Born: March 2, 1904, Považská Bystrica, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Slovakia)
Died: November 30, 1991 Bratislava, Slovakia
Matriculated: 1931
Locations: Slovakia, Germany, Czech Republic
“Every day gave me new creative impulses for my political and professional work.” Irena Blühová fondly remembered her three semesters at the Bauhaus, which started in spring 1931. One of Slovakia’s best-known photographers, Blühová studied in the typography and advertising workshop and dedicated part of her Bauhaus life to political activism as a member of the Communist Student Faction, or KoStuFra. Both her political and her artistic work were shaped by this Bauhaus experience, which she affectionately called “a school that created humans, for becoming human.”
“Art … is only art if it helps to change people, to move them forward.”
Irena Blühová
Born to a large Jewish family in Považská Bystrica, today in north-western Slovakia, Blühová was confronted with economic difficulties early on in life. Her father owned a grocery store but could no longer afford to pay for his daughter’s schooling after the First World War, so the fourteen-year-old began to work as a secretary and a bank clerk to pay her way through grammar school. In 1921, at the age of seventeen, Blühová joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ) to act against the poverty she had been witnessing since her childhood. While her home country, the first Czechoslovak Republic, was celebrated for its progressiveness, the rural area Blühová came from suffered underdevelopment and economic hardship, which she encountered first hand during mountaineering tours with the KSČ’s youth club. On these tours, Blühová began to photograph as a hobby. Soon, she not only captured her adventures, but also the people she met along the way: beggars, vagabonds, rural workers, the disabled. Blühová showed these outcasts in a realistic light with images, revealing the squalor of their living conditions. After standing as a candidate for the Communist Party in Považská Bystrica in 1929, the bank she worked for transferred her to the remote Kysuca Valley for “disciplinary reasons.” Even poorer than the area she came from, the region encouraged Blühová to develop her photographic skills: “Photography, which originally had been a hobby of mine, became my sharpest weapon against poverty, exploitation, injustice,” she later wrote. By the late 1920s, Blühová’s photographs were not only used by communist deputies to highlight social injustice in parliamentary debates, but also featured in progressive cultural magazines like DAV.
One of Blühová’s most radical images before she studied at the Bauhaus was a photograph taken in 1929 of her childhood friend—and later husband—the surrealist painter Imro Weiner-Král, nude on skis. Propped up on his ski-poles, Weiner-Král lifts himself up in the air in front of an idyllic snowy forest scene. The sunlight pronounces the contours of his muscular body, while his jumping position adds a humorous element to this image, which the couple effectively staged together. With this image, Blühová turns the conventional artist-model relationship on its head, creating the first nude photograph of a man shot by a woman in Slovakia.
Irena Blühová, Imro Weiner-Král on Skiers, 1929
Blühová’s photographic skills were self-taught, strengthened by an interest in modern art and culture. Growing up to speak Slovak, Hungarian, and German, Blühová had access to a broad range of literature. Together with Weiner-Král, she also spent her holidays traveling across Europe, establishing a network of friends to provide her with literature “to stay up-to-date,” and which formed her intention to study at the Bauhaus; Blühová closely researched the school after reading Ilya Ehrenburg’s article about his visit to the Bauhaus Dessau in the Frankfurter Zeitung in May, 1927. Discovering that a number of Bauhaus masters, including László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, had dedicated works to the International Workers’ Aid (IAH) in 1926, when the school’s then-director Hannes Meyer pledged to support the IAH in their campaign for striking British miners, Blühová was convinced that Dessau was her ideal place to study. For her, the Bauhaus maintained “an extraordinarily high level not only in the arts and pedagogy, but also in its humanism, its compassion and its solidarity.”
When Blühová arrived in Dessau for the spring of 1931, her formal education began with Joost Schmidt’s preliminary course, after which she became a member of the typography and advertising workshop, attending Schmidt’s typography course and Walter Peterhans’s photography classes. The workshop trained her in the use of typography for propaganda purposes and strengthened the technical abilities she had taught herself. With Peterhans, Blühová immersed herself in photographic composition, and produced works in which she explored the effects of lighting on different forms.
Blühová’s technical explorations were not contained in the classroom. The camera was her steady companion as she recorded various aspects of Bauhaus life. In Siesta, Blühová combined two negatives. In the first, two students sit at a table during lunch, while in the second, overlaid negative, another student is sleeping, creating a dream-like double image. Such a playful approach to photography strongly contrasts with Blühová’s documentary images of the 1920s, but she maintained a close focus on humans and the everyday. Blühová captured life as she saw it, staying true to her profession as a social photographer.
Irena Blühová, Bauhaus-Students’ Siesta, 1931–1932. The students pictured are: Zsó Markos-Ney, Ricarda Schwerin and Peggy Hess.
Blühová used the overlaying of negatives several times in her Bauhaus works, including some of her most personal images such as Experiments with Two Negatives at the Bauhaus. While its title emphasizes a technical process, these photographs allow a glimpse into the photographer’s private life with a combined double portrait of Weiner-Král and herself. Blühová took the image of Weiner-Král; her portrait was photographed by a fellow student, Hilde Hubbuch. The double vision of the final print both comments on Weiner-Král’s artistic practice as a painter through visual references to surrealism, and simultaneously reveals how Blühová deployed and re-used images in collaboration with other students. It demonstrates how the Bauhaus offered her a freedom to experiment in response to both her artistic and social concerns.
Irena Blühová, Experiments with Two Negatives at the Bauhaus, 1931–1932
Blühová’s models were not only Bauhaus students and teachers. Service Woman at the Bauhaus showed a young woman in a close-up portrait that, in its compositional form, resembles the images students took of each other. Yet Blühová renders the woman anonymous by stating only her profession in the title, and Blühová’s upward camera angle transforms her subject into an icon of manual labor. In Wagoner in Front of the Bauhaus, Blühová instead makes a body anonymous, by not showing the head. Along with the service woman, it confirmed that Blühová had by no means abandoned the proletarian subjects of her earlier years. Instead, she updated and incorporated them into her new environment, connecting manual labor and the modernist Bauhaus.
Irena Blühová, Service Woman at the Bauhaus, 1931
Irena Blühová, Wagoner in Front of the Bauhaus, 1931
Renting a room in the workers’ dorms of the local Junkers aircraft-engine factory, Blühová was in daily contact with both students and workers. As a member of the KoStuFra, Blühová went together with Junkers workers on marches and protests against the rising National Socialist Party. She even organized a trip to Berlin for the workers’ children, together with fellow KoStuFra members Judit Kárász and Ricarda Schwerin. Blühová’s engagement with the KoStuFra was manifold, and we know from her writings and interviews that the group played a significant role in her Bauhaus life, despite the fact that it had to operate illegally since Bauhaus director Mies van der Rohe had banned all political activity in 1930. Yet this did not deter the students; they participated in marches, organized events with the Junkers workers, distributed flyers, and continued to produce their own magazine bauhaus: megaphone of the communist students. Blühová also worked as a distributor of the popular communist illustrated Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ), a left-leaning alternative to glossy, bourgeois magazines.
When Blühová was suddenly called back to Czechoslovakia by the KSČ in 1932, prematurely breaking off her studies, her involvement with AIZ provided continuity. For several months, she worked for the Runge & Co. publishing company in Liberec, northern Bohemia, which printed AIZ, before opening her own bookstore in Bratislava. Though the store ran under Blühová’s name as Blüh kníhkupectvo, it in fact served as a branch of the Communist International, owned by Willi Münzenberg’s communist media conglomerate. The main purpose of the store, which printed communist propaganda material and hosted meetings for the party’s local and international intelligentsia, was to support communists in Austria, Hungary, and Germany, where the party had been made illegal. In 1934, Blühová also co-founded the agitprop theater group Dielňa-Werkstatt-Mühely (Workshop in Slovak, German and Hungarian), organized leftist documentary exhibitions in Bratislava, and showed her social documentary photographs as part of an anonymous collective, which signed works only with “Soziofoto.”
In Bratislava, Blühová again adjusted her photography to the local environment. She produced photographic series, including one focused on female labor in tobacco farming. She also continued to specifically address the hunger and poverty of the industrial working class through her photomontages, and to directly criticize the harmful effects of capitalism; these works were published anonymously as the covers of several magazines, including AIZ, from 1932 onwards.
In 1938, Blühová briefly took up her studies again, this time attending a film course with Karol Plicka at the School of Arts and Crafts in Bratislava, which has been dubbed the “Bratislava Bauhaus” for its similarities in approach. A year later, the school was closed with the start of the Second World War and Slovakia becoming a National Socialist client state. Blühová joined the underground resistance. In 1942 her cover was blown by a National Socialist spy, and she spent the remainder of the war in hiding, using the pseudonym Elena Fischerová. Many in her family, including her father, Móric, perished in the Holocaust.
With the establishment of the communist Czechoslovak People’s Republic in 1948, Blühová began to work as an educator, and she founded and led the Bratislava publishing house Pravda and the Slovak Educational Library. She also published several children’s books. Her political commitment to the Communist Party ended with great disillusionment, especially after she became a “person of interest” in the so-called normalization era of the 1970s. Yet her strong social commitment remained, and she continued to teach, and worked with disabled children.
Decades later, Blühová was reunited with the Bauhaus at the third and fourth International Bauhaus Colloquia in Weimar in 1983 and in 1986. Blühová’s writings from that time reveal that the Bauhaus continued to shape her work and thinking. In 1983 she wrote: “Art … is only art if it helps to change people, to move them forward. The Bauhaus, those who founded it, those who represented it, knew how to merge art and life—life and art. Within us, the Bauhaus lives forever!”