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

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03087298.2013.769773

2150-7295

Robin Schuldenfrei,

Photography and Visual Culture

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. Keywords: Lucia Moholy (1894–1989)Walter Gropius (1883–1969)László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946)glass negativesBauhaus photographyBauhaus architectureBauhaus designexileWorld War II Notes 1 – Rolf Sachsse's two books on the photography of Lucia Moholy remain the most authoritative and significant: Rolf Sachsse, Lucia Moholy, Düsseldorf: Marzona 1985; and Rolf Sachsse, Lucia Moholy: Bauhaus Fotografin, Berlin: Museumspädagogischer Dienst Berlin/Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin 1995. On Lucia Moholy's Bauhaus photography, see also: Lucia Moholy, ‘Das Bauhaus-Bild’, Werk, 6:55 (1968), 397–402; Lucia Moholy, Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy: Dokumentarische Ungereimtheiten / Moholy-Nagy, Marginal Notes: Documentary Absurdities, Krefeld: Scherpe Verlag 1972; Rolf Sachsse, ‘Notes on Lucia Moholy’ and ‘Architectural and Product Photography’, in Photography at the Bauhaus, ed. Jeannine Fiedler, London: Dirk Nishen 1990, 24–33 and 184–203; Rolf Sachsse, ‘Lucia Moholy, oder: Vom Wert der Reproduktion’, in Das Neue Sehen: Von der Fotografie am Bauhaus zur Subjektiven Fotografie, ed. Rainer K. Wick, Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann 1991, 91–105; Rolf Sachsse, ‘Die Frau an seiner Seite: Irene Bayer und Lucia Moholy als Fotografinnen’, in Fotografieren hiess teilnehmen: Fotografinnen der Weimarer Republik, ed. Ute Eskildsen, Düsseldorf: Richter 1994, 67–75; Anja Baumhoff, ‘Zwischen Kunst und Technik: Lucia Moholy und die Entwicklung der modernen Produktfotografie’, in Klassik und Avantgarde: Das Bauhaus in Weimar 1919–1925, ed. Hellmut Th. Seemann and Thorsten Valk, Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag 2009, 169–84; Ulrike Müller, with the collaboration of Ingrid Radewaldt and Sandra Kemker, ‘Lucia Moholy’, in Bauhaus Women: Art, Handicraft, Design, London: Thames & Hudson 2009, 142–9; and Claire Zimmerman, ‘Lucia Moholy’, public lecture, Museum of Modern Art, ‘Women and the Bauhaus Lecture Series’, 6 January 2010, http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/188/1953. I became aware of Zimmerman's lecture, which touches upon some of the same themes, after writing this article; Zimmerman highlights the criticality of images at the Bauhaus in presenting its multiple identities to the public, especially via architectural photographs of the main school building, and Lucia Moholy's role in that process – not only as photographer but as ‘producer’, as Zimmerman frames it, especially through Moholy's editorial and production work on Bauhaus publications. She also convincingly argues that Moholy's images were made for reproduction in the way in which they served ‘pictorial goals’ rather than aiming for technical perfection. 2 – The building can no longer be experienced in this way because various restorations and renovations have replaced the original glass curtain wall, which was destroyed during World War II, with more modern variants. The original polished plate glass (Kristallspiegelglas), was an expensive, new glass developed in the 1920s that featured exceptional transparency and prevented visual distortions. For more on the glass of the Bauhaus building, see Monika Markgraf, ‘The Glass Facades of the Bauhaus Dessau Building’, in Glass in the 20th Century Architecture: Preservation and Restoration, ed. Franz Graf and Francesca Albani, Mendrisio, Switzerland: Mendrisio Academy Press 2011, 19–39. 3 – Claire Zimmerman's meticulous work on the visual implications of the architectural photograph for modernism, chiefly in the work of Mies van der Rohe, is especially helpful in light of the images under discussion here. See ‘Photographic Modern Architecture: Inside “the New Deep”’, The Journal of Architecture, 9:3 (Autumn 2004), 331–54. Through the famous photographs of the Tugendhat House, she traces various developments and distortions of its architecture (including what she terms the ‘spatiality of photographic architecture’) and convincingly argues that the post-war historical writing of architectural history was heavily influenced by photographic presentations of modern architecture, pointing out that ‘architectural photographs continued throughout the 1920s, with little critical discussion in architectural circles, to be understood as metonyms of the buildings they depicted’ (331–2 and 347). See also Claire Zimmerman, ‘Tugendhat Frames’, Harvard Design Magazine, 15 (Fall 2001), 24–31; and Claire Zimmerman, ‘Modernism, Media, Abstraction: Mies van der Rohe's Photographic Architecture in Barcelona and Brno (1927–1931)’, PhD diss., The City University of New York 2005. 