About

M. Halberstadt was a recipient of one of the first Rockefeller Foundation scholarships given by the School of Design in the Fall of 1940. Already an accomplished photographer and photo-technician from Boston, he became a teaching assistant to both László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes. In addition, M. Halberstadt photographed Moholy’s plexiglass sculptures and printed many of Moholy’s Berlin camera images including a limited edition in 1941 of Moholy’s famous Radio Tower, Berlin, 1928 image for New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Halberstadt’s own photographic investigations at the school resulted in his innovative camera images that included multiple exposures, negative reversal prints, and an engaging use of solarization.

In 2019 the Robert Koch Gallery staged the exhibition New Bauhaus in America, with an accompanying 68 page monograph of the same title, which served to commemorated the 100 year anniversary of the founding of the original Bauhaus School in Germany. The exhibition was likely one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of György Kepes’s work in decades, with 48 works, plus two collaborations with M. Halberstadt. Also included in the exhibition were work from others in the New Bauhaus milieu, including mixed media works by László Moholy-Nagy (gouache and ink on paper, serigraph on paper, and vintage photogram), along with photograms by Arthur Siegel, solarized photographs by M. Halberstadt, along with experimental light and color abstractions by Henry Holmes Smith.