and


8
  Useful Cinema, ed. by Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson (Durham: Duke University Press,
2011); Michael Cowan, ‘Absolute Advertising: Walter Ruttmann and the Weimar Advertising
Film’, Cinema Journal, 52.4 (Summer 2013), 49–73.
9
   See Moholy-Nagy, ‘Paths to the Unleashed Color Camera’ (1937), reprinted in Lázsló Moholy-
Nagy: Color in Transparency: Photography Experiments in Color, ed. by Jeannine Fiedler and
Hattula Moholy-Nagy (Steidel: Bauhaus-Archiv, 2009), p. 38; Siegel, ‘The Modern Artist’s New
Tools’, in Moholy-Nagy: Future Present, ed. by Matthew S. Witkovsky and others (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 232.
10
   On Kodachrome’s (and before it, Kodacolor’s) connections with moving image ‘craft’ practices
and energetic amateur practices, see Kaveh Askari, ‘16mm Colour by a Career Amateur’, Film
History, 21.2 (2009), 150–63.
11
    Rather than directly selling a product or service, ‘institutional advertising’ seeks to imbue a
product with a more intangible aura or a corporate personality. On the CCA’s institutional
advertising, see Allison.
12
    Catherine Ince, ‘Spread the Word: Bauhaus Instruments of Communication’, in Bauhaus: Art
as Life (London: Koenig Books, in association with Barbican Art Gallery, 2012), p. 112. Ince
includes Moholy’s quotation from his essay ‘The New Typography’, reproduced in Moholy-Nagy:
An Anthology, ed. by Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo, 1970), p. 75.

                                                                                                73
                                       Justus Nieland


their role in so-called General Education initiatives, and the films circulated in
a media environment in which the arts and humanities, to survive, were forced
to justify themselves to private philanthropies, which meant competing for the
attention of audiences and donors alike. In this sense, Design Workshops offer an
important episode in what Mark Garrett Cooper and John Marx have recently
analysed as the work of schools as ‘media institutions’ — the ways educational
institutions have historically deployed media to address audiences and argue
for their usefulness in a competitive marketplace that, in the early and mid-
twentieth-century, co-evolved with the new managerial arts of ‘packaging’.13
As the intersecting labours of Paepcke and Moholy at the School of Design
make clear, ‘packaging’ meant more than the point-of-sale design of any given
commodity’s container; it encompassed the new profession of public relations,
practices of propaganda, and the broader conceptual matrix of ‘communication’
through which these arts were understood.

                                            ***

   Moholy’s most sustained analysis of that matrix was Vision in Motion, but
his earlier works of interwar media theory devoted considerable attention to
the psychophysical aspects of colour, and thus informed the artist’s desire to
wed colour values and various forms of colour composition across media to his
broader utopian agenda of sensory training and uplift. In this way, the multimedia
theory and practice of colour at the Institute of Design, as promoted in Vision
in Motion and enacted in Design Workshops, extended aspects of the chromatic
commitments of the pedagogical program of the German Bauhaus. There, various
theories of colour — ranging from the spiritual or Theosophical to the scientific
and technical — were taught, as students conducted synaesthetic experiments in
colour music, studied the theories of colour harmony of Wilhelm Ostwald, and
were tasked with a range of colour exercises as tools of introspection.14 At the
core of this curriculum, was a turn to a ‘nondiscursive, nonconceptual’ form of
knowing, a kinaesthetic epistemology that assumed, in the way of psychophysics,
‘a relationship of correspondence between physical stimulus and psychological
sensation’.15 ‘Forms and colors’, Walter Gropius stated in 1923, ‘gain their
meaning in the world only through the relationship with our inner being’.16
Similarly, Moholy’s pedagogical aim to start with elementary forms and colours,
and find their precise sensorial equivalents, underscored the foundationalism
and elementarism at the heart of the Bauhaus’s approach to colour. Elementary

13
   Mark Garrett Cooper and John Marx, Media U: How the Need to Win Audiences Has Shaped
Higher Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 5.
14
   Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe, Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media in the 1920s
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), pp. 151–69.
15
    Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), p. 174.
16
   Gropius, quoted in Kinaesthetic Knowing, p. 181.

74
                                    Colour Communications


forms and colours, as a means of returning students to ‘ground experiences’,
were framed as a challenge to modernity’s regime of specialization, and an
essential part of a holistic education ministering to the ‘whole man’.17
   Similarly, colour experimentation and colour theory played an essential role
in Moholy’s pedagogical practice at the School of Design. While colour film
production didn’t begin in earnest at the School until 1942, theories of colour
and practices of its technical manipulation — what Moholy called the ‘high craft’
of colour processes — were incorporated into various aspects of the curriculum
from the start, and followed from Moholy’s experiences with colour photography
through his work as a commercial designer in Berlin in the late 1920s.18 Moholy
later took courses in new colour processes (including Kodachrome, Agfa,
Dufay, and Finlay) in London in the 1930s, and he worked with them as Art
Director for the Pallas design studio in Amsterdam, whose commercial printing
arm included a range of colour experts. In 1937, the year of the New Bauhaus’s
founding, Moholy published ‘Paths to the Unleashed Color Camera’, a short
essay evaluating contemporary colour technologies and practices through their
capacity for non-naturalism, the sign of liberated chromatic creativity. In that
same year, his colour photograph ‘The Tinsel and the Glamour’ appeared in
Fortune magazine at the conclusion of an article titled ‘Fifteen Paper Companies’,
the second of three profiling ‘the lively paper industry’ in the US (fig. 1).19
Moholy’s decidedly objective, functional photo, featuring an array of brightly
hued paper products — confetti, tinsel, masks, table coverings, wrapping paper
— works to illustrate paper’s sheer communicative ability ‘to mean a thousand
things’ today.20 The artist, described as ‘the Director of the New Bauhaus set
up by the Chicago Associate of Arts and Industries in a mansion donated by
Marshall Fields’, is credited with ‘looking at things as dispassionately as an
astronomer looks at a universe’.21 But the photograph has also subtly embedded
a corporate advertisement — for Chicago-based United Airlines — into its
festive scene in a way that acknowledges the new synergies between art and
industry in the production of colour communications. And while Paepcke’s CCA
escapes mention in this article, one of the firm’s own early exercises in corporate
branding — French poster artist A. M. Cassandre’s striking advertisement of the
CCA’s corporate ‘integration’ — appears following the conclusion of the paper
article.
   Paepcke’s own tastes and significant financial investments in modern design
mark a commitment to the role of colour within a broader strategy of corporate
communications in the CCA’s corporate identity program. Beginning in the


17
   Kinaesthetic Knowing, p. 183.
18
   Moholy’s 1933 letter to Sibylle Pietzsch, quoted in Fiedler, ‘Moholy-Nagy’s Color Camera Works:
A Pioneer of Color Photography’, in Color in Transparency, p. 20.
19
   ‘Fifteen Paper Companies’, Fortune, November 1937, p. 132.
20
   Ivi, p. 138.
21
   Ibid.

                                                                                               75
                                        Justus Nieland




           Fig 1. Moholy Nagy, The Tinsel and the Glamour, in ‘Five Paper Companies’,
     Fortune, © 1937 Estate of László Moholy-Nagy / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.




mid-1930s, Paepcke’s CCA championed modern ‘good design’ as an important
‘function of management’, and a means of providing firms with a distinctive
graphic identity. In 1936, Paepcke hired Egbert Jacobson, a leader in colour theory
and typography, as Director of the Department of Design, where he oversaw
a sweeping refashioning of the CCA’s corporate image, from logos, invoices,
and annual reports, to office interiors, factories, and trucks. ‘The painting of
work rooms’, Jacobson explained in an overview of his work at the CCA, ‘has
brought the best experience of lighting engineers and colour consultants into
the everyday life of workers’, while reducing ‘tension for executives’ and adding
to ‘the efficiency of secretarial staffs’.22 Essential to this public relations project
was Jacobson’s Color Harmony Manual (1942), based on the Ostwald system
and published and sold by the CCA’s Color Standards Department to ‘assist in
communication’ between art directors, advertisers, managers, and designers by
developing a standard descriptive language for colour.23


