Germany 2025, 52 min, HDA B2W filmworks Production
by Sigrid Faltin
REQUEST A SCREENING Lucia Moholy - Bauhaus Photographer
Lucia Moholy took the photographs that shaped the world's image of the Bauhaus – yet for decades, her name was not known. Forced to flee Nazi Germany, she left her glass-plate negatives behind. German-American architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, Walter Gropius, held them for over twenty years without her knowledge. This is Moholy’s story through the eyes of contemporary artists, inspired by her work and her struggle for recognition.Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy (1894 -1989) was a pioneer of the New Vision art movement in the early 1920s in Germany. Her photos bear important testimony to the ideas and visions of the legendary art school, Bauhaus, that continue to influence architecture and design around the world in a span from IKEA to Apple. Moholy's pictures not only capture buildings and objects, but also the Bauhaus spirit and atmosphere.
Lucia Moholy and her husband Lászlo Moholy-Nagy spent five years living and working at the Bauhaus. Lászlo became world famous as the inventor of the photogram, a photo without a camera. Lucia's part has only recently surfaced. Lászlo, as it turns out, never in his life set foot inside a darkroom.
When Lucia Moholy, 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. Moholy had to pay for the transportation costs herself. 330 glass plates were missing.
The Kunsthalle Prague has made it their mission to coax artists who had emigrated back to their homeland. So the museum tasked the Czech-American photo-artist Jan Tichy to co-curate a large Lucia Moholy retrospective with them and to create through his artworks a dialogue with Lucia Moholy.
Moholy's story is as admirable as it is tragic. Even today, artists in the US and Europe are moved by her fate and are inspired by her work. Our film tells the story behind the Prague Exhibition, which has also been shown at Fotostiftung Winterthur in Switzerland.
Cannes Arts Film Festival, Austin International Art Festival, Toronto International Women Film Festival