In 1969, when the Bauhaus-trained Hungarian émigré László Moholy-Nagy received his first career retrospective, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) was one of several West Coast stops for a show that many critics considered the most prescient of that tumultuous year. Moholy-Nagy pointed the way toward several of the dominant themes emerging in the art of the 1970s, and he appears to have left a particularly sharp impression on the hardedge abstractionists and finish fetish artists of Southern California. For Karl Benjamin, Frederick Hammersley, and John McLaughlin, among many others, Moholy’s take on constructivism became a landmark for the lineup.