22
   Egbert Jacobson, ‘Good Design: An Important Function of Management’, Graphis, 6.30
(February 1950), 136–47, 199–204, 140, 201.
23
   For more on the CCA’s horizontally model of integrated corporate knowledge production, see
Allison; and Phillip B. Meggs, ‘The Rise and Fall of Design at a Great Corporation’, in Graphic

76
                                   Colour Communications


   Spearheaded by Jacobson, Paepcke’s design efforts at CCA were shaped by the
rising prestige of so-called ‘functional color’ and the increasingly sophisticated
theories of colour engineers and consultants to bring colour at mid-century into
the soft behaviourist domains of scientific management and mood conditioning.
Faber Birren, who coined the phrase ‘functional color’ in a book published in
the same year as the New Bauhaus’s founding, rose to prominence in Chicago in
the mid-1930s through the colour program of a wholesale meat manufacturer.24
For Birren, the term was meant to ‘do some straight thinking’ about an often
unscientific and irrational topic by describing colour’s pervasive utility: identifying
and classifying objects (and hazards), increasing domestic efficiency, improving
the safety of factories and plants, increasing legibility of communications,
reducing eye-strain in the experience of architecture and home décor, protecting
against heat, and cooperating ‘with illumination to add efficiency to labor’.25 And
as Paepcke’s CCA was increasingly aware, for ‘the manufacturer of packaged
goods’ functional colour role in producing legibility and visibility in advertising
‘builds up permanent identity for the thing he sells’.26
   If Birren’s work, according to fellow corporate colourist Egmont Arens,
‘carried on where Ostwald stopped’, a similar claim might be made of Moholy
and Paepcke’s Chicago-based Bauhaus reboot.27 Like Birren and other functional
colourists, Moholy and Paepcke understood colour theory and practice as a form
of what their contemporaries dubbed ‘Visual Public Relations’, colour in the
service of morale-building, mood-conditioning, and identity-building, from the
colourization of factories or war plants to the boardroom and the classroom.28
Colour’s role in practices of holistic ‘integration’ was the hallmark of Moholy’s
design pedagogy at the School of Design. Moholy’s reworking of Walter
Gropius’s famous bulls-eye diagram for the Bauhaus curriculum in Chicago,
which rebooted its famous preliminary course (Vorkurs) as the transdisciplinary
core required of all first-year students, located the study of the medium of film
and photography in a ‘Light Workshop’, one of six specialized workshops to
follow the propaedeutic Vorkurs.29 Colour was placed in another specialized
workshop, alongside ‘painting’ and ‘decorating’. For the fall semester of 1938,
Moholy had planned to appoint French painter Jean Hélion as head of the Color
Workshop, and designer Herbert Bayer head of the Light Workshop, before the


Design History, ed. by Steven Heller and Georgette Ballance (New York: Allworth Press, 2001),
pp. 283–92. With Paepcke’s support, Jacobson also published a further elaboration of Wilhelm
Ostwald, Basic Color: An Interpretation of the Ostwald System (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1948),
which was designed by two of Moholy’s students at the ID, Morton and Millie Goldsholl.
24
   Birren’s blue-green showroom walls and complementary lighting made the manufacturer’s steaks
look redder, and improved sales.
25
   Faber Birren, Functional Color (New York: The Crimson Press, 1937), pp. 11, 12.
26
   Ivi, p. 12.
27
   Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), p. 220.
28
   Ivi, pp. 232–37.
29
    ‘School of Design catalogue, 1938–39’, Box 3, Folder 54, Institute of Design Collection,
University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections. Hereafter UICIDC.

                                                                                            77
                                       Justus Nieland


New Bauhaus was abruptly closed when it lost the support of its sponsor, the
Chicago Association of Arts and Industries.30
   But this practice-based separation of colour (in painting, murals, or
decorating) and light (in photography, film, or typography) was never hard
and fast, given the Bauhäuslers attentiveness to the intertwined physical and
physiological properties of each, and the School’s pedagogical aim of synthesis
and intellectual integration. A description of the various exercises from the Light
Workshop of 1937 included a ‘Color Filter Study’ working with both ‘ordinary
“color-blind” emulsions’ and ‘with some of the colour-sensitive materials such as
orthochromatic and panchromatic films’.31 In the first-year curriculum, exercises
in photography, the building of light modulators, and drawing and colour,
exposed students to materials and their properties, while what the catalogue calls
the ‘re-examination of color’ would provide still further colour training. Here,
students would isolate colour’s physical and psychological properties, and learn
its ‘receding and advancing values’.32 This early exposure to colour was cast as
a ‘reliable background’ for the students’ ‘later specialized work in any type of
visual expression: rendering and packaging, poster and advertising, mural and
easel painting, wallpaper and decorating’.33 When the New Bauhaus reopened as
the School of Design in 1939, with Hungarian designer György Kepes appointed
as the head of Light Workshop, colour and light would again be taught together,
and across media practices. A course description of Kepes’s Light Workshop
begins by explaining the centrality of colour processes and technologies for all
photography students: ‘Just as traditional painting involved colour techniques
from frescoes to oil, so the pioneers in photography are giving us the photogram,
photomontage, the photomural, microscopic, macroscopic, high-speed and
colour photography, and new motion picture techniques.’34 Thus does ‘the
expert in photography becomes the expert in light and extends the scope of his
talents to include stage, exposition, advertising, and other lighting problems’.35
In Design Workshops, Kepes himself appears in the thick of one such problem.
He’s seen wrapping a fashion model in thin silver wire. Coloured gels bathe her
in hues of blue and red, and thrown light gleams on the coiled wire as she stands
in front of another of the School’s vanguard models — a plywood chair. The
chair’s bright red, removable upholstery is another novel object, its textile woven,
in part, of Saran (fig. 2). The curricular saturation of colour experimentation
into the work of Kepes’s Light Workshop was consistent with Bauhaus aesthetic
principles, and Moholy’s own philosophies. But it is also telling that, in Chicago,
circa 1937, the Light Workshop also included the sphere of ‘publicity’, a use for

30
   ‘Exhibition on the New Bauhaus, 1937–38’, Box 3, Folder 56, UICIDC.
31
   Ivi.
32
   ‘School of Design Catalogue, 1942’, Box 3, Folder 63, UICIDC.
33
   Ivi.
34
   ‘School of Design, Light Workshop, Photography, Day and Evening Classes’, School of Design:
Course and Program Descriptions, 1938–44, Box 3, Folder 64, UICIDC.
35
   Ivi.

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                                   Colour Communications


                                                                    Fig. 2. György Kepes
                                                                    wrapping a model in
                                                                    wire coil for the Light
                                                                    Workshop. © 1942-43
                                                                    Estate of László Moholy-
                                                                    Nagy / Artists Rights
                                                                    Society (ARS), New York.




colour perhaps best exemplified by the Design Workshops films themselves as
communications — that is, as publicly facing media extensions of the School’s
urgent humanities mission, now framed to meet the demands of a nation at war
at a moment of communicative urgency. Travelling widely, the films represented
the social utility of colour experimentation across media at the School; they
expressed the creative activities, democratic capacities, and social orientation of
certain kinds of ‘useful’ pedagogical subjects, as trained at the School in cutting-
edge colour technologies during the war, and their very rhetorical success at
securing funding for the School depended on the extent to which the films might
be considered as an expression of a vision of the humanities themselves.
   In other words, the films were designed to communicate not just to the School’s
potential corporate sponsors, showing the utility of new industrial products like
Saran, but to officers at the Rockefeller Foundation, the private philanthropy
that had supported their production in the first place, with a small grant ($7,500)
for film production in 1942, and with the support of Paepcke.36 Buoyed by these


 Walter P. Paepcke Papers, Box 61, Folder 1, Special Collections Research Center, University of
36

Chicago Library. Hereafter WPP.

