Pressemitteilungen

Lucia Moholy (1894–1989) was born Lucia Schulz in Prague, the daughter of a lawyer. After studying the humanities, she worked as an editor for various publishers, including Kurt Wolff and Rowohlt Verlag. In Berlin in 1920 she met László Moholy-Nagy, whom she married in 1921. Her publishing activity financed their life together until her husband was appointed to the Bauhaus in Weimar (April 1, 1923). Lucia Moholy gave up her publishing work, but now had the opportunity to focus on photography, which fascinated her from an early age.
While László Moholy-Nagy took over the preliminary courses and the management of the metal workshop and at the same time prepared the Bauhaus exhibition in the summer of 1923, she became active “as the wife of a master” for the “collective thought of the school”. Her experience in the editorial field is important in the design of the Bauhaus books and the Bauhaus magazine, for which László Moholy-Nagy was also responsible.

Photographs from the collection of Torsten Bröhan – from the estate of László Moholy-Nagy

Photography was not a subject taught at the Bauhaus Weimar; Gropius saw the medium as particularly suitable for documentation. With the necessary publicity, however, there was a need for factual photographs for the Bauhaus books and the press. The Weimar photographer Louis Held (1851-1927) and the studio of Hermann Otto Eckner worked for the Bauhaus in Weimar. Otto Eckner initially took on the tasks of documenting the workshop work. He created the illustrations for the volume Bauhaus in Weimar 1919-1923 on behalf of Gropius. Lucia Moholy studied in his studio from around 1923 to 1924 and later independently took photos of works from the Bauhaus workshops. For this purpose, Lucia Moholy had an old plate camera for glass negatives in the format 18 x 24 cm at the Bauhaus Weimar.
After the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, Lucia Moholy attended courses at the Academy for Graphic Arts and Book Trade in Leipzig to acquire further technical skills in the field of photography and printing technology. In addition to the material photographs, the well-known photographs of the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau were also taken, which were also sold as postcards and form a “core piece of all Bauhaus historiography”. She also created stage photos, portraits and later landscape photographs.

In 1928 Lucia and László Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus and went to Berlin. She worked as a trade fair and theater photographer. After separating from László Moholy-Nagy in 1929, she taught photography as the successor to Otto Umbehr (Umbo) at Johannes Itten’s private art school in Berlin.

Torsten Bröhan’s loans – original vintage prints by Lucia Moholy

Lucia Moholy’s photography is particularly fascinating in her object and architectural photographs, which convey a special form of objectivity. If you look at comparable non-fiction photography by Hans Finsler (1881-1972), Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966) or Willi Moegle (1897-1989) – who also began photographing objects in this way in the mid-1920s – you will notice on the fact that they often choose a staging through shadows, bleed or arrangement. In contrast, Lucia Moholy’s photographs actually seem entirely object-related. The object is shown isolated at a certain close-up. Photographs by Lucia Moholy impressively document numerous Bauhaus workshop works, as well as works by students from the preliminary courses. The earliest photographs of Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel furniture were also taken by Lucia Moholy.

László Moholy-Nagy used his wife’s photographs for Bauhaus publications, his own publications and later also for retrospective books about the Bauhaus. Some of the original vintage prints from Torsten Bröhan’s collection bear his handwritten notes.
Lucia Moholy’s form of photography has been a style-former in her non-fiction photographs. There is a relationship to the photos by Dore Barleben (1896-1990) for the Vereinigte Lausitzer Glaswerke catalog (1930s), to the arrangements in the German goods book (1915) and to the later goods customers of the 1930s. Finally, in the emerging success of the couple Bernd and Hilla Becher since the 1970s, Lucia Moholy’s photographic style found an impressive art-historical continuation.
A large overview of Lucia Moholy’s photographic work can now be seen in the exhibition Lucia Moholy – Das Bild der Moderne in Berlin’s Bröhan Museum.

The exhibition “Lucia Moholy – Das Bild der Moderne” runs from October 1, 2022 to January 22, 2022 in Berlin’s Bröhan Museum.

Bröhan-Museum, Schlossstr. 1a, 14059 Berlin, Tue-Sun 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and on all public holidays (closed on December 24th and 31st), admission: €8/reduced. €5, www.broehan-museum.de

A catalog will be published by Wienand publishers to accompany the exhibition with contributions from Tobias Hoffmann, Fabian Reifferscheidt and Robin Schuldfrei:
Tobias Hoffmann (Hrsg.):
Lucia Moholy. Das Bild der Moderne.
Katalog zur Ausstellung im Bröhan Museum,
Berlin 2022/2023. Köln 2022.