Lucia Moholy – Exposures
Youth in Prague
Lucia Moholy was born Lucia Schulz on the 18th of January 1894 and grew up in a Czech-German-Jewish household in Prague. Her family was well off, which enabled the three children to have a higher level of schooling. Lucia took piano and French lessons. After training as an English teacher, she worked in her father’s law firm, and attended lectures in art history and philosophy at Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague. The diaries from her youth contain notes on visits to exhibitions and plays, dance cards, invitations to wedding parties, drawn still lifes, quotations from Thomas Mann, Leo Tolstoy and Auguste Rodin, and a musical score for a Beethoven sonata, reflecting her diverse intellectual and artistic interests. Keeping diaries was a practice that Lucia Moholy continued throughout her life.
Acquaintance with László Moholy-Nagy
In 1915, Lucie Schulz left her hometown of Prague to work for the Wiesbadener Zeitung and for various publishing houses, including Rowohlt. She became involved in German reform movements and witnessed the establishment and fall of the Bremen Council Republic in 1919. After its violent suppression by the Reich government’s military, she published a poem under the pseudonym Ulrich Steffen, creating a tribute to honour the victims. In Berlin, she met the Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy, whom she married in 1921. The couple shared not only pacifist and left-wing activist political commitments but also a deep interest in the emerging technical processes of reproduction. The 1922 essay Production – Reproduction, published in the Dutch magazine De Stijl, was long attributed solely to László Moholy-Nagy but is now recognized as the result of close collaboration with Lucia Moholy. Their experiments with camera-less photography also began as a joint project. During a visit to the Loheland School for Physical Education, Agriculture, and Crafts near Fulda, they encountered photograms created by Bertha Günther. Between 1920 and 1922, Günther, a dancer and late eurythmy teacher, had placed grasses and flowers on light sensitive paper to capture their shadows. Inspired by her work, Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy began imitating and further developing the photogram technique in their Berlin darkroom.
Weimar und Dessau
In 1923, Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy moved to Weimar and in 1926 to Dessau. While László taught as a master at the Bauhaus, Lucia became a photographer at the school following a brief apprenticeship with Weimar photographer Hermann Eckner. Notably, the Bauhaus did not establish a photography department until 1929. Lucia Moholy played a crucial role in documenting the output of the Bauhaus. She photographed design objects from its workshops as well as the Dessau buildings designed by Walter Gropius. Her carefully composed images of coffee pots, lamps, furniture, the construction site, and the finished ‘Master’s Houses’, including their interiors, profoundly shaped how the Bauhaus is perceived to this day. Additionally, her striking portraits of teachers and students – characterized by tight cropping, strong contrasts, and dynamic blurring – exemplify the stylistic elements of the ‘New Vision’ movement. Beyond her photography, she also took on editorial responsibilities, overseeing the publication of the Bauhausbücher series edited by Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy.
Berlin
Lucia Moholy returned to Berlin in 1928 and separated from her husband a year later. At the invitation of Swiss painter and art theorist Johannes Itten – who had taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar from 1919 to 1923 and founded his own art school in Berlin in 1926 – Lucia Moholy began teaching photography. Among her students at the Itten School was Binia Spoerri from Zurich, known as Binia Bill after her marriage to Max Bill. During this time, Lucia Moholy also worked as a photojournalist.m In 1928, she documented the International Congress for Drawing, Art Education, and Applied Arts in Prague, subsequently reporting on it in the Dutch magazine i10. In 1932, she travelled through the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, capturing everyday life, landscapes, and architecture. She presented these photographs during lectures in Berlin and later published them in English-language magazines.
London
In 1933, Moholy’s partner, Theodor Neubauer – a Reichstag member of the KPD and a resistance fighter – was arrested in her apartment. Fearing for her safety, she decided to leave Germany immediately, hastily departing and leaving behind her glass plate negatives. By the time she settled in London in early 1934, she was compelled to start anew and chose to open a portrait studio at 39 Mecklenburgh Square. Her neighbours included writer Virginia Woolf and John Lehmann, editor of The Geographical Magazine. Lucia Moholy photographed members of the Bloomsbury Group as well as other prominent artists, scientists, and intellectuals, many of whom were involved in Britain’s anti-fascist movement.
Documentary Services
Following the bombing and subsequent loss of her studio in London in 1940, Lucia Moholy deepened her interest in microfilm, a subject she had already explored in her books and articles on photography. Her collaboration with the Viennese pedagogue and philosopher of science Otto Neurath led to her appointment in 1942 as Director of Microfilm Service at the London-based Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux (ASLIB), which operated out of the Victoria and Albert Museum during the war. Later, Moholy established her own consulting office, which she named ‘Documentary Services’. With her extensive experience in microfilm, she was invited in 1954 to present her research at photokina Cologne, one of the largest industrial trade fairs for imaging technologies. In the 1960s, she published on the potential of microfilm methods for electronic data storage, the mechanization of cataloguing tasks, and computerised translations.
