Lucia Moholy | |
|---|---|
 Self-portrait (1930) | |
| Born | Lucia Schulz (1894-01-18)18 January 1894 Prague, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | 17 May 1989(1989-05-17) (aged 95) Zürich, Switzerland |
| Known for | Photography |
| Movement | Bauhaus |
| Spouse | |
Lucia Moholy (néeSchulz; 18 January 1894 — 17 May 1989) was a photographer and publications editor. Her photos documented the architecture and products of theBauhaus, and introduced their ideas to a post-World War II audience. However, Moholy was seldom credited for her work, which was often attributed to her husbandLászló Moholy-Nagy or toWalter Gropius.[1][2]
Schulz grew up in a nonpracticing Jewish family in a "German-speaking enclave" ofPrague,[2] where her father had his law practice, in theAustrian part ofAustria-Hungary.[2] Her own diaries from that period, include a drawing from 10 May 1907 of gifts her father brought back to her, her brother Franz, mother and grandmother from his trips.[2] Through these diaries written in her teen years, we know she corresponded with pen pals in the United States in English, and readThomas Mann andLeo Tolstoy.[2] As tensions rose in 1914 and the events that led toWorld War I, then twenty-year old Schulz, who may have been working in her father's law offices at the time, made donations "for the families of the Austrian war".[2]
After qualifying as a German and English teacher in 1912, Schulz studied philosophy,philology, and art history at theUniversity of Prague.[3]
In the early years of World War I, Schulz began to work inWiesbaden, Germany, as theater critic for a local newspaper.[2] Shortly after, Schulz moved toLeipzig. In Berlin, she worked for publishing houses, such as Hyperion, Kurt Wolff, among others, where she was an editor and copy editor.[3]
In 1919 she published radical,Expressionist literature under the pseudonym "Ulrich Steffen".[3][4]
In Berlin in April 1920, Schulz metLászló Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), a recent émigré fromHungary.[2] They were married on 21 January 1921, her 27th birthday.[2] Following her marriage to Moholy-Nagy in 1921, Moholy, who worked with publishing houses, provided the only salary for the couple.[2] During the years the couple lived inDessau, Germany, on theBauhaus school campus, Moholy's diaries describe her sense of discontent in Dessau, her feelings of estrangement and her longing for the city. She described how groups of twenty arrived for short periods, partied and left. Moholy-Nagy was not sympathetic to her feelings.[2] They separated in 1929, a year after they left Dessau, though their divorce would not be finalized until 1934.[2]
In 1933, theNazi Party rose to power. Moholy was in a relationship with a communist Member of Parliament,Theodor Neubauer, who was arrested in her apartment one day while she was out.[5][6] She abruptly left Berlin, leaving all of her belongings including the bulkyglass negatives of her Bauhaus photographs, which ended up in the hands ofWalter Gropius.[7][2] After having lived in Germany for two decades, she was forced to flee to Prague where she stayed with her family. She then went to Switzerland, Austria, Paris, before settling in London in June 1934.[4][8]
After World War II ended, Moholy started a campaign to emigrate to the United States. Documentation for the application included a letter from her brother, Franz, who had a successful career, a good income and had offered to support her.[9] Moholy-Nagy provided her with an offer of a position as photography professor in Chicago.[2] Her application for a "nonquota visa as a professor" was denied in 1940, on the "grounds that she lacked experience teaching".[2]
In 1923,Walter Gropius, who had founded theBauhaus school in 1919 inWeimar, Germany, hired Moholy-Nagy as a teacher.[2] In 1926, she and her husband moved into one of the Bauhaus staff residences calledMeisterhäuser—Masters' Houses—on the school's new campus inDessau, Germany.[2]
During those five years, Moholy documented the interior and exterior of Bauhaus architecture and its facilities in Weimar andDessau,[10][11] as well as the students and teachers. Her aesthetic was part of theNeue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, which focused on documentation from a straightforward perspective. Moholy's Bauhaus photographs helped construct the identity of the school and create its image.[4][3] She was a skilled photographer through her studies at the Leipzig Academy for Graphic and Book Arts (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig)[4] At Bauhaus, she also apprenticed inOtto Eckner’s photography studio.
