Exhibition shines light on Prague-born Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy
Lucia Moholy was a Prague-born photographer who documented, often uncredited, the interwar Bauhaus movement in Germany. She has largely been overlooked as an artist – something a major new retrospective at the gallery Kunsthalle Praha aims to redress. I asked curator Jordan Troeller what role Moholy played in the Bauhaus.
“The role that she played is better stated negatively [laughs]. She was neither an enrolled student nor paid staff there; nor did she have another staff, teaching position.
“She was, as she put it, one of the Bauhaus wives [she was married to László Moholy-Nagy, a painter, photographer and Bauhaus professor]. There was a big group of women who were considered the Bauhaus wives – wives of teachers there.
“That was her role. But at the same time she took the initiative to start taking photographs. And those are the photographs that you’ll see here.”
How valuable is her photography from that time?
“It’s undisputed that these are incredibly important photographs, because for decades… Dessau was located in East Germany, so that building and the masters’ houses… these buildings were not available to people behind the Iron Curtain, so to speak, from the West.
“So all people had were these photographs, to see what it looked like.”
But her photographs were often, or always, uncredited? Is that the case?
“They start to become uncredited in the ‘30s, when she no longer has possession over them.
“She leaves them in Germany, because she has to flee very quickly in 1933; a Communist government representative is arrested in her apartment and she has to go right away, in August, and can’t take these very weighty glass negatives with her.”
She died in 1989 in her mid-80s. Obviously the Bauhaus was only a relatively small part of her life.
“Yes, exactly. She worked, in terms of writing, in terms of taking photographs, as an information scientist, over a period of seven decades, even though she was only at the Bauhaus for five years.”
What were some of the most significant things that she did after the Bauhaus? You mentioned a few.
“One of the most significant things is that she wrote the first mass market history of photography. It was printed in 40,000 copies on [publishers] Pelican, and that quickly sold out.
“It was a pocket book that people could buy very cheaply, and it was also one of the first instances of photography being told as a cultural medium, not just a technical medium.
“That was a really important contribution. Another one was as an information scientist; that was her title. She played an important role in the development of microfilm as a technology.
“It’s an incredibly important strategic technology for copying war... ammunitions information, published in scientific journals, but also in preserving information in libraries, and making copies of them.”
Is her photography significant because of its artistic qualities, or because of what she recorded?
“I would say both. Because you see, at different points in her life, that she is stressing one over the other.
“For example, the works that she makes at the Bauhaus in the ‘20s have now become regarded as works of art, because they’re aesthetically so powerful.
“Whereas the work that she does in the ‘50s, for UNESCO for example, is about documentation.
“But that’s what’s so exciting about photography and its history in the 20th century – it really is both of these things at once.”
This is a major exhibition of an artist who most people probably wouldn’t have heard of. What are you and the other curators hoping to achieve with this show?
“Well, we want to show not only that her life and work is extremely complex and multi-layered, which is not what we know so far when you find publications in exhibitions under her name. That’s number one.
“Number two, we want to show that photography as a medium means many different things in the 20th century. And we’re forgetting that today, with its digitalisation.
“The material variety of this medium, and its significance for social and cultural contexts, is no longer present now as it used to be. That’s something that we also want to foreground.”
Lucia Moholy: Exposures
Until October 28, 2024
Kunsthalle Praha
Klárov 5,
Prague 1