Ankara
Lucia Moholy’s expertise in microfilm earned her a position as a technical expert at UNESCO. From 1952 to 1953, she spent six months in Ankara, where she established a microfilm documentation centre and laboratory for the National Library. She returned in 1955–1956 to coordinate the archiving of old Turkish manuscripts, book extracts, periodical articles, and other documents for scientific and research purposes. While in Turkey, she took photographs and began drafting a book on the country’s evolving cultural, social, and technological landscape. This project was her own initiative, independent of her UNESCO assignment, but it was never published.
The Missing Negatives
After the end of the Second World War, Lucia Moholy once again had access to international publications and, to her dismay, discovered many of her photographs in newly released books and magazines. This was notably the case in the catalogue for the comprehensive Bauhaus exhibition organised by Walter Gropius, Ise Gropius, and former Bauhaus teacher Herbert Bayer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1938. Reproductions of glass negatives that Moholy had assumed were lost or destroyed during the war appeared in the catalogue, yet her name was not even mentioned. Following this discovery, Moholy undertook extensive research to locate the glass negatives and eventually learned that Walter Gropius had taken them with him when he emigrated to the US via London. Until the 1950s, Gropius denied possessing her glass negatives and later refused to return them. After years of legal negotiations, Lucia Moholy finally reclaimed a significant number of her negatives in 1957, though 330 remained missing. She later described the dispute as “a shattering experience.” Today, the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin holds 230 of the 560 negatives that Gropius took to the U.S. An additional 50 glass negatives have been identified in the Moholy-Nagy Foundation in Ann Arbor, Michigan. These include her portraits of Moholy-Nagy, documentation of his stage designs, and reproductions of his photograms, collages, and paintings. According to Moholy’s own card catalog, 280 negatives are still missing.
Zurich
In 1959, Lucia Moholy moved to Zurich to work on the international and multilingual handbook Who’s Who in Graphic Arts, published by Amstutz & Herdeg Graphis Press. She continued to write reviews for English-language magazines, such as The Burlington Magazine, now focusing on exhibitions in Zurich. Moholy sought to revive her friendship with the Zurich-based architectural historian Sigfried Giedion. During the 1920s, she and László Moholy-Nagy had been in close contact with Carola Giedion-Welcker and Sigfried Giedion. However, their correspondence reveals Giedion’s unwavering defense of his friend Walter Gropius’s actions, which ultimately led Moholy to turn away from him in disappointment. After his death, Moholy regularly met with art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker and dancer Marietta von Meyenburg at the café of the Kunsthaus Zürich.
Late Recognition
In 1972, Lucia Moholy presented her perspective on the reception of the Bauhaus in her concise and incisive publication Marginal Notes on Moholy-Nagy, Documentary Absurdities. In it, she sought to correct misconceptions and to highlight her own contributions to the texts and photographs attributed to László Moholy-Nagy. In collaboration with the Swiss photographer Giorgio Hoch, Moholy began producing new prints from her negatives, which were exhibited for the first time at photokina in Cologne in 1978. The Ziegler Gallery in Zurich honored her photographic work with a solo exhibition in 1981. Four years later, a comprehensive monograph by Rolf Sachsse was published, further cementing her legacy. The young Zurich-based art historian Angela Thomas also advocated for Lucia Moholy’s recognition as a photographer and an independent, pioneering figure of the 20th-century.
Lucia Moholy and Fotostiftung Schweiz
Lucia Moholy was a prominent figure in Zurich’s art scene. Portraits by Thomas Burla, Gaechter & Clahsen, Giorgio Hoch, Vera Isler, Hans Peter Klauser, and Niklaus Stauss depict the ‘grande dame’ at events or in her apartment in Zollikon. Moholy participated in a discussion during the exhibition The Concerned Photographer, held at the Centre Le Corbusier, which subsequently led to the official founding of the Foundation for Photography (today: Fotostiftung Schweiz). She also wrote a review for The Burlington Magazine on the groundbreaking exhibition Photography in Switzerland – 1840 to Today. In 1984, Walter Binder, then director of the Foundation, visited Lucia Moholy and offered to assist in archiving her photographs. In 1986, he acquired 25 prints for the Foundation‘s collection, which were supplemented in 1991 – three years after Moholy’s death – by a generous donation from her estate.
Lucia Moholy’s Last Will
The execution of Lucia Moholy’s will was entrusted to Dr. Fritz Karsten, a lawyer from London who, like Moholy, had roots in the Czech Republic. In 1973, she stipulated that the proceeds from her literary estate should be donated in equal shares and anonymously to the following institutions: the Swiss Committee for UNICEF in Zurich, the British Red Cross Society Refugee Aid, and the International Rescue Committee in New York. While Moholy gave no explicit instructions regarding her negatives and prints, she requested that all personal documents, including private photographs and manuscripts, be burned. The significant public interest following Lucia Moholy’s death, along with a plea from Rolf Sachsse, persuaded Dr. Karsten to disregard Lucia Moholy‘s instructions. As a result, her archive was divided: materials related to the years before 1933 were donated to the Bauhaus Archive, and a substantial collection of London portraits was gifted to the National Portrait Gallery. In 1991, Swiss photographer Olivia Heussler documented Moholy’s camera equipment on behalf of her godfather, who was involved in handling her other legacies. In August 2022, Jan Tichy photographed the stone marking Lucia Moholy’s urn grave; a few months later, it was removed without any public attention.