Lucia Moholy

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
László Moholy-Nagy: Lucia Moholy, 1920s
Lucia Moholy, photograph by László Moholy-Nagy, between 1924 and 1928

Lucia Moholy , also Lucia Moholy-Nagy, b. Schulz, pseudonym: Ulrich Steffen (born January 18, 1894 in Prague , Austria-Hungary ; † May 17, 1989 in Zurich ) was a photographer . She was married to the Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy and was best known for her Bauhaus photographs.

life and work

The daughter of a lawyer, Lucia Schulz grew up in the Prague suburb of Karolinenthal . Although she was of the Mosaic faith according to her birth certificate , she was raised more atheist . In 1910 she passed the Matura and after studying philosophy, philology and art history worked in Prague as an editor and lecturer. From 1918 she worked successively for the Kurt Wolff Verlag , the Hyperion Verlag and the Rowohlt Verlag , where she was employed as an editor in 1920. She spent the summers of 1918 and 1919 at Heinrich Vogeler's “ Barkenhoff ” in Worpswede , where her first photographs were taken. She published expressionist literature under the pseudonym Ulrich Steffen.

In 1921 she married the painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy in Berlin , with whom she worked at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau from 1923 to 1928 . In 1923/24 she completed an internship in photography and took photography lessons in Leipzig .

When László Moholy-Nagy was appointed to the Bauhaus as successor to Johannes Itten in 1923 , one could not study photography in Weimar and later in Dessau. A separate department was not set up until 1929. Nevertheless, the five years that Moholy-Nagy worked as a master at the Bauhaus were decisive for the development of modern photography. While he was experimenting with cameraless photography, the so-called photograms, he appeared as a photo publicist and presented a manifesto of the New Vision in 1925 with “Painting, Photography, Film”, Moholy remained in the background as a tacit co-author. Several decades later, she wrote in a small memory book about a "symbiotic study group". In 1930 Walter Gropius illustrated his book "Bauhaus buildings in Dessau" with their photographs. After the exhibition curated by Gropius at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1938 , her pictures were repeatedly printed. Moholy was only able to persuade Gropius to return part of her negative archive (500 to 600 glass negatives) to her after a lengthy legal dispute in the 1950s.

Lucia Moholy went to Berlin with her husband in 1928. In 1929 the couple separated. She then lived with Theodor Neubauer , a communist member of the Reichstag and later a resistance fighter . From 1929 to 1931 she taught photography at Johannes Itten's private art school.

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Lucia Moholy emigrated to London via Paris , as she was threatened because of her Jewish descent , where she worked as a photographer and lecturer in photography and from 1940 worked on scientific documentation. After the war she worked in Prague and until 1957 in the national libraries of the Near and Middle East on behalf of the UN .

After spending a year in Berlin, Lucia Moholy settled in Zollikon (Switzerland) in 1959 , where she edited biographical collections and worked as a freelance correspondent for art magazines. The rediscovery of the Bauhaus, on which she reported regularly from 1946, accompanied her rather critically, which was not conducive to her rediscovery as a photographer, theorist and contemporary witness.

exhibition

The Cologne Museum Ludwig honored Lucia Moholy in 2019/2020 with the solo exhibition "Lucia Moholy - Writing Photo History ". In addition to her photographic works, letters from the museum's archive were also presented, which document a lively exchange between Moholy and the photo collector and historian Erich Stenger .

Fonts

  • A Hundred Years of Photography 1839-1939 (= A pelican special. S35). Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex 1939, OCLC 828405779 .
    • A hundred years of photography 1839–1939 = one hundred years of photography 1839–1939 (= Bauhäusler. Documents from the Bauhaus archive. Volume 4). Translation from English by Sonja Knecht. Bauhaus Archive , Museum of Design, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-922613-58-9 (English, German).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ People from the Bauhaus environment: Lucia Moholy. In: Bauhaus100.de. Bauhaus Cooperation, accessed on December 1, 2019 (Text: bauhaus-online.de).
  2. ^ Steffen Siegel : Exhibition in the Museum Ludwig Cologne: Unnamed author. In: taz . November 29, 2019, accessed December 1, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Georg Imdahl : Hotbed of the new seeing. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . November 27, 2019, accessed December 1, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Miriam Szwast: Lucia Moholy - Writing Photo History . In: museum-ludwig.de. Accessed December 1, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Moholy, Lucia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schulz, Lucia (maiden name); Moholy-Nagy, Lucia; Steffen, Ulrich (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech photographer
DATE OF BIRTH January 18, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague
DATE OF DEATH May 17, 1989
Place of death Zurich