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                                        Justus Nieland


funds, Moholy announced the School’s capacity ‘to continue the avant-garde
work which has been so essential in making the film a prominent part in the
search for contemporary expression, the more so as commercial production is
still governed by conceptions derived from the traditional pictorial art, and has
not yet the control of its potentialities’.37 The most essential public product of
the grant was not the avant-garde Kodachrome work Do Not Disturb (1945),
an abstract meditation on desire, jealousy, and betrayal, produced by Moholy
and various ID students, but Design Workshops. In these films, ‘contemporary
expression’ didn’t mean abstract form, but rather a set of humane expressive
capacities cultivated at the School across various media forms and processes, and
cast in Vision in Motion as essential to democratic subjectivity. The colour films’
communicative work becomes clear only within the interpretive horizon through
which their content was understood — for RF officers — as a vanguard expression
of the mid-century humanities, and a particularly ‘functional’ humanities at that.
   Here, we should recall the central role of the Rockefeller Foundation in the
emergence of the mid-century ‘communications complex’.38 In the prelude to
the war, the Humanities Division of the foundation, led by its Assistant Director
John Marshall, sponsored the so-called ‘Communications Group’. An important
collaboration among the academy, the state, and private foundations, the
Communications Group explored the problems of ‘mass influence’, the dynamics
of fascist propaganda, and the possibility of ‘genuinely democratic propaganda’.39
Intersecting with these efforts, beginning in 1935, the Humanities Division of
the Foundation, along with its Foundation-funded General Education Board,
devoted considerable funds to various initiatives that explored the possibilities
of film and radio for general education initiatives.40 The Foundation hoped
that programs of quality ‘visual education’ would elevate the public taste and
serve in the production of democratic subjects, consistent with the Foundation’s
liberalism.
   Moholy’s curricular aims for colour film production at the School thus
became entwined with a broader interest in funding educational film as part of
a humanities mission at a moment of intense interest in the power of film and
other mass media to build morale, to propagandize, and to shape public opinion,
a topic Moholy took up directly in the ‘propaganda machine’ section of Vision in
Motion.41 There, he indicted ‘unofficial education’ — advertising, the press, and
radio — for fomenting an atmosphere of ideological mystification. For Moholy,


37
   ‘School of Design, Light Workshop, Photography, Day and Evening Classes’, School of Design:
Course and Program Descriptions, 1938–44, Box 3, Folder 64, UICIDC.
38
   See Cooper and Marx, Media U.
39
   Brett Gary, The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 85–130.
40
    William J. Buxton, ‘Rockefeller Support for Projects on the Use of Motion Pictures for
Educational and Public Purposes, 1935–1954’, Rockefeller Archive Center Research Report (2001),
1–8.
41
   Vision in Motion, pp. 19–20.

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unofficial education produces a media environment ‘of a thousand details, but
missing all fundamental relationships’. Vision in Motion sought to defend the
role of the techno-savvy humanities themselves in redressing the ideological
and biological impairments inflicted by corporate mass media and the seeming
saturation of market values over democratic values. The Light Workshop that
housed the film and media program at the Institute of Design was framed within
this broader regime of sensory and medial therapy, providing students with the
‘tools of integration’.
   Democratic rehabilitation and integration were also an urgent response to
the conditions of a nation at war, which demanded the same kind of flexible,
interdisciplinary, and intermedial creative capacities the School had always
taught, and total mobilization thus spawned a number of pragmatic design
projects for students. As they navigated wartime metal shortages, students
prototyped plywood springs; they designed parachute clothes and new kinds
of barbed wire, and experimented with shock-proof helmets and portable
runways for temporary airfields. During the war, the School’s curriculum was
also tweaked, and new courses were developed: an art-historical survey was
reframed as ‘The Social Usefulness of Art and its Relationship to a Nation
of War’; and the School offered a ‘Visual Propaganda in Wartime’ course in
collaboration with the Army, where graphic design abetted public education
about air-raid procedures and wartime information campaigns like the CCA’s
Paperboard Goes to War endeavor.42
   Much of this utilitarian, wartime work — including the plywood springs
— is featured in Design Workshops. Especially notable is the film’s interest in
documenting the School’s new ‘Principles of Camouflage’ courses, applying the
School’s formalist investments in the laws of vision and the manipulation of colour
and light.43 The courses were taught by Kepes under the auspices of the Office
of Civilian Defense.44 In his introductory lecture, Kepes described camouflage
as an ideal site of interdisciplinary activity and collaboration, requiring ‘the
combined knowledge of people with a great variety of training — architects,
engineers, painters, sculptors, graphic artists’.45 As Robin Schuldenfrei has
argued, camouflage entailed ‘an almost seamless merging of important, originary
Bauhaus ideals — the joining of the arts in work on a common goal’.46 Like
Moholy’s media pedagogy more broadly, the camouflage courses were integrative



