Lucia Moholy (1894 -1989), a Bauhaus photographer, was a pioneer of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) art movement in the early 1920s in Germany. Her photos bear important testimony to the ideas and visions of the legendary art school, the Bauhaus, that continue to influence architecture and design around the world, from IKEA to Apple. Lucia’s pictures not only capture buildings and objects, but also the Bauhaus spirit and atmosphere.
Lucia and her husband László Moholy-Nagy spent five years living and working at the Bauhaus. László became world famous for his photograms, a photo without film. Lucia’s part has only recently surfaced.
When Lucia, born a Czech Jew, had to precipitously flee Germany in 1933 after the Nazis seized power, she couldn’t take her most valuable belongings with her, her glass negatives. In London she struggled to make ends meet by working for the British secret service, microfilming valuable documents. After the war, she set off in search of her photos. Bauhaus director Walter Gropius, now a professor of architecture at Harvard, with whom she shared a friendly correspondence, long neglected to tell her that he had her negatives and was using them diligently to augment Bauhaus’s reputation – without ever mentioning her name. It wasn’t until after three years of legal negotiations that Gropius sent her a box with 230 negatives. Lucia had to pay for the transportation costs herself. 330 glass plates were missing.
Lucia’s story is as admirable as it is tragic. Even today artists are moved by her fate and in the USA and Europe are inspired by her work.
Dr Sigrid Faltin is the film’s director. She studied English, German, and History in Bonn and Freiburg. After training as a journalist, she worked as a regional correspondent with the German South-West TV station SWF, and as an anchorwoman for radio and TV. Today she is a book author, a writer, director, and producer for television and an independent documentary filmmaker. Her films are shown on film festivals and on TV worldwide.
Organised by Robin Schuldenfrei, Tangen Reader in 20th-century Modernism, The Courtauld as part of the research cluster Migrations: People, Borders, Objects.