Moholy and Moholy-Nagy experimented with different processes in the darkroom, such as makingphotograms.[2][12][13][14]
In 1925, the bookMalerei, Photografie, Film (1925;Painting, Photography, Film) was published only under Moholy-Nagy's name, even though she had contributed to all of the experimentation. This lack of recognition was evident in numerous publications.[4]
In 1938, while Moholy lived in London, Walter Gropius used about fifty of Moholy’s images from the Bauhaus years—from her negatives that he still had in his possession—in theMuseum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition and the accompanying catalogue, without giving her any credit.[2][15][16]
Lucia Moholy struggled to receive recognition for her work. Her images were widely used for marketing and in the Bauhaus school’s sales catalogs, as well as Bauhaus-published books that she edited.[17][15] An interest in the Bauhaus started to grow in the late 1930s, and she saw numerous catalogs of theBauhaus printed with her lost images.[18] Gropius had been using her photographs without crediting her.[7] She repeatedly reached out to Gropius to reclaim her images and he would continuously protest. Moholy resorted to hiring a lawyer to retrieve her work.[2][15][19]
Some relevant letters between Walter Gropius and Lucia Moholy are displayed on the website99% Invisible.[15] Moholy stated, "These negatives are irreplaceable documents which could be extremely useful, now more than ever" to which Gropius replied, "[...]long years ago in Berlin, you gave all these negatives to me. You will imagine that these photographs are extremely useful to me and that I have continuously made use of them; so I hope you will not deprive me of them." Lucia Moholy responded, "Surely you did not expect me to delay my departure in order to draw up a formal contract stipulating date and conditions of return? No formal agreement could have carried more weight than our friendship. It is a friendship I have always relied on, and which, also, I am now invoking."[20][15]
Moholy did not get physical possession of her original material until 1957, but even then she only could recover a portion of them, 230 out of the 560 Bauhaus-era negatives she took, while 330 negatives, according to Moholy’s own card catalogue, are still missing.[21] Her 1972 publication,Moholy-Nagy Notes, was an attempt to reclaim credit for her work that was printed without permission.[12] After her death, the collection of negatives was donated to theBauhaus Archive in Berlin.[22][21]
Lucia Moholy arrived in London in June 1934 and established her home and studio at 39 Mecklenburgh Square. There she befriended members of the wider "Bloomsbury Set", who supported her work by commissioning portraits and inviting her to give lectures.[8] Among her portrait subjects from this period were scientists such asPatrick Blackett andMichael Polanyi, prominent Quakers such asRuth Fry and Hilda Schuster (grandmother ofStephen Spender), and writers such asMargaret Leland Goldsmith,Inez Pearn/ Spender andErnest Rhys.[23] She also wrote a book in English,A Hundred Years of Photography, 1839-1939,[24] which was published in 1939 byPenguin Books, under their Pelican Special imprint. The book sold 40,000 copies, but no further editions were published due to paper shortages.[25]
During WWII, Moholy became involved in working inmicrofilm, through connections withEugene Power ofUniversity Microfilms International who organized the microfilming of documents for the US office of the Coordinator of Information.[26] She was appointed director of theASLIB Microfilm Service (AMS), at theScience Museum, London, as part of theAssociation of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux (ASLIB).[27] The service moved to theVictoria and Albert Museum in April 1943, where it remained for the next three years, sponsored by the British and US governments and theRockefeller Foundation.[27][28] Much of the team's work was highly secretive, and involved the copying of scientific and technical publications and papers usingKodak'sRecordak Microfile cameras.[6]
Photographs attributed to Lucia Moholy are held in theConway Library atThe Courtauld Institute of Art whose archive, of primarily architectural images, is being digitised under the wider Courtauld Connects project.[29] Many of the portraits she made while in Britain are held at theNational Portrait Gallery in London,[23] and in theBauhaus Archive, Berlin.
From 1946 to 1957, immediately after World War II, she traveled to the Near and Middle East where she did microfilm projects forUNESCO, and directed documentary films.[3]
In 1959, she moved toZollikon, Switzerland, where she wrote about her time at the Bauhaus, and focused onart criticism.[4]
In 1925, Lucia Moholy was included in the landmark exhibition inStuttgart,Film and Foto. It featured artists working in the New Vision aesthetic (Precisionism) and New Objectivity or Neue Sachlichkeit photographers such as Moholy.[25][4]
Her studies of the novelistInez Pearn are held at the National Portrait Gallery, one of which formed part of theBauhaus In Britain exhibition at the Tate Britain (2019).[30]
In her book,A Hundred Years of Photography, 1839-1939, she discussed in depth the history of the medium.[1] The more well-known photography historianHelmut Gernsheim, credited his interest in the history of photography to Moholy's book.[31] The book was reviewed byBeaumont Newhall in 1941, who complained that it did not give enough account of stylistic changes in photography: Newhall wanted to give photography its own history, distinct from the wider histories of art and technology, but Moholy situated photography within these larger contexts, emphasising the mutual dependence of different media and practices.[25]
In her 1972 publication, entitledMoholy-Nagy Notes ,[12] she included the shared collaboration between herself andLászló Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus, in an attempt to reclaim artistic credit for her photographs and experimentation.[4]
Anja Guttenberger:Podcast about life and work of Lucia Moholy with Robin Schuldenfrei,bauhaus faces, host: Dr. Anja Guttenberger, published on 23 Sep, 2024
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)| International | |
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