Fembio Special: European Jewish Women
Lucia Moholy
(née Schulz, also: Lucia Moholy-Nagy, pseudonym: Ulrich Steffen)
born on January 18, 1894 in Karolinenthal near Prague (formerly Austria-Hungary, today: Czech Republic)
died on May 17, 1989 in Zollikon near Zurich/ Switzerland
Austrian-Hungarian-British photographer, art theorist, publicist
130th birthday on January 18, 2024
Biography
With the adulation of Bauhaus photography remaining unabated over the decades, “almost every piece of trash recovered from the (Bauhaus) darkroom (is) treated as a relic,” art historian Rainer K. Wick once sarcastically noted (Wick, 1991, p. 12). It is therefore all the more striking that Lucia Moholy failed to be recognized for what are today the best-known photographs of Germany's favorite art school. Instead, she is a prime example of the biased treatment many female artists have been accorded.
“HE WAS THE ARTIST ... NOT SHE”: LIGHT AND SHADOW
Our image of the Bauhaus—both of its buildings now listed as UNESCO World Heritage sites and of its teachers and students—has been enduringly shaped by Lucia Moholy’s neo-objective black and white photographs. It is difficult to imagine how the Bauhaus products that have made such an impact in design history could ever have become bestsellers without the unfussy photographs Moholy took of Marcel Breuer's stylish tubular steel chair or Wilhelm Wagenfeld's lamp with its almost hemispherically shaped glass shade. To this day these design classics are purchased by the educated bourgeoise as showcase items for their living rooms. It is also difficult to imagine how the oft-cited Bauhaus Books could have ever been published without Moholy's photographs or without her astute and confident editing. In addition to her work during the Bauhaus era, Moholy left behind many small milestones. She proudly enumerated these near the end of her life (Moholy, 1983); they included the management of a large microfilming project in London in 1942 and her appointment in 1946 as a senior filming commissioner for UNESCO. Yet when Lucia Moholy died in 1989, DER SPIEGEL (29.05.1989) used very strange phrasing. She had tended towards self-denial, the German news magazine explained, and had thus chosen to live her life as a “humble servant to two gentlemen”—her husband László Moholy-Nagy and Bauhaus director Walter Gropius. Six years later she was rediscovered by the biographer Rolf Sachsse, who was also confident that there could be “no doubt ... he was the artist,” Moholy-Nagy, and “not she” (Sachsse, 1995, p. 22). Recent research has revealed that these were not the only fallacies about Moholy's life that persisted.
“...AND YET I YEARNED TO LEAVE”: THE START OF HER LIFE
Lucia Schulz began life in an orderly, middle-class home in Karolinenthal near Prague, in the then Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a lawyer her father provided a solid financial basis for the family; less is known about her German-born mother. Lucia was bright, played the piano and enjoyed tennis. In 1910, she passed her A-levels with distinction and obtained a teaching qualification for English soon afterwards. She attended philosophy and art history lectures at the University of Prague and worked in her parents' law firm. But she was bored, noting in 1915: “Always the same 20 faces, and yet I yearned to leave” (cited in Valdivieso, p. 67). Her relationship with her father was strained. At the age of 21 and unmarried, she committed a minor bourgeois transgression by leaving her parental home to earn her own living as an editorial secretary in Wiesbaden. She occasionally published theater reviews and also planned to train as a photographer. But she lacked the time.
THE PERFECT MARRIAGE? LUCIA MOHOLY AND LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY
In Berlin in 1920, Lucia Schulz met the Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) into whose shadow she would be pushed from then on. She had already been working for five years at the time, taking up publishing positions in Leipzig and Hamburg and then work as an editor and press officer in Berlin for Ernst Rowohlt Verlag. She had long since discovered socialism for herself and had taken initial steps into photography at Heinrich Vogeler's Barkenhoff (part of the art colony in Worpswede).
