Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s close friends called him Schnellaufer, or “fast runner” – a nickname that aptly conveyed this avant-garde master’s race for innovation.

Born Jewish but converted to Calvinism, Laszlo Weisz took on an alias derived from the last name of his maternal uncle suffixed to the locational of his native town in southern Hungary, Mohol. A one-time law student and poet, he began to paint while recuperating from a wound suffered during his service in the Austro-Hungarian artillery in World War I. From painting, he eventually moved on to photography, sculpture, graphics, stage design, commercial and industrial design, film – in a word, as he himself put it, “everything.”

“Technical Detours: The Early Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered,” now on view at the art gallery of the Graduate Center at CUNY, illuminates a little-known aspect of this phenomenal career. Focusing on his pre-Bauhaus (pre-1923) period, the exhibition peers into the conceptual and stylistic crisis that inaugurated Moholy-Nagy’s major pedagogical-aesthetic program known as New Vision.

Among the 200-odd items on view are wartime sketches on postcards, early poems, period books, manifestos, and the digital model of his stunning Dynamic-Constructive Energy System. In addition, there are works by his friends, collaborators, and fellow artists, among them Bela Uitz, Lajos Kassak, Kurt Schwitters, and Oskar Kokoschka.

The result is something of a muffled detonation. Contrary to Moholy-Nagy’s assessment of his early work as “detours,” what we witness is a bold, lyrical, and fully autonomous oeuvre that has been, it appears, fiercely suppressed by his later Constructivist persona.

Nothing illuminates this drama better than the show’s centerpiece: a previously unknown painting, buried under layers of whitewash on the verso of Moholy-Nagy’s Constructivist canvas “Architektur I.” First noticed by the exhibition’s curator, Oliver Botar, in 1996, and since cleared of paint (applied most likely by Moholy-Nagy himself), it is a striking example of the master’s early, half-representational painting – a hybrid of his ackerfelder (“farm field”) and mechano-Dada series. Together with “Architektur I” it forms, in Mr. Botar’s words, a “Janus-faced object, looking backwards to Moholy-Nagy’s unsettled early years.”

“Eisenbahnbild mit Ackerfelder und 3,” as Mr. Botar calls it, stands in striking contrast to its abstract counterpart. It features subtle chromatic modulations in the bands of color that denote farm fields, and thinner strips that resemble bridge-and-wheel or power pole-like structures: Here is a modern collision of innocence and experience that might have just tapped into something primal. Few other Moholy-Nagy works have fused so potently the agricultural and the industrial, the spiritual and the mechanical, the textural and the geometrical.

The piece also implies that Moholy-Nagy’s passionate quest for reinvention was a way of running from himself. An innately sensuous painter (“I loved the qualities of a texture,” he wrote), he also distrusted this sensuality and sought to forsake it for the presumed purity of “elementarist” abstraction. He rationalized this essentially ascetic gesture as an aesthetic sacrifice, yet – as his multiple whitewashing of “Eisenbahnbild” suggests – he may have feared that the thwarted Muse was, after all, trying to come back.

Until April 22 (365 Fifth Avenue, 212-817-7394).