Images in Exile: Lucia Moholy's Bauhaus Negatives and the Construction of the Bauhaus Legacy

Abstract

This article argues that photographs of the Bauhaus – its architecture and design objects – taken by Lucia Moholy played a key role in establishing the school during the short period of its existence, but that they took on heightened significance in exile, during the post-war period in which the Bauhaus's legacy was solidified. As Bauhaus members fled Germany in the 1930s, what they were able to take with them formed a disproportionate part of their oeuvre thereafter; what was no longer extant was often lost to the footnotes of history. Lucia Moholy was forced to leave behind her entire collection of original glass negatives in Berlin when she escaped into exile in 1933. What followed – in which the negatives she thought lost became the core of the visual archive deployed by Walter Gropius in the subsequent narration of the Bauhaus – demonstrates the exigencies of exile, especially the lacunae created by objects left behind upon emigration, and how photography as a medium became crucial to the later reception of the closed school and what had been produced there. By examining this constellation of circumstances, this article illuminates shifts in notions of authorship and in the signification of objects. It argues that processes of meaning-formation for exiled artists of the Bauhaus were closely tied to the power involved in the ability to reproduce photographs, specifically Lucia Moholy's photographs, and for the importance of the photograph as a stand-in for that which was no longer accessible or extant.

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