Moholy-Nagy, whom historiography would years later crown the pioneer of New Vision, was a penniless student who had failed to complete his studies of law. In contrast to Lucia Schulz, he had little artistic experience. Lucia Moholy had adhered to tradition by bearing his surname since her 27th birthday, but she demonstrated less concern for conforming when she became the sole breadwinner for the family. Together the couple engaged in an “ad hoc competition of spontaneous ideas” (Moholy, 1972, p. 13), creating photograms (cameraless photographs) and writing texts on art theory. As with their famous “double portrait” of 1923, which synthesizes their two silhouettes into one, it seems in retrospect impossible to identify the individual contributions. Lucia Moholy herself called their cooperation “symbiotic,” while also emphasizing that “formulating the language” to describe their work was mainly her responsibility (Moholy, 1972, p. 11).
László expressed feeling that she was the invaluable “beacon” who illuminated his “emotional chaos”: “She taught me how to think” (Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, 1972, cited in Valdivieso, p. 81). Yet he declined to credit her at all to the outer world when he published co-productions solely under his name. An essay of great significance in the history of photography—Production-Reproduction (1922)—bore, for example, only his name. In 1927 Theodor H. van de Velde’s educational bestseller, The Perfect Marriage, with its less than favorable view of women, was reviewed by Lucia Moholy for the avantgarde magazine i10. In any case, the committed social reformist did not find the perfect spouse in Moholy-Nagy; the couple separated two years later.
Moholy fell in love with Theodor Neubauer (1890-1945), a politically more suitable match as he was a member of parliament for the Communist Party and would later become active in the Nazi resistance. He was her great love. Tragically, posterity would also write Moholy out of his life for years; Neubauer's first biographer did not want to admit that the married father of two had engaged in an extramarital relationship.
BAUHAUS ARTIST, UNPAID
Lucia Moholy spent five years at the Bauhaus - from László Moholy-Nagy's appointment as master in 1923 until 1928. Founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919 and moved to Dessau in 1925, the Bauhaus was generally regarded as the cradle of modernism per se. Moholy scornfully remarked that it was the “cradle of everything” that “assumes to be supermodernist” (Moholy, 1971). The fact that Gropius and his men cultivated an unmodern, reactionary image of women was often criticized, but hardly dampened enthusiasm for the Bauhaus.
Like Gertrud Arndt and Marianne Brandt, Lucia Moholy suffered in the misogynistic climate and reacted with “mild irony” (Sachsse, 1995, p. 11). After 1945, scholars continued to ignore the Bauhaus women, which infuriated her. She criticized the concentration on masters and insisted that the wives, who had contributed significantly to the “history and post-history of the Bauhaus” (cited in Valdevieso, p. 71), finally be included. Unlike her husband and most of the Bauhaus photographers of the time, Moholy was a trained photographer. She quickly became the “in-house photographer” and Gropius used her photographs as the basis for advertising the school in almost every Bauhaus publication. However, Moholy did not receive an official title, remuneration or a salaried position (Baumhoff, 2009, p. 183). She also oversaw the publication of the 14 Bauhaus Books, contributing free of charge the specialist knowledge she had acquired during her previous work in publishing. Editors Gropius and Moholy-Nagy officially declared that they had “neither the time nor the inclination to concern themselves with the details of book production” (Moholy, 1972, p. 44). They apparently also had neither the time nor the inclination to credit Moholy as an editor. She was only mentioned in the foreword to the last Bauhaus volume, where her ex-husband included brief words of thanks for her.
WHERE YOU “WAIT FOR THE NEXT TRAIN”: DESSAU
In contrast to her friend Florence Henri, Lucia Moholy was not very fond of her Bauhaus period. In particular, she remained discontented with the city of Dessau, the former center of German Enlightenment. “Dessau is like a place where - while traveling - you have missed your connection and have to wait for the next train” (cited in Baumhoff, 2009, p. 183). She pined for the vibrant cultural life of Berlin: “It doesn't help me when 20 friends come here every week” (quoted in Baumhoff, 2009, p. 183/184). She saw her husband only rarely.