42
   Robin Schuldenfrei, ‘Assimilating Unease: Moholy-Nagy and the Wartime/Post-war Bauhaus in
Chicago’, in Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture, ed. by Schuldenfrei
(London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 87–126.
43
   Course catalogue, ‘Principles of Camouflage Course’, Box 3, Folder 76, UICIDC.
44
   John R. Blakinger, ‘Camouflage 1942: Artists, Architects, and Designers at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia’, in
Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art, ed. by Miguel de Baca and Makeda Best (Newcastle
upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), pp. 35–56.
45
   Kepes, quoted in Schuldenfrei, p.106.
46
   Schuldenfrei, p. 109.

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                                           Justus Nieland


in both method and aim — a performative poetics of the group that now includes
Design Workshops.
   In Design Workshops, the camouflage course sequence follows the display
of a series of multi-coloured kinetic assemblages designed to produce mobile
compositions of light, shadow, and colour, and Papmac (1943), one of Moholy’s
own kinetic Plexiglas paintings, which took advantage of a manufacturing defect
in the bubbled material to fuse light and colour in a continuously changing
composition. The editing demonstrates the compatibility between the School’s
aesthetic investigations into colour and light manipulation and the kind of
functional illusion we see in our first glimpse of the camouflage courses, as a hand
holding a red crayon traces a pattern in translucent paper above a reconnaissance
photo to mask it from bombardment. Moholy’s editing, which returns us to images
of colour printmaking after observing the precise study of surface texture in the
context of the wartime courses, insists that the camouflage skills and techniques
featured in Design Workshops were part of a flexible colour practice and study
at the School, and thus readily convertible to peacetime design applications in
the domain of functional colour (whose experts, Blaszczyk reminds us, had often
served as camoufleurs) and its purportedly scientific targeting of consumer tastes
and moods.
   As the urgency of war gave way to the anticipation of the post-war needs of
consumers and industry, film production at the School didn’t always square
with the Foundation’s evolving funding criteria for ‘humanities’ training.
Writing to Paepcke in 1944, Stevens describes having ‘put off’ writing about
Paepcke’s request for a grant extension until having the chance to see Moholy’s
‘showing of his colour films here in New York City’ (likely Design Workshops
and Do Not Disturb).47 While he compliments ‘the intelligence of Moholy-
Nagy’s program as a means to general education’, he explains that ‘it is not
easy from this material […] to get an idea of what Moholy-Nagy accomplished
with those particular students’. With the colour films as evidence, Stevens
‘does not now see cause to propose a larger or renewed grant’ for developing
film production at the School, even as Moholy was writing Vision in Motion,
an elaborate justification of his humanities agenda and film’s role producing
a ‘new kind of specialist’ equipped with a socially integrated propensity for
‘seeing, feeling and thinking in relationship and not as a series of isolated
phenomena’.48
   At the dawn of the post-war, Rockefeller bureaucrats monitored Moholy’s
School less in defence of a humanities mission oriented toward wartime
‘communications’, but rather with an eye towards funding links between art
education and the needs of science, industry, and the post-war corporation. In
denying Paepcke’s request in May of 1945 for expanded photography operations
following the war, Stevens framed it within ‘a new field, for us, of art and

47
     ‘School of Design, Institute of Design, 1939–1944’, Box 61, Folder 1, WPP.
48
     Vision in Motion, pp. 21, 12.

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industry’.49 He noted that programs for teacher training, or occupational therapy
courses in photography for vets, would not be funded ‘under Humanities’. In
doing so, he grouped these with other proposals submitted to the Foundation
on ‘varied forms of hand craft’.50 And he hung the possibility of future funding
on the conclusions of a report then being drafted by his colleague, Robert N.
S. Whitelaw. The report, which aimed to evaluate present methods of teaching
handicrafts in the US as well as the position of the craftsman vis-à-vis the post-war
capitalist economy, offered a version of the humanities linked to a craft ethos that
preserves skills ‘that are economic factors or contributes to [national] growth’,
and dismisses as ‘therapeutic’ or ‘sentimental’ craft approaches (as in veteran
rehabilitation) as ways of ‘getting men out of step with our social structure’.51 In
this narrowly functional humanities vision, there is nothing of Vision in Motion’s
insistence on a dynamic sense of history, or the capacity of a humane intermedial
education to counter and critique a pervasive ‘social ethics based on economic
superiority rather than on the principles of justice’.52
    Whitelaw’s report acknowledged Moholy’s desire to use the Institute as
laboratory for the ‘humanities to be handled in it in a new way, so the intellectual
quality of one subject matter and can be felt and applied to another, and vice
versa’.53 But to Whitelaw’s eyes, Moholy is ‘too preoccupied with freedom of
expression and release from convention’, and the Institute’s pedagogy ‘too
theoretical’, and weakly tied to industry or engineering. After spending twenty
hours with Moholy and Paepcke at the Institute, he concludes ‘the major problem
is one of communication with the public, other schools, and with other discoveries
in science’. The solution to poor communication was more communication,
despite Moholy’s best efforts in the new colour-assisted administrative art of
media messaging and packaging. Whitelaw suggested that Paepcke convene a
Chicago-based forum on the subject of the ‘relation of art to industry’ in order
to clarify ‘what the Institute stands for’ and answer the pressing question: ‘Is it
training teachers, designers, or people concerned with, as Moholy would put
it, “the new education”?’54 By Whitelaw’s sights, the Institute’s pedagogy could
be understood as a skills-based, instrumental ‘training’ in various materials and
media, or a vanguard, humanistic education, but not both at once. In framing
the issue this way, Whitelaw missed the basic lesson of a handcrafted set of
colour films like Design Workshops, which sought — like many of Moholy’s
photographs and photograms of the 1920s — to surpass the distinction between
art and industry, or between specialization and holistic education, or between the
expressive brushwork of a painter’s hand and the mechanical, technical work of

49
   ‘School of Design, Institute of Design, 1945’, Box 61, Folder 2, WPP.
50
   Ivi.
51
    Robert N. S. Whitelaw, ‘Handicrafts: Teacher Training in Handicrafts for the Humanities’,
Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Box 232, Folder 2765.
52
   Vision in Motion, p. 14.
53
   Whitelaw.
54
   ‘School of Design, Institute of Design, 1945’, Box 61, Folder 2, WPP.

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                                 Justus Nieland


modern photomechanical media. A new humanities education, of the sort Design
Workshops allegorizes and promotes through various vanguard colour processes,
would be both attentive to specific materials and material processes and broadly
intermedial, indeed, interdisciplinary. Design Workshops’ basic communicative
task is to perform an increasingly imperilled theory of the humanities whose
brand of ‘integrated’ training refused the very distinctions the Foundation drew
as it anticipated the future of mid-century design education. In it, industrial
craftsmanship would operate firmly in lockstep with a booming post-war
economy that merged democracy, consumerism, and the ‘humane’ corporation
in ways that Moholy, perhaps thankfully, would never see.




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