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Lucia Moholy
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| Lucia Moholy, Bauhaus Dessau: workshop building from the southwest c.1926 |
A Brief Biography:
Lucia Moholy (1894–1989) was a Czech-born British photographer, editor, and writer who played a fundamental role in shaping the visual identity of the Bauhaus art school. Her work is characterized by the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement, focusing on clear, unsentimental, and technically precise documentation of modernism.
She produced the iconic photographs of the Bauhaus building in Dessau (designed by Walter Gropius) and the "Masters' Houses." These images became the primary way the world understood Bauhaus architecture. Moholy photographed the furniture, metalwork, and ceramics created in the Bauhaus workshops, helping to market the school’s aesthetic as a global movement.
Along with her then-husband, László Moholy-Nagy, she co-developed experimental techniques like the photogram. After leaving Germany in 1933, she lived in London and became a renowned expert in microfilm technology, directing the ASLIB Microfilm Service during World War II. In 1939, she authored A Hundred Years of Photography, one of the first comprehensive histories of the medium in English. She later worked on archival projects for UNESCO in the Middle East before retiring to Switzerland.
Resources and Links
Lucia Moholy, The Kitchen, Gael Newton AM March 2026
Photographs - Lucia Moholy: a small selection
Lucia Moholy's photographs provide a different perspective on the Bauhaus, Alyn Griffiths, dezeen magazine 2024
Harvard Art Museum, Art Talk: Picturing the Modern Home - Lucia Moholy's Bauhaus Living Room, 1921
Photography at the Bauhaus, edited Jeannine Fiedler, 1990
Robin Schuldenfre ‘Images in Exile: Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Negatives and the Construction of the Bauhaus Legacy’,
History of Photography, May 2013
"What I Could Lose": The Fate of Lucia Moholy, Meghan Forbes 2016, Michigan Quarterly Review
Art Blart: Exhibition review, Lucia Moholy 2025
Exhibition site, Exposures 2025
Exhibition publication: Lucy Moholy Exposures 2025
Listing with Museum of Modern Art (New York)
Harvard University Archive: The Bauhaus
Search result for Lucia Moholy
For association with new appliances Hugo Junkers & Co
See interview withBauhaus scholar Robin Schuldenfrei author of Images in Exile: Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Negatives and the Construction of the Bauhaus Legacy
Robin Schuldenfrei has studied Lucia Moholy and photography at the Bauhaus
The Frankfurt Kitchen
About László Moholy-Nagy, Hungary 1895 – 1946 USA
Hungarian born László Moholy-Nagy was a leading modernist painter, sculptor, photographer, film maker and theorist.
He experimented with photography while teaching in the 1920s at the Bauhaus design school at Weimar then later Dessau.
He used unusual camera angles as a way of exploring different compositions and spatial experience making others see the world differently as a result. Photography, however, was not granted official status at the school until 1929.
For essays by Gael Newton AM - click here
For the photo-web contents page - click here
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