CAMBRIDGE, MA.- The Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University Art Museums will present Light Display Machines: Two Works by László Moholy-Nagy on view July 21 through November 4, 2007. This exhibition showcases the Busch-Reisinger Museum's newly acquired replica of László Moholy-Nagy's seminal kinetic sculpture, Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1930). Commonly known as the Light-Space Modulator, the original work has been in the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s collection since 1956, and is currently on view in its galleries. Extensive changes in the original Light Prop’s materials over the decades and continuing problems with its mechanical engineering mean that the original can no longer give an adequate impression of some of the artist's intentions. The full-sized and fully functioning 2006 replica has been installed in a darkened gallery with spotlighting that creates a dramatic play of shadows, translucencies, transparencies, and reflections generated by the rotating machine's multiple surfaces. Moholy-Nagy’s short experimental film Light Play: Black White Gray (1930) is also showing in the gallery. The artist used the Light Prop as the sole subject of this film’s carefully choreographed sequence of close-ups, double exposures, and special effects.

László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) was one of the great pioneers of abstract and experimental art of the last century. He worked primarily in painting, photography, and graphic design. Born in Hungary, he was an enormously influential teacher at the Bauhaus in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Forced to leave Germany by the Nazis, he worked briefly in the Netherlands and in London, before settling in Chicago, where he founded the New Bauhaus, and subsequently, the Institute of Design. Organized by Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum.