The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (318 page)

mobile
.

Term coined by Marcel
Duchamp
in 1932 to describe the motor- or hand-powered
Kinetic sculptures
of Alexander
Calder
and soon extended to those he produced where the movement is caused by a combination of air currents and their own structural tension. Typically they consisted of flat metal parts suspended on wires. Many other sculptors (notably Lynn
Chadwick
) have experimented with the genre, and mobiles have been adopted as articles of interior decoration and (on a miniature scale) as playthings for babies.

 
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modello
.

A preparatory drawing or painting for a larger work, usually made to be shown to a patron. Since the object was to impress the patron and give him a clear idea of the picture which the artist had in mind, the
modello
was more elaborate and fully worked out than the sketch.
Rubens's
work is particularly rich in
modelli
.

 
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(1876–1907).
German painter and graphic artist, born Paula Becker. In 1898 she joined the artists' colony at
Worpswede
and in 1901 she married
Otto Modersohn
(1865–1943), another member of the group. She shared in a high degree the poetic sensibility for nature which was cultivated by the Worpswede School and she was a friend of the poet Rilke. But she was dissatisfied with the sentimentalized idealization of the Worpswede manner, and made it her object to express by means of the utmost simplicity and economy of form ‘the unconscious feeling that often murmurs so softly and sweetly within me’. She visited Paris in 1900 and on three subsequent visits before her early death in 1907, and in the last years of her life, under the influence of
Gauguin
, van
Gogh
, and
Cézanne
, she found the ‘great simplicity of form’ for which she had been searching. Up to about 1900 she painted landscapes and scenes of peasant life; thereafter she concentrated on single figures, including self-portraits and portraits of peasants, and also still lifes. In her self-portraits she typically shows herself with wide, staring eyes and often in the nude. Although she had a weak physical constitution, she worked with great discipline and perseverance, producing about 650 pictures in a career that lasted only 10 years. She died soon after giving birth to her first child. At this time she was little known, but she has since become recognized as one of the most important precursors of German
Expressionism
because of her symbolic use of colour and pattern, her highly subjective vision, and the almost primitive force of some of her work.

 
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(1884–1920).
Italian painter, sculptor, and draughtsman, active mainly in Paris. Although virtually his whole career was spent in France, he laid the foundations of his style in Italy with his study of the masters of the
Renaissance
. In particular he is often seen as a spiritual heir of
Botticelli
because of the linear grace of his work. He moved to Paris in 1906; apart from visits to his family in Italy and a year spent at Nice and Cagnes, 1918–19, this was his home for the rest of his life, and he became a familiar figure in the café and night life of Montmartre. In about 1909 he met
Brancusi
and devoted himself mainly to stonecarving until 1914, when the war made it impossible for him to get materials. He returned to painting and his finest works were produced in the last five years of his short life. Both as a sculptor and as a painter his range was limited. With few exceptions his sculptures are heads or crouching caryatid figures and the paintings are portraits or female nudes. Common to virtually all his work are extremely elongated, simplified forms and a superb sense of rhythmic vitality, but there is a great difference in mood between, for example, his sculpted heads (
Head
, Tate, London,
c.
1911–12), which have the primitive power of the African masks that inspired them, and his gloriously sensual nudes (
Reclining Nude
, MOMA, New York,
c.
1919), which were censured for their open eroticism. Modigliani's early death from tuberculosis was hastened by his notoriously dissolute lifestyle, and his mistress Jeanne Hébuterne, pregnant with their second child, committed suicide the day after he died. He had exhibited little during his lifetime; his posthumous fame was established by an exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, in 1922 and a biography by the poet André Salmon in 1926—
Modigliani, sa vie et son œuvre
. His reputation as one of the outstandingly original artists of his time is now secure, but his fame rests even more on his reputation as the bohemian
par excellence
: in the popular imagination he is the archetypal romantic genius, starving in a garret, the victim of drugs and alcohol, an inveterate womanizer, but painting and carving obsessively.

 
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(1895–1946).
Hungarian born painter, sculptor, experimental artist, and writer who became an American citizen in 1944. After qualifying in law at Budapest University and serving in the First World War, he moved to Vienna in 1919 and then in 1921 to Berlin, where he painted abstract pictures influenced by
Lissitzky
(himself newly arrived from Russia). He also experimented with
collage
and
photomontage
and in 1922 had his first one-man exhibition, at the
Sturm
Gallery. From 1923 to 1928 he taught at the
Bauhaus
, taking over from
Itten
the running of the preliminary course. The difference in approach between these two highly distinctive characters is summed up by Frank Whitford (
Bauhaus
, 1984): ‘Even Moholy's appearance proclaimed his artistic sympathies. Itten had worn something like a monk's habit and had kept his head immaculately shaved with the intention of creating an aura of spirituality and communion with the transcendental. Moholy sported the kind of overall worn by workers in modern industy. His nickel-rimned spectacles contributed further to an image of sobriety and calculation belonging to a man mistrustful of the emotions, more at home among machines than human beings.’ Following an argument with Hannes Meyer ,
Gropius's
successor as Director, Moholy-Nagy resigned from the Bauhaus in 1928. He worked for some years in Berlin, chiefly on stage design and experimental film, then moved to Amsterdam and in 1935 to London, where he was a member of the
Constructivist
group represented by the publication
Circle
. In London he also began the constructions which he named ‘Space Modulators’ and worked on designs for the film
Things to Come
(1936), produced by his fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda. In 1937 he emigrated to Chicago, where he became Director of the short-lived New Bauhaus (1937–8), then founded his own School of Design (1939; it changed its name to Institute of Design in 1944), directing it until his death. Moholy-Nagy was one of the most inventive and versatile artists in the Constructivist school, pioneering especially in the artistic uses of light, movement (see
KINETIC ART
), photography, film, and plastic materials, and he was one of the most influential teachers of the 20th cent. He also was an emphatic advocate of the Constructivist doctrine that so-called
fine art
must be integrated with the total environment. His views were most fully expressed in his post-humously published book
Vision in Motion
(1947).