2024-09-24 01:13:24
Lucia Moholy had her first solo exhibition in the early 1980s only thanks to her longevity. The photographer, critic and theoretician of photography, who lived from 1894 to 1989, helped create the image of the famous German Bauhaus school.
The Prague native is now commemorated in a large-scale exhibition called Lucia Moholy: Exposures at the Kunsthalle Praha. Until October 28, it offers the opportunity to get to know the work, thoughts and story of a woman who gradually found a home in three European countries and left a significant cultural footprint in them.
Her life path was determined not only by growing up in Prague’s German-Jewish environment and Europe divided by wars, but also by love or being overlooked by several famous men. She was not like Alma Mahler, with whom she was friends with her second husband, Walter Gropius. She did not become a muse who inspired artists and bore them children. Lucia Moholy worked with them, was part of their enterprises. However, she did not receive much thanks from them.
She grew up with two younger siblings in the well-off Prague family of the progressive Jewish lawyer Bohumil Schulz – he preferred the Czech form of his name to the German Gottlieb. For the children, however, the mother tongue was German.
For several years, they lived in Prague’s Na Poříčí street, directly opposite the insurance company where Franz Kafka worked. Unlike the future world writer who only dreamed about it, the girl from her hometown broke free.
The road to Bauhaus
At the age of twenty-one, she left Prague with the approval of an English teacher and a graduate of university art history courses. It was the war year 1915 and the determined young woman was heading to Berlin, where she found work in several publishing houses. In three years, she worked her way up to the editor-in-chief of Hyperion, a branch of the Kurt Wolff publishing house, publishing prose and poetry herself under the pseudonym Ulrich Steffen.
Lucia Moholy in a photograph by an unknown photographer from 1927. | Photo: Bauhaus-Archive
In Berlin, she met László Moholy-Nagye, an avant-garde artist of Hungarian origin, whom she married at the age of 27. She quickly learned Hungarian, which was her fifth language alongside German, Czech, English and French. She began collaborating with her husband on his photographic experiments, together they created a series of photograms and wrote the influential text Prodiktion-Reproduktion, published in the Dutch magazine De Stijl. However, only Moholy-Nagy was signed.
“Lucia Moholy stood behind the camera for some of his ‘self-portraits’ and processed the photographic material. According to her, Moholy-Nagy visited the darkroom only exceptionally,” writes Hana Buddeus, co-author of the symposium dedicated to the author.
Lucia Moholy and her husband moved to Weimar in 1923 because of his teaching position at the Bauhaus. Lászlo Moholy-Nagy became an important creator of this modern art school, whose style was mainly determined by the German architect Walter Gropius.
Lucia Moholy found a job in the publication section. She documented the personalities and products of the academy. She printed photographs in catalogs and textbooks, and also provided her images to newspapers and magazines that reported on the Bauhaus.
After the school moved to the city of Dessau, she photographed the architecture of the Bauhaus, its new building according to Gropio’s design, and Dessau’s “master houses”. All three, Lucia, Moholy-Nagy and Gropius, then left the Bauhaus in 1928 and returned to Berlin. Lucia Moholy brought with her more than five hundred glass negatives, which, as it later turned out, became an important and widely used archive documenting the image of the famous German school. The author herself soon lost control over the archive.
After breaking up with Moholy-Nagy, she lived with the communist politician Theodor Neubauer. However, he was arrested by the Nazis in her apartment in 1933, and Lucia Moholy had to quickly disappear. She went to Prague and from there via Vienna and Paris to London. She never saw Neubauer again, the Nazis executed him in February 1945.
View from the window in Desava, as photographed by Lucia Moholy in 1926. | Photo: Fotostiftung Schweiz
Photograph people like a house
She started with empty hands in London, her glass archive remained in Berlin – she entrusted it to the care of Moholy-Nagy and Gropius, who later also emigrated. All she had was her big, heavy camera. She opened a portrait studio at 39 Mecklenburgh Square, where she was a neighbor of the writer Virginia Woolf.