4 – Moholy, Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy, 61. 5 – Ibid., 55. She goes on to lament that they had kept quiet about the extent and manner of their collaboration. 6 – The role that Lucia played in helping compose texts published under László’s name alone, as well as her collaboration on his photographic oeuvre, is only being slowly acknowledged. For a discussion of the working relationship between László and Lucia, including the lack of attribution for her contributions, including her photography, see Moholy, Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy; and Mercedes Valdivieso , ‘Eine “symbiotische Arbeitsgemeinschaft”: Lucia und László Moholy-Nagy’, in Liebe Macht Kunst. Künstlerpaare in 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Renate Berges, Cologne: Böhlau Verlag 2000, 65–85. 7 – Moholy-Nagy's ability to capture extreme views was aided by his use of a light, flexible Leica camera, purchased in the spring of 1925; in particular, the Leica newly allowed for the separation of the camera from the photographer's body resulting in a new flexibility of viewpoint and the quick capture of images. See Rolf Sachsse, ‘Telephon, Reproduktion und Erzeugerabfüllung. Zum Begriff des Originals bei László Moholy-Nagy’, in Über Moholy-Nagy, Ergebnisse aus dem internationalen László Moholy-Nagy Symposium Bielefeld, 1995, zum 100. Geburtstag des Künstlers und Bauhauslehrers, ed. Gottfried Jäger and Gudrun Wessing, Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag 1997, 78–82; and Andreas Haus, Moholy-Nagy: Fotos und Fotogramme, Munich: Schirmer-Mosel 1978, 85–6. This was in contradistinction to the painstaking images produced by Lucia's cumbersome, large-format camera on tripod. 8 – For the move away from this earlier kind of straight forward descriptive photographing of whole objects in architectural space and the later interest, from 1928 onwards, in using photography to convey the tactility as well as the optical elements in pictorial reproductions of Bauhaus products, see T'ai Smith, ‘Limits of the Tactile and the Optical: Bauhaus Fabric in the Frame of Photography’, Grey Room, 25 (Fall 2006), 6–31. 9 – As she later reminds Herbert Bayer about her Bauhaus-era photographs, ‘I took those photographs on my own account and my own responsibility, and have been entitled, in all cases, to claim fees for publication and other uses’. Moholy to Bayer, 2 April 1955, Bauhaus Archive, Berlin (BHA), Lucia Moholy Archive (LM Archive), Folder ‘Spende Rolf Sachsse’. This enormous, time-consuming task executed by a Bauhaus wife was in keeping with the hard work, mostly unacknowledged and always unpaid, of many other Bauhaus wives in dedication to their husbands’ pursuits and the school's causes. See, for example, Lucia Moholy's contributions to László Moholy-Nagy's oeuvre in Moholy, Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy and the documentation of Ise Gropius's, and other wives’, tireless assistance in Müller, Bauhaus Women, especially the entry ‘Ise Gropius’, 136–41. 10 – Baumhoff, ‘Zwischen Kunst und Technik’, 179. For more on product photography at the Bauhaus, see Rolf Sachsse, ‘Architectural and Product Photography’, in Photography at the Bauhaus, 184–203. 11 – See Robin Schuldenfrei, ‘The Irreproducibility of the Bauhaus Object’, in Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse, and Modernism, ed. Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei, London: Routledge 2009, 37–60. 12 – Notable exceptions are Marianne Brandt's 1928 photomontage me (Metal Workshop), which prominently features a photograph, by Brandt, of a towering stack of metal lampshades, and in later photographs, when the school was under the directorship of Hannes Meyer, which depict vitrines filled with rows of the same Bauhaus object such as for the 1930 Bauhaus travelling exhibition. 13 – See, for example, industrial products photographed in Renger-Patzsch's masterwork of Neue Sachlichkeit photography: Carl Georg Heise, ed., Die Welt ist schön: Einhundert Photographische Aufnahmen von Albert Renger-Patzsch, Munich: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1928. For a discussion of how straightforward, sachlich photographs by Renger-Patzsch and others were used by early-twentieth-century German educational photographic archives for use for teaching and academic study and ways in which it led to the development of Neue Sachlichkeit as a style, see Pepper Stetler, ‘The Object, the Archive and the Origins of Neue Sachlichkeit Photography’, History of Photography, 35:3 (August 2011), 281–95. 14 – Lucia Moholy, ‘The Missing Negatives’, The British Journal of Photography, 130 (7 