Nathan Lerner Furniture

Nathan Lerner, whose parents were Ukrainian emigrants, was born in Chicago in 1913. At the age of nine, he attended painting courses at the Art Institute of Chicago, and at 16, he started to use the camera to aid and “perfect his sense of composition.” When Lerner was 18, he left to study with Samuel Ostrovsky, a Russian-French, post-Impressionist painter, who was interested in expressing light. In 1935, Lerner began a photo documentary project that developed into his well-known series, Maxwell Street. Much of Lerner’s work at this time was as a “witness of life during the Great Depression in the poorest immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago." In 1937, Archipenko, the well-known sculptor, recommended the New Bauhaus school to Lerner. Archipenko had moved to Chicago to teach at the New Bauhaus, which was under the direction of Moholy-Nagy. Awarded a scholarship by Moholy, Lerner enrolled and found himself strongly influenced by the spirit that permeated the school. He developed ingenious artistic experiments: luminous projections with reflection, cliche-verre, photographing through viscous substances, solarizations, and light drawings with the pen. Most importantly, Lerner invented the light-box, which allowed photographers to create abstract studies of objects and light. The light-box is mentioned by Moholy-Nagy in The New Vision (1939) and reproduced by Gropius in his Bauhaus 1914–28 catalog for the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1938). In 1939, Lerner became the assistant of Gyorgy Kepes, who was head of the light workshop and co-authored with him The Creative Use of Light (1941). In 1942, Lerner became the director of the light workshop. In 1942, Lerner worked with Charles Niedringhaus developing a machine for forming plywood into furniture.