This episode of "bauhaus faces" is about a photographer that most Bauhaus fans today know: Lucia Moholy. She was the photographer who delivered the photos of the Bauhaus in Dessau and its masters’ houses that made the art school so iconic. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that art historians became alert to her when her photos and negatives made their way into the Bauhaus-Archive in Berlin. Until then they had taken a long reroute from Germany via the US, while Lucia Moholy had thought they were lost, when in fact Bauhaus founder and first director Walter Gropius had taken them with him, denied their possession for decades and made use of them to promote the Bauhaus as the ultimate epitome of the avantgarde without ever mentioning their creator: Lucia Moholy.

But her life and work were so much more! When she was in danger of being arrested by the Nazis, Lucia left Germany and emigrated to London. Here, she worked as a portrait photographer and – as director – set up the microfilm archive ASLIB. She never succeeded in emigrating to the US like so many other Bauhauslers although she had an offer from her ex-husband László Moholy-Nagy to come and teach photography at the New Bauhaus in Chicago.

Most of her adult life, Lucia Moholy struggled to make ends meet and gain recognition for her achievements. When she – once more – emigrated to Switzerland in 1959 (she would live and die in Zollikon near Zurich) Lucia started writing about her collaborative work with László Moholy-Nagy and her own share in it.For this episode the US art historian Robin Schuldenfrei helped to tell the story of Lucia Moholy. She has been researching Moholy for many years now.

SHOW NOTES
bauhausfaces.com | @bauhausfacespodcast | YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

EXHIBITION
„Lucia Moholy: Exposures“ at Kunsthalle Praha from 30th May until 28th October 2024 AND at Fotostiftung Winterthur in Spring 2025 

BOOKS BY LUCIA MOHOLY 
Lucia Moholy: A Hundred Years of Photography“, 1939 
Lucia Moholy: Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy/Moholy-Nagy, Marginal Notes, 1972

**PUBLICATIONS & ARTICLES ABOUT LUCIA MOHOLY **
Rolf Sachsse: Lucia Moholy Bauhaus Fotografin, 1995 
Meghan Forbes: "'What I Could Lose': The Fate of Lucia Moholy", in: Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. 55, Issue 1, Winter 2016
Jochen Stöckmann: "Lucia Moholy. Im Schatten des Bauhaus", in: Weltkunst, 2022

ABOUT LUCIA MOHOLY’S BOOKS AND NEGATIVES
Sabine Hartmann: "Multiple Frames for Lucia Moholy: Contextualizing Photography, Gender, and Place in the 20th Century", Kunsthalle Praha, 2024
Robin Schuldenfrei: "Images in Exile: Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Negatives and the Construction of the Bauhaus Legacy", in: History of Photography, May 2013
Burcu Dogramaci: "A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939", in: METROMOD Archive, 2021

PHOTOS BY LUCIA MOHOLY IN ARCHIVES
BAUHAUS-ARCHIV BERLIN 
HARVARD ART MUSEUMS 
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON
FOTOSTIFTUNG WINTERTHUR, SWITZERLAND
MoMA, NEW YORK 

COVER PHOTO
László Moholy-Nagy: Portrait of Lucia Moholy, Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain, CC0 1.0