Lázsló Moholy-Nagy and Lucia Moholy (née Schulz)

As teachers, writers, and artists affiliated with the international Bauhaus network, Lázsló Moholy-Nagy and Lucia Moholy transformed how the medium of photography was understood by artists and intellectuals working in Europe and the United States. Moholy’s contributions to projects previously solely attributed to Moholy-Nagy were, until recently, overlooked. During their marriage, from 1921 to 1929, they collaborated closely on photographic experiments and widely influential texts. These include “Production-Reproduction” (first published in the Dutch journal De Stijl in 1922) and Malerei Fotografie Film (Painting Photography Film) (1927), a manifesto-like book that used innovative typography and design to defend photography’s creative potential in relation to other media. Together, they established and promoted the New Vision aesthetic, which celebrated the camera’s unique ability to revolutionize perception through unconventional viewpoints and experiments with form and light.

The pair met in Berlin through mutual friends in 1920, shortly after Moholy-Nagy—a veteran of World War I who dropped out of law school to become an artist—arrived in the city from Vienna. During his short stay in Vienna, he joined the Hungarian avant-garde group MA (1916–26) founded by Lajos Kassák. Moholy was fluent in Czech, German, and English, and studied art history and philosophy before moving to Germany in 1915. Her job in publishing supported the couple as Moholy-Nagy became immersed in Berlin’s artistic circles.

Moholy-Nagy was transformed by his encounter with Soviet Constructivism at the First Russian Art Exhibition, a landmark show held at the Van Diemen Gallery in Berlin in 1922. In the same year, he met Walter Gropius, architect and founder of the Bauhaus art school, while exhibiting at Der Sturm gallery. Gropius hired him as the director of the Bauhaus metal workshop in 1923, where his students included Marianne Brandt, who later succeeded him. During their early years at the Bauhaus, Moholy apprenticed with the photographer Hermann Eckner in Weimar and studied photography at the Akademie für Graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe in Leipzig. Her skills in the darkroom proved essential to their joint experimentation with photograms.

Throughout his career, Moholy-Nagy synthesized ideas circulating in the international avant-gardes and experimented with abstract painting, photography, film, collage, kinetic sculpture, typography, exhibition, stage, and commercial design. He curated the German section of the Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929 and explored the possibilities of installation through unrealized plans for dynamic, interactive displays, including Room of the Present for Alexander Dorner’s Hannover Museum and Light Prop for an Electric Stage, both in 1930.

Together, Gropius, Moholy, and Moholy-Nagy developed the Bauhaus book series—an ambitious program of publications (fourteen of which were realized) that cemented the school’s international renown and disseminated its vision of the intersection between modern art and design. Bringing to bear her many years of experience in publishing, Moholy oversaw the books production and edited the series, but her work went uncredited.

After teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau from 1921 to 1928, Moholy-Nagy played a central role in the transfer of the school’s ideas to the United States by establishing the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1937 (initially called the Chicago School of Design, and also known as the New Bauhaus). His colleagues there included Alexander Archipenko, Carl Eckart, and Gyorgy Kepes; he invited Lucia Moholy to teach at the school, but her US visa was denied by immigration officials, who cited a lack of teaching experience. Beyond his formal teaching responsibilities, Moholy-Nagy exposed his American students to art and ideas from the interwar European context by hosting them at his apartment, which included a gallery of his own works, Marcel Breuer’s furniture, Marcel Duchamp’s roto-reliefs, and Kurt Schwitter’s recordings of poetry recitations. Until his untimely death from leukemia in 1946, he continued to produce works of art alongside commercial assignments.

Moholy’s extensive photographic documentation of Bauhaus artists, spaces, and designs proved essential to preserving the influential school’s legacy after it closed in 1933, when faculty voted to dissolve the school rather than adhere to Nazi party cultural policy. She had taken more than five hundred photographs depicting life on the school’s campuses in Weimar and Dessau, including numerous portraits of its key protagonists and photographs of its various workshops, products, and student assignments. Widely reproduced in publications and exhibitions, they were essential to communicating the school’s ethos and achievements after its closure, when many of the faculty and students went into exile during World War II.

Her involvement with the medium of photography continued after she separated from Moholy-Nagy in 1929 (their divorce was not finalized until 1934). She taught photography at Johannes Itten’s art and architecture school in Berlin in 1930–31, worked as a freelance photographer, traveled to Yugoslavia as a photojournalist, and wrote one of the earliest histories of photography intended for a general audience, a paperback titled A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939 (Penguin, 1939), which sold forty thousand copies in two years. During the war years and until the end of her life, she pioneered efforts to preserve cultural heritage through microfilm and led projects on this topic for UNESCO and other organizations.

Although their lives diverged after their relationship ended, Moholy and Moholy-Nagy independently continued to explore a goal they proclaimed in Painting Photography Film (Bauhaus book no. 8): to use modern media to see the world anew.