Born: Lucia Schulz, January 18, 1894, Prague-Karlin, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Czech Republic)
Died: May 17, 1989, Zollikon, Switzerland
Joined: 1923
Locations: Czech Republic, Germany, France, UK, Switzerland
Her strikingly precise black-and-white photographs have shaped our image of the Dessau Bauhaus buildings; they are shot head-on or at a forty-five-degree angle, so that the architectural lines and diagonals stand out in razor-sharp clarity. Her portraits of Bauhäusler exude this same concentration of expression, such as those of the weaver Otti Berger or Walter Gropius. Even today, the reception and documentation of the Bauhaus would be unimaginable without the photos of Lucia Moholy, who is considered one of the most important New Objectivity photographers of the early twentieth century. She was also a journalist, copy editor, and art critic. She had a talent for both linguistic and pictorial expression in conjunction with a highly developed historical consciousness and, at the same time, a decidedly modern concept of art. Between 1923 and 1928, she systematically photographed the buildings, works, and personalities of the Bauhaus. Furthermore, she played an essential role in László Moholy-Nagy’s photographic experiments and publications as well as in the fourteen Bauhaus books published between 1925 and 1930.
A politically active Jewish woman, Moholy fled to London in 1934. There she eked out a living as a freelance portrait photographer and author, and toward the end of the Second World War, she obtained British citizenship. Following this, she oversaw and documented archival projects for the newly founded United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), for which she filmed and photographed world heritage sites primarily in the Middle East. After immigrating to Switzerland in 1959, she increasingly focused her attention on communicating what can still be referred to today as the visionary spirit of the Bauhaus—particularly aspects other than historic preservation and the cult of the masters. As early as 1948, she described the essence of this spirit in her article “Der Bauhausgedanke” (“The Bauhaus Thought”): “Bauhaus is not ‘style,’ not a set formula, but expression derived from an understanding of material, function, form, color, etc. that, in time and over time, steadfastly continues evolving.”
Although Moholy remains present through her photographic work in numerous publications and exhibitions, her level of renown still does not reflect her actual importance. There are many reasons for this, the most significant of which Moholy herself explained: she never held an official, regularly paid position at the school and, instead, was first and foremost seen as the wife of master Moholy-Nagy, a reputation that carried over to her later position as an independent photographer. While her sense of avant-garde experimentation, specialized knowledge, critical intellect, editorial achievements, and brilliant photography were made use of, collegial recognition was never forthcoming from the Bauhaus masters.
The second major reason for her under-recognition is closely related to the first—the unpleasant story of her photographic negatives that were seemingly lost during the tumultuous emigration of Bauhaus masters. After the school’s closure under the Nazi regime, her friend Walter Gropius re-established the teachings and artistic profile of the Bauhaus, particularly in the United States of America. He was greatly aided by the fact that he had Moholy’s original negatives at hand. With these, many Bauhäusler were able to rebuild their careers, while the photographer herself had no access to her work for more than twelve years. Her ability to capitalize on her Bauhaus work was limited, and she missed the chance to establish a lasting name for herself as the school’s in-house photographer. Her pictures became even more valuable in exile, as the buildings and works at the school were either inaccessible or no longer existed. Artistically marginalized, she had to begin her career as a photographer again in London. Once she learned that the negatives’ location had been kept from her, she lamented in a 1956 letter: “Everyone—except me—has either directly or indirectly benefited from the use of my photographs.” Persistently and with the help of a lawyer, she finally won back a portion of her negatives and the rights to the images.
Even as a young woman, curiosity had led her to become a photographer. As her diary entries show, she was a very keen observer who wanted to perceive people, things, and ideas exactly as they were and understand them inside and out. As a proponent of New Objectivity, she directed the entirety of her creative abilities toward capturing whatever was in front of her—person or object—in a concentrated moment, in as precise a composition as possible, and as realistically as her camera could. Through black-and-white photography, she aimed to make pictures that documented the form, structure, and mentality of her subject and its light and dark sides. For her, spontaneous design ideas and artistic self-presentation were irrelevant. Moholy’s works embodied qualities that largely corresponded to her personality: sympathetic yet restrained, engaged yet distant, and a receptive form of creativity—qualities also found in good journalism. “For me it was about the thing itself; in it, I was involved to my core, and toward it, I was accordingly critical,” she wrote in the biographical fragment “Frau des 20. Jahrhunderts” (“Woman of the 20th Century”). Contemporaries characterized her as calm, earnest, and judicious and as keenly attuned to her surroundings. She faced human folly with subtle irony but was as tenacious as she was relentless in rooting out injustice. In response to what she had experienced first-hand with her own work, for instance, Moholy compiled an elaborate index of fallacies, which served as the foundation of her 1972 book Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy: Dokumentarische Ungereimtheiten (Moholy-Nagy, Marginal Notes, Documentary Contradictions).
Lucia Moholy, from Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy: Dokumentarische Ungereimtheiten (Moholy-Nagy, Marginal Notes, Documentary Contradictions), 1972
Moholy was born Lucia Schulz in 1894, in Prague, at the time still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Until confronted with National Socialism, her Jewish origins played no role in her life; her upper-middle-class parents’ home was focused on aesthetics and socialism, and her father offered pro-bono legal assistance to the poor. Growing up, she showed equal enthusiasm for the German Youth Movement as for communism and, under the pseudonym Ulrich Steffen, published expressionist poems. After taking her high-school exam (Abitur) in 1910, she studied English, philosophy, and education at the Imperial and Royal Women’s College, passing her state teaching examination in 1912. She then began sitting in on philosophy and art history classes at the University of Prague, and earned money working at her father’s law firm on the side. In 1915, she was editorial director at the Wiesbadener Zeitung newspaper and, in 1917, went to Leipzig and worked for, among others, Kurt Wolff and the Hyperion-Verlag publisher. She spent the summers of 1918 and 1919 with Adolf Danath (one of the leading communists in Bremen) at Heinrich Vogeler’s home—“Barkenhoff”—in Worpswede, Germany, and it was here that she took her first photographs. In 1920, she accepted a position at Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, a renowned publisher in Berlin, and fell in love with a poor young artist, László Moholy-Nagy. When the two were married in 1921, she became a Hungarian citizen. In the fall of 1922, they developed the photogram technique together and these works later became famous solely as her husband’s creations, as did the book they wrote together, Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film), which was published under his name in 1925.
When László was appointed a master at the Bauhaus in April 1923, Lucia followed reluctantly to Weimar; she would have preferred to stay in the city. While her husband took over Itten’s preliminary course (Vorkurs) and expanded the metal workshop, she began studying under the professional photographer Otto Eckner and, in 1924 and 1925, took courses in reproduction photography at the Leipzig Academy for Graphic and Book Arts. On completing the courses, she immediately devoted her photography skills and publishing experience to the service of the school. Initially she captured art objects with a wooden field camera and 7 x 9.5-in (18 x 24cm) glass plates, which were used in Bauhaus publications and swatch books, and she applied this to her photographs of people too. But after purchasing a Leica camera, she composed her portraits more freely and often developed her negatives with a retouching dye to create a darkening effect. At the Dessau Bauhaus, new standards were set in education and design, and more and more photographs were required for public relations work; Ise Gropius often wrote the texts, while Moholy provided the photographs. The prints were usually stamped with her name, marking them as Moholy’s and not “common property,” as Ise Gropius later claimed. Over time, Moholy found the industrial city of Dessau dull, and in 1928, she and her husband left the Bauhaus to return to Berlin. One year later, they divorced, and Moholy opened her own “photographic studio for portraits, architecture, advertising, [and] arts.” She also offered photography courses and worked with the Mauritius photo agency. In 1929, she participated in the Film und Foto exhibit from the Deutscher Werkbund in Stuttgart, and she succeeded the former Bauhaus member Umbo as photography instructor at Johannes Itten’s private art school in Berlin.
“For me it was about the thing itself; in it, I was involved to my core, and toward it, I was accordingly critical.”
Lucia Moholy
Lucia Moholy, Masters’ Houses, Dessau. Moholy-Nagy’s living room, 1927–1928. Interior design by Marcel Breuer
“It is not technology or tools that determine what art is, but man, if he has the gift to create art with them.”
Lucia Moholy
From 1929, Moholy was in a happy relationship living with the communist deputy to the Reichstag, Theodor Neubauer. When in 1933 Neubauer, by then in the anti-Nazi resistance, was arrested in their apartment and taken to a concentration camp, Moholy fled to Prague. She left her valuable glass negatives behind in the care of Moholy-Nagy, who then gave them to Walter and Ise Gropius for safekeeping. After her attempt to help Neubauer using press contacts in Paris failed, in March 1934, she settled in London. In addition to some photography work, she also gave lectures about the Bauhaus at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and taught photography at the London School of Painting and Graphic Art. In 1939, Penguin Books published A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939. Despite a positive response, the book was not reissued after the war and was only recently published in German. In 1940, she started documenting holdings of the University of Cambridge’s library on microfilm, and in 1942, oversaw the microfilm project of the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureau. Her circumstances, however, became increasingly bleak, and the Quaker community helped her in her time of dire need. Moholy-Nagy, who had been serving as director of the school of design he had founded in Chicago in 1937, tried to help her gain entry into the USA, as she longed to do, with an invitation to teach photography, but she was not granted a visa. In 1942, her home in London was destroyed in an air raid. During the 1950s, after the first unauthorized prints of her works had appeared in the USA (even before the end of the war) she entered into an intense dispute with Walter and Ise Gropius over her negatives. One day, in 1957, she found a box containing negatives from the Busch-Reisinger Museum sitting on her doorstep in London—an offer of amends from Gropius. Of her original 560 glass negatives, 230 are now included in her estate in the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin. Recently, her photographic portraits, hand studies, and cityscapes taken in exile in London were made available to the public for the first time, while the photographs she took in addition to her documentary work for UNESCO await rediscovery. Finally, it is worth quoting her artistic principle, which she stated in a radio broadcast in 1958: “It is not technology or tools that determine what art is, but man, if he has the gift to create art with them.”
Lucia Moholy, portrait of a child (Thomas Lüttke), c. 1930
Lucia Moholy, Health Centre, Peckham, London, 1933–1935