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, Bauhaus, that continue to influence architecture and design around the world in a span from IKEA to Apple. Lucia's pictures not only capture buildings and objects, but also the Bauhaus spirit and atmosphere.
Lucia 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 film. Lucia's part has only recently surfaced. Lászlo, as it turns out, never in his life set foot inside a darkroom....
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.
Prague's Kunsthalle (art exhibition center) 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 through seven of her artworks to create a dialog with Lucia Moholy about her life.
Lucia's story is as admirable as it it tragic. Even today artists are moved by her fate and in the USA and Europe are inspired by her work. Our film tells the story behind the Prague Exhibition which opens in 2025 in the Swiss cities of Winterthur and Lausanne.
First broadcast
planned for February 2025
Produced by
Behringfilm + Klotz Media, Freiburg
A film by
Sigrid Faltin
Running time
52 min.
Team
Written and directed by Sigrid Faltin
cinematographer: Ingo Behring
sound and 2. camera: Samuel Rupp, Yuyao Shen, Timo Vögele
drone: Timo Vögele
editor: Petra Hölge
composer: Günter A. Buchwald
actress Lucia Moholy: Susanne Schäfer
actor Walter Gropius: Heinzl Spagl
actress Ise Gropius: Tjadke Biallowons
make up: Jacqueline de Leo
Thanks to:
Augustinum Freiburg
Bauhaus Archiv Berlin
Bauhaus-Universtität Weimar
Einrichtungskultur Freiburg
Funduz Staufen
Holzkamera Heinicke
Museumsshop Weimar
RIO Weimar
Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau
executive producer: Regina Weise (B2W Filmworks), Katharina Krohmann (ZDF/Arte)
Producer: Ingo Behring
commissioning editor: Sabine Bubeck-Paaz (ZDF/Arte)
A coproduktion of B2W Filmworks with ZDF/Arte and SRG, and the support of MFG Filmförderung Baden-Württemberg