Lucia Moholy (née Schulz; 18 January 1894 — 17 May 1989) was a photographer and publications editor. Her photos documented the architecture and products of the Bauhaus, and introduced their ideas to a post-World War II audience. However Moholy was seldom credited for her work, which was often attributed to her husband László Moholy-Nagy or to Walter Gropius.
Early years
Lucy Schulz grew up in a nonpracticing Jewish family in a "German-speaking enclave" of Prague, where her father had his law practice, in the Austrian part of Austria-Hungary. Her own diaries from that period, include a drawing from 10 May 1907 of gifts her father brought back to Lucy, her brother Franz, mother and grandmother from his trips. Through these diaries written in her teen years, we know she corresponded with pen pals in the United States in English, and read Thomas Mann, and Leo Tolstoy. As tensions rose in 1914 and the events that led to World War ], then twenty-year old Shultz, who may have been working in her father's law offices at the time, made donations "for the families of the Austrian war".
Education
After qualifying as a German and English teacher in 1912, Shultz studied philosophy, philology, and art history at the University of Prague.
Early career
In the early years of World War I, Shultz began to work in Wiesbaden, Germany, as theater critic for a local newspaper. Shortly after, Shultz moved to Leipzig. In Berlin, she worked for publishing houses, such as Hyperion, Kurt Wolff, among others, where she was an editor and copy editor.
In 1919 she published radical, Expressionist literature under the pseudonym "Ulrich Steffen".
Personal life
In Berlin in April 1920, Shultz met László Moholy-Nagy (1895 – 1946), a recent émigré from Hungary. They were married on 21 January 1921, her 27th birthday. Following her marriage to Moholy-Nagy in 1921, Moholy, who worked with publishing houses, provided the only salary for the couple. During the years the couple lived in Dessau, Germany, on the Bauhaus school campus, Moholy's diaries describe her sense of discontent in Dessau, her feelings of estrangement and her longing for the city. She described how groups of twenty arrived for short periods, partied and left. Moholy-Nagy was not sympathetic to her feelings. They separated in 1929, a year after they left Dessau.
In 1933, the Nazi Party rose to power. Moholy was in a relationship with a communist Member of Parliament, Theodor Neubauer, who was arrested in her apartment one day while she was out. She abruptly left Berlin, leaving all of her belongings including the bulky glass negatives of her Bauhaus photographs, which ended up in the hands of Walter Gropius. After having lived in Germany for two decades, she was forced to flee to Prague where she stayed with her family. She then went to Switzerland, Austria, Paris, before settling in London in June 1934.
After World War II ended, Moholy started a campaign to emigrate to the United States. Documentation for the application included a letter from her brother, Franz, who had a successful career, a good income and had offered to support her. Moholy-Nagy provided her with an offer of a position as photography professor in Chicago. Her application for a "nonquota visa as a professor" was denied in 1940, on the "grounds that she lacked experience teaching".
Bauhaus years (1923–1928)
In 1923, Walter Gropius, who had founded the Bauhaus school in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, hired Moholy-Nagy as a teacher. In 1926, the couple moved into one of the Bauhaus staff residences called 'Meisterhäuser—Masters’ Houses—on the school's new campus in Dessau, Germany.
During those five years, Moholy documented the interior and exterior of Bauhaus architecture and its facilities in Weimar and Dessau, as well as the students and teachers. Her aesthetic was part of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, which focused on documentation from a straightforward perspective. Moholy's Bauhaus photographs helped construct the identity of the school and create its image. She was a skilled photographer through her studies at the Leipzig Academy for Graphic and Book Arts (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig) At Bauhaus, she also apprenticed in Otto Eckner’s photography studio.
Moholy and Moholy-Nagy experimented with different processes in the darkroom, such as making photograms.Robin Schuldenfrei, “Iteration of the Non-iterative: Revaluation and the Case of László Moholy-Nagy’s Photograms” in Iteration: Episodes in the Mediation of Art and Architecture. Edited by Robin Schuldenfrei (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 79-82.