Prague’s Museum of Modern Art is dedicated to a major retrospective of Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy. But why are we only now discovering her important work?
Her contemporary portrait (Gisela Schulz): Lucia Moholy, ca. Photo: Bauhaus Archive, Berlin
She was born near Prague in 1894, grew up in Prague, and died here in 1915. She was Luci Schulz, known as Lucia Moholy. She took her surname from her husband, László Moholy-Nagy, whom she married in Berlin in 1921 and separated eight years later.
With him she came to the Bauhaus, first in Weimar and then, from the end of 1926, in Dessau. However, while he was appointed one of the “masters”, she remained in the environment only as a photographic assistant and publisher of Bauhaus books.
“Lucia Moholy: Exposure”: Prague Museum, until October 28; catalogue (Hatje Cantz), €48
This contempt is the real theme of the large-scale exhibition dedicated to Lucia Moholy of Prague by the Prague Museum, a woman whose life’s work and all stages of her life were extended, and whose multiple interruptions in both prevented her from taking her proper place in 20th-century cultural history.
Produced in collaboration with the Swiss Foto Foundation in Winterthur, this exhibition and accompanying book, which will travel there, clearly demonstrates the material that is up for reevaluation.
Not working at Bauhaus
On the one hand, this is related to the history of the Bauhaus: the photographs that made the Dessau building, designed by Walter Gropius, world-famous were probably even more famous than the concept of a single school, and they came mainly from the hands of Lucia Moholy, who had been an apprentice to a photographer in Weimar in 1923 and an apprentice in Leipzig in 1925. She was a photographer in the technique of photography.
The only thing she failed to find was a job at the Bauhaus itself, and later in the United States, where her ex-husband ran the New Bauhaus in Chicago, where she had tried and failed to emigrate.
She moved to London in 1934 and worked as an ‘art photographer’. She later devoted herself to microfilm documentation techniques and took on increasingly more administrative tasks, eventually being called up as an expert by UNESCO. She worked repeatedly as a photographer, especially in countries such as Turkey.
She later lived in Switzerland, where she died in 1989. All of this is now presented for the first time in a biographical and documentary form at the Prague Museum. This eventful life is constantly taking leaps and turns, and it is not always easy for the visitor to follow it.
The fight with Gropius
The Bauhaus period does not play a major role here, although you can see some of the well-known photographs as well as a small number of 600 glass negatives. Because of her, Lucia Moholy had to fight a humiliating dispute with Gropius that lasted for years. Gropius took her with him when he moved to the United States and together they carried out successful Bauhaus propaganda.
This story is now well known. In the fall of 2022, at the Bröhan Museum in Berlin, <루치아 모홀리>The exhibition was opened. It focused on the construction of modernity through Lucia’s photographs. <모더니즘의 이미지>There is already a Bauhaus archive in Berlin from 1995. <루치아 모홀리>It houses the collection of “Bauhaus Photographers”.
The catalogue lists 296 photographs, all taken between 1923 and 1930. So you can read how Lucia Moholy’s life’s work should be evaluated over the course of 30 years, and the reputation of the current Prague exhibition for its discovery is based more on ignorance of what has already been achieved.
Such oblivion accompanies the life and acceptance of Lucia Moholy. Unlike Gropius, Breuer and all the other “masters” of the Bauhaus, there were no real achievements associated with their names. And the photographs of the buildings were recorded only for the architects, as Gropius had already done for his own self-aggrandizement.
This makes this exhibition all the more important. The history of the Bauhaus cannot be written without Lucia Moholy, but her entire life after this event is an example of the fragmented 20th century.
