Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1894 Prague, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic)

Died: 1989 Zurich, Switzerland

Year of Migration to the UK: 1934

Other name/s: Lucia Schulz, Ulrich Steffen

Biography

Photographer Lucia Moholy (née Schulz) was born into a Jewish family in Karlin, Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Czech Republic), in 1894. After qualifying as an English and German teacher she began to study art history and philosophy at the University of Prague. Between 1915 and 1918 she worked as an editor for several German publishing houses in Berlin, also publishing radical, Expressionist literature under the pseudonym Ulrich Steffen. In 1920, she became editor of the Berlin publishing house Rowohlt in Berlin. The following year she married Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy. From 1922 to 1923, they worked together in the field of experimental photography, although she was not credited for the majority of their projects including the 1925 book Malerei, Photografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film). After her husband was appointed to the Bauhaus Weimar in 1923, Moholy began an apprenticeship in one of its photography studios and, at the same time, photographed objects produced in the Bauhaus workshops for publications, working as a freelance photographer from 1923–25, and afterwards at the Bauhaus Dessau from 1925–28. Between 1925 and 1926, she also studied photographic and printing techniques at the Akademie für grafische Künste und Buchgewerbe Leipzig (Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig). After leaving the Bauhaus in 1928, she worked with the photographic agency Mauritius and was represented at the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart in 1929. She separated from her husband the same year. As the successor of Otto Umbehr (Umbo), she was hired as a specialist subject teacher for photography at Johannes Itten's school in Berlin.

In 1933, after her then-partner, communist politician Theodor Neubauer, was arrested by the Nazis, she fled Berlin, arriving in England via Prague, Vienna and Paris, and settling in London. She left her entire oeuvre to that date – 500 to 600 glass negatives – in the care of her ex-husband, who then entrusted them to Bauhaus founder and director Walter Gropius when he fled Germany himself (Gropius subsequently used around 50 of them without credit or permission at the Bauhaus exhibition and its accompanying catalogue at the Museum of Modern in Art in New York in 1938; only returning them in the 1950s after she threatened legal action). In London, Moholy established a photographic portrait studio in Bloomsbury, producing many insightful portraits of English nobleman, academics, authors, publishers and politicians. She also taught privately, including fellow émigrée Elsbeth Juda. In addition to her photography, Moholy also wrote articles, delivered lectures and ran a microfilm project at the London's Science Museum library. Her prescient survey, A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939, was published by Penguin books in 1939, in which she explained that due to the 'growing demand in pictorial reading' media outlets had to call upon 'international networks of individual photographers, news agencies, photographic agencies to supply a constant flow of photographic images'. Moholy concluded that 'life without photographs is no longer imaginable ...They are in our lives as our lives are in them'. After the outbreak of the Second World War, she recorded important documents, manuscripts and graphic works of the university library at the University of Cambridge on microfilm. After the war she was granted British citizenship and in the following years, she directed documentary films for numerous important archives and UNESCO projects in the Near and Middle East.

After relocating to Switzerland in 1959, she worked in publishing, focusing on art criticism and art education, and participated in many exhibitions. Lucia Moholy died in Zurich, Switzerland in 1989.

Related books

Carla Mitchell and John March (eds.), Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain after 1933 (London: Four Corners Gallery, 2020)
Steven Mansbach and Eleanor Janet Chamberlain-Stoltzfus, New Womanhood and the Bauhaus: The Avant-Garde Photography of Lucia Moholy (PhD Thesis, College Park: University of Maryland, 2019)
Ulrike Müller, 'Lucia Moholy', in Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rösslerr (eds.), Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective (London: Herbert Press, 2019), pp. 162-166
Sandra Neugärtner, 'Utopias of a New Society: Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, and the Loheland and Schwarzerden Women's Communes', in Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler (eds.), Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism's Legendary Art School (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019), pp. 73-100
John March, 'Women Exile Photographers', in Marian Malet, Rachel Dickson, Sarah MacDougall and Anna Nyburg (eds.), Applied Arts in British Exile from 1933: Changing Visual and Material Culture (Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2019)
Lucia Moholy: Material und Architektur: Fotos der Bauhauszeit (Berlin: Derda Galerie, 2016)
Robin Schuldenfrei, 'Images in Exile: Lucia Moholy's Bauhaus Negatives and the Construction of the Bauhaus Legacy', History of Photography, Vol. 37, No. 2, 2013, pp. 182-203
Angela Madesani, Nicoletta Ossanna Cavadini et al., Lucia Moholy: Between Photography and Life (Centro Culturale Chiasso, Italy: Silvana Editoriale, 2012)
Ulrike Müller, Bauhaus Women: Art, Handicraft, Design (Paris: Flammarion
London: Thames & Hudson, 2009)
Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009)
Olivia Lahs-Gonzales and Lucy R. Lippard (eds.), Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the 20th Century: Selections From the Helen Kornblum Collection (St. Louis: Saint Louis Art Museum, 1997)
Liz Herron and Val Williams (eds.), Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996)
Rolf Sachsse, Lucia Moholy: Bauhaus Fotografin (Berlin: Museumspädagogischer Dienst Berlin/Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 1995)
Eckhard Neumann, Bauhaus and Bauhaus People: Personal Opinions and Recollections of Former Bauhaus Members and Their Contemporaries (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993)
Jeannine Fiedler, Photography at the Bauhaus (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990)
Rolf Sachsse, Lucia Moholy (Düsseldorf: Marzona, 1985)
Lucia Moholy, 'The Missing Negatives', British Journal of Photography, 7 January 1983
Lucia Moholy, 'Nicolas de Stael at Zurich', Burlington Magazine, No. 119, 1977, pp. 65-66
Lucia Moholy, ''The European Vision' at Washington: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C', Burlington Magazine, No. 118, 1976, pp. 57-58
Lucia Moholy, 'Henry Moore on the Shores of Zürichsee', Burlington Magazine, No. 118, 1976, p. 616
Lucia Moholy, 'Photography in Switzerland', Burlington Magazine, No. 117, 1975, pp. 69-70
Lucia Moholy, 'Paul Klee at Berne and Basle', Burlington Magazine, No. 115, 1973, pp. 765-766
Lucia Moholy, Moholy-Nagy: Marginal Notes, Documentary Absurdities (Krefeld: Scherpe Verlag, 1972)
Lucia Moholy, 'Johannes Itten: 1888–1967', Art Journal / College Association of America, 1968, p. 304
Lucia Moholy, 'Dada at Geneva', Apollo, No. 83, 1966, p. 306
Lucia Moholy, A Hundred Years of Photography 1839-1939 (London: Penguin, 1939)

Public collections

Related organisations

The Bauhaus (student and photographer)
The Science Museum (researcher/recorder)
Royal Photographic Society (member)
University of Cambridge (researcher/recorder)

Selected exhibitions

Lucia Moholy: Writing Photography's History, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2020)
Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain after 1933, Four Corners Gallery, London (2020)
Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Lucia Moholy]