She photographed members of the Bloomsbury artistic group, scientists, nobles and intellectuals, many of whom were involved in the anti-fascist movement. “I took people and simply photographed them like a house,” she recalls in the interview, which is reprinted in the comprehensive catalog for the Prague exhibition and whose audio recording can be heard in the Kunsthalle.
Lucia Moholy was photographed by Giorgio Hoch at an exhibition of her works in 1981. | Photo: Giorgio Hoch
The London portraits really feel like Lucia Moholy is walking around her clients. She photographed them from many angles, often from the ceiling. The photographs are also characterized by statuary, details are not important, the author appreciates the portrait subject – most often his head – in its entirety. Shape, expression, silhouette. A large collection of portraits was later purchased by London’s National Portrait Gallery.
Her photos look very modern. They have a radical cut, Moholy did not hesitate to leave out a piece of the head to emphasize the closeness and something characteristic of the portrait face. She also experimented with shallow depth of field, for example focusing on the subject’s hair rather than their eyes, or highlighting a lady’s intricate hairdo and leaving her profile face in shadow only as a silhouette.
In addition, Lucia Moholy established herself in England as a theoretician of photography. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Penguin publishing house publishes her book One Hundred Years of Photography 1839 – 1939, which she was already preparing in Berlin, in a Pelican Special paperback edition. The forty thousand edition is sold out in two years.
During the war, her technical talent, which she had already shown when photographing architecture, also showed itself. She becomes a microfilm specialist – first in the service of wartime British intelligence, then UNESCO, after its establishment in 1945, the author travels to the Near or Middle East and documents the cultural heritage there.
For the World Health Organization, he has the task of establishing an international medical library in his native Prague. However, it is already 1949 and Czechoslovakia is ruled by a communist tyranny. Lucia Moholy is expelled from the country.
The exhibition of Lucie Mohola’s works in Prague’s Kunsthalle occupies two floors. | Photo: Vojtěch Veškrna
The last station
Lucia Moholy eventually begins lecturing on photography in English schools. When he once needed a visual accompaniment to a lecture on the Bauhaus, he turned to Walter Grupius, then living in the United States of America. She believes that most of her negatives were destroyed during the Allied bombing of Berlin. However, he hopes that the architect, who emigrated in time, managed to save at least something.
Grupius excuses himself, saying he has the last few original photos and won’t let them go. He denies to Lucia Moholy that, in fact, he took away almost all of her archive and still has it.
Lucia Moholy came up with this when she got her hands on the catalog of the Bauhaus exhibition organized by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1938 and on which Grupius collaborated. The catalog contained many of her photographs. However, the architect did not consider it necessary to inform the author about this, and did not even mention her by name. The photographer did not get her negatives back from Grupius until 1957, but she got barely half of them.
The last country Lucia Moholy chose was Switzerland, where she spent the last thirty years of her long life. She made a living as a columnist and writer, for the first time in her life she received recognition from the artistic community. Curators began to include her in comprehensive retrospectives. The first independent exhibition of Lucia Moholy was organized in 1981 by the Renée Ziegler Gallery in Zurich. She was 87 years old.
Photographer Giorgio Hoch helped with the exhibition, the look of which is now also replicated in Prague’s Kunsthalle. He helped create new positives from the original negatives, especially from the 20s and 30s. On that occasion, a series of portraits of Lucie Mohola was also created, Hoch captured her in the gallery next to her works and also at her home.
A self-confident, likeable woman, who has an unexpectedly sharp and youthful look, calmly looks down from the photographs. Her voice from the recording of the interview also testifies that Lucia Moholy was admirably vital in her old age, ready to discuss the role and possibilities of photography in society.
The current exhibition in Prague is extraordinarily complex. Lucia Moholy is presented as an excellent experimenter and technically proficient photographer, and at the same time as an underappreciated theoretician who still has a lot to say on the subject. On this occasion, not only a comprehensive catalog was published, but also the first Czech edition of her book One Hundred Years of Photography 1839 – 1939.
You might be interested: This year’s floods can be compared with 1997 and 2002, says hydrologist (16/09/2024)
“Floods in the Czech Republic surpass 2013 in terms of their extent, precipitation and significance,” assesses Jan Daňhelka from the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute. | Video: Team Spotlight