Without her own income for the first time in Weimar, she already began to plan for a career as a freelancer. She completed an apprenticeship at the Weimar photo studio Eckner in 1923/24 and took photography and printing lessons at the Leipzig Academy for Graphic and Book Arts. In 1928 she returned to Berlin and took over the management of the photography class at the Itten School a year later.
Soon afterwards and at the age of 36, she created the self-portrait for which she is now best known. Defying the ideals of femininity of the time and with a self-confidence that seems almost provocative, she looks from deeply shadowed, questioning eyes directly into the camera.
“A LITTLE PIECE OF THE GREAT WORLD”: ARCHITECTURAL AND PRODUCT PHOTOGRAPHY
Moholy believed that photography, like a walnut shell, reveals to us “a little piece of the great world” (Moholy, 1933). The photograph, as a small piece of the universe, was to be taken as austerely as possible and to require no accompanying words of explanation. Her approach was quite different from the experimental strategies of her ex-husband’s New Vision. When Gropius commissioned her in the late fall of 1926 to photograph the Bauhaus buildings that he himself had designed in Dessau, she used none of the effects typical of the time. Her photographs of the façades of the factory-like masters’ houses, lined up in a row like miniature ocean steamships, contained no dramatically exaggerated shadows, no exorbitant top or bottom views and no intentional distortion of minor details.
Biographer Sachsse therefore describes her most reproduced series as “matter-of-fact to the point of artlessness” (Sachsse, 1995, p. 17) with Moholy never making any “claim to individual design elements.” What could be superficially read as a derisory verdict is actually a tribute to her approach; Moholy herself explained that she rejected the artistic pathos inherent in Expressionism and in New Vision and sought to pursue a New Objectivity. But given Sachsse's well-meaning conclusion that it was Moholy-Nagy who was the true artist - and “not she” – it is nevertheless doubtful that his biography was an adequate contribution to her rediscovery.
As effortless as some of Moholy's shots of objects may seem, others appear to have involved detailed planning. In her famous photograph from the balcony of the studio building (1926), for example, Moholy cast shadows and moved the railing-like balustrade into the center. Attention is focused on Gropius' architectural allusion to the ocean liners considered the pinnacle of progressivism since Le Corbusier's book Vers une architecture (1923); the Dessau skyline recedes into a hazy darkness. She thus integrated a favorite motif of the self-proclaimed tabula rasa modernists, who typically pushed the radiantly new to the front and the supposedly outdated into the dark background.
Moholy's product photography was no less subtle. It is hardly a coincidence that a Bauhaus window is reflected in her photograph of Marianne Brandt's Tea Infuser (1924). Moholy photographed the imposing metal windows simultaneously in every conceivable variation, as if searching for an insignia of the art school to implant in the infuser. As a former student of art history, she was certainly familiar with similar picture-in-picture effects from the past, e.g. with Jan van Eyck's Marriage of Arnolfini (1434).
“I PHOTOGRAPHED PEOPLE LIKE HOUSES”: PORTRAITS
Lucia Moholy's portraits of Walter Gropius, Florence Henri and Clara Zetkin are now included in many photography books. However, they received little attention at the time they were taken. Moholy posited that the unusual combination of large formats and daylight may have seemed “somewhat strange to her contemporaries” (Lucia Moholy, 1978).
She added: “I photographed people like houses.” Quoted most often, this explanation is also the most easily misunderstood (cited in Sachsse, 1995, p. 19). She did indeed seem to be guided by subtle schematism - she liked to take one shot of the face, one of the profile, one from a slight bird's-eye view and one from a frog's-eye view. But she explained that this was in order to enable her to gain an objective impression.
Unlike her colleague Lotte Jacobi, she also avoided framing her subjects in personal surroundings, especially not in their own homes. She strived for the most neutral background possible, avoiding status and professional symbols and the staging typical of traditional (studio) photography.
However, she by no means dogmatically adhered to the principles of New Objectivity in her work. Apart from the photographs of Nelly and Theo van Doesburg (1924), she usually photographed her fellow human beings - mostly acquaintances or friends - in very personal moments. Sometimes she retouched the negatives - a considerable faux pas for rigid New Objectivists. In her own words, she was looking for the views and details that show “the character ... more clearly ” (cited in Guttenberger, 2012, p. 169). This was sometimes the profile, sometimes the hand, sometimes the “full figure.” But in questioning neither whether people even possess a single supposedly most distinct side nor whether the so-called character of a person could actually be captured in a portrait, she remained very much a child of her times.
“THE DARK SIDES OF LIFE THAT GO UNNOTICED”: LOSS OF THE NEGATIVES
Moholy believed that photography sharpens the eye for the many small beauties of everyday life. Those who had learned to see perfection would thus inevitably develop a keener eye “for the dark sides of life that (otherwise) go unnoticed” (Moholy, 1933). She wrote these lines on February 2, 1933, three days after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Six months later, the Nazis arrested the love of her life, Theodor Neubauer, in her apartment. She was never to see him again; after months of imprisonment, he returned to the resistance. The Nazis murdered him in 1945.
It was not Moholy's Jewish roots - they were of no concern to the atheist - but her contempt for the Nazi regime that caused her to flee to Prague, Vienna and Paris. She left behind her “most valuable possession” (Moholy, 1983), her archive of almost 600 negatives. She discovered only much later that the negatives had taken a circuitous route to end up in Walter Gropius' possession. She had viewed Gropius as one of her “truest friends” (cited in Schuldenfrei, 2012, p. 264). He denied having her negatives for years; yet at the same time, the wealthy architect sold prints from the archive without naming Moholy as the holder of the copyright. In 1954, the affair came to light and a legal dispute ensued. A fraction of the negatives were returned in 1957. Financially and emotionally, Moholy was unable to overcome the loss for the rest of her life. She found it especially distressing that third parties continued to use images without her permission.
Six years before her death, she went public about the copyright infringements (Moholy, 1983), although she mentioned no one by name. Contrary to what the SPIEGEL obituary suggests, she did not suffer from self-denial; she suffered under the denial of others. Far from silent, she waged her battles in the courtroom until the end (Hoiman, p. 175/76).
WHERE “THE WILLINGNESS TO HELP ... WAS MUCH GREATER”: A NEW BEGINNING IN LONDON
In 1934, Lucia Moholy found herself penniless in London where “the willingness to help is much greater ... than anywhere else (sic.)” (Moholy, 1947). She made ends meet by taking portraits of celebrities and she wrote a highly acclaimed book on the cultural history of photography that she had been planning since her participation in the Stuttgart Werkbund exhibition “Film and Photography” (1929). Exile left considerable mental and physical traces. She confessed in 1937 that she worked hard to “behave normally” (cited in Schuldenfrei 2012, p. 259).
Three years later, she once again lost almost all her possessions – in bombing raids. Her application to leave the country for the United States was rejected. In 1942, she took over the management of the microfilm service of ASLIB (Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux), an organization important for cultural history as well as for military intelligence. In 1946 UNESCO appointed her, by then a British citizen and 52 years old, documentary film director for countries of the Near and Middle East (Honnef, 1998, p. 343).
“THE CIRCLE OF LIFE HAS CLOSED”: EVENING OF LIFE
Since the end of the war, Moholy had fought for the rehabilitation of the Bauhaus with lectures and writings. When the time finally came, she was appalled by the one-sided glorification: the debate was not free of “pathos and emotion ... traces of esotericism” (Moholy, 1971). According to biographer Sachsse, her consistently frank criticism “to a certain degree prevented Moholy's rediscovery” (Sachsse, 1993). And yet at the end of her life - in Zollikon near Zurich where she had moved in 1959 - she seemed surprisingly free of embitterment, allegedly noting on her 90th birthday that “the circle of life has closed” (Sachsse, 1995, p. 27). She died five years later.
(Text from 2014; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2023.)
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