Lucia Moholy

Lucia Moholy (born January 18, 1894, Prague, Bohemia (now in Czech Republic)—died May 17, 1989, Zürich, Switzerland) was a Bohemian-born British photographer, teacher, and writer best known for her documentary photographs of the Bauhaus, the noted German school of design, architecture, and applied arts.

Moholy pursued some schooling at the University of Prague in the early 1910s, but in 1915 she turned her attention to publishing and worked as a copy editor and as an editor for a number of publishing houses in Germany. For a brief period about 1919 she also published writings with a radical, anarchist bent under the pseudonym Ulrich Steffen. In 1920 she met László Moholy-Nagy at the Ernst Rowohlt publishing house in Berlin, and she married him in 1921. When Moholy-Nagy became a teacher in 1923 at the Weimar Bauhaus—architect Walter Gropius’s school of design (founded 1919)—Moholy joined him in Weimar and became an apprentice in Otto Eckner’s Bauhaus photography studio. From 1925 to 1926, she also studied at the Leipzig Academy for Graphic and Book Arts (now the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig), becoming skilled in photography and darkroom processes. (A formal course in photography had not yet been established at the Bauhaus at that time.) She set up her first darkroom in 1926 in the house she shared with Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus.

Moholy spent her five years at the Bauhaus documenting the interior and exterior spaces of its facilities and the activities of its community, as well as the creative output of its teachers and students. Her photographic aesthetic was that of the Neue Sachlichkeit (German: “New Objectivity”), which called for precise documentation from a straightforward perspective. At the same time, she collaborated with Moholy-Nagy in the darkroom, experimenting with image-making processes such as the photogram, an image created on photo-sensitive paper without a camera but by exposure to light. In contemporary publications that documented their experimentation, all credit was given to Moholy-Nagy, such as in the book Malerei, Photografie, Film (1925; Painting, Photography, Film), which was cowritten by the couple but published solely under Moholy-Nagy’s name. That lack of recognition became Moholy’s lifelong struggle.

In 1928 they both left the Bauhaus for Berlin, and the couple separated in 1929 (divorced 1934). That year Moholy was included in the landmark “Film und Foto” exhibition in Stuttgart, which featured an international roster of photographers working in the New Objectivity aesthetic (also called “New Vision” or “Precisionism”). From 1929 to 1933 she taught photography in Berlin at a private art school directed by Swiss artist and former Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten. Thereafter she settled in London (1934), where she set up a commercial portraiture studio.

Moholy’s years of practicing photography had taught her valuable methods of photomechanical reproduction, which, during World War II, she used in her position with Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux to run a microfilm operation (the photographic copying of documents at a reduced scale for compact storage) at the London Science Museum Library. She also participated (c. 1946–57) in archival projects with UNESCO, where she employed several advanced reprography methods (photographic reproduction processes of graphic material). In the late 1930s she wrote a history of photography, A Hundred Years of Photography (1939), the first of its kind in English. Her contributions to the field of photography were recognized officially in 1948 when she was made a member of the Britain’s Royal Photographic Society. In 1959 she retired and moved to Switzerland, where she spent the rest of her life writing art criticism as well as a book on her work at the Bauhaus.

Moholy’s photographs of the Bauhaus from the 1920s served a critical function in constructing the identity of the school and its community and in establishing its reputation. The images were used in Bauhaus books, which she also edited, and they were used in the marketing materials and in the school’s sales catalogue. When she left Germany in 1933, she left her glass negatives with Gropius for safekeeping. He proceeded to use the images without crediting her, as in, for example, a 1938 exhibition on the Bauhaus organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Gropius provided nearly 50 of Moholy’s photographs to the museum, which used them either in the exhibition itself or in the accompanying catalogue, completely without credit. Though Moholy tried repeatedly to retrieve her original materials, she did not succeed in getting her hands on any of them until the 1960s, and even then only a limited number were returned. At that point she attempted retroactively, with some success, to lay claim to images that had been printed and used without her permission. That circumstance was a major impulse behind her publication of Moholy-Nagy Marginal Notes (1972), in which she tried to set the record straight about her collaboration in the groundbreaking photographic experimentation at the Bauhaus that had hitherto been credited to Moholy-Nagy alone.

Like many of the women involved in the male-dominated Bauhaus community, Moholy was largely left out of the school’s histories, though many of those were illustrated by her photographs. Her name has since been resuscitated and her role reexamined as central in shaping the Bauhaus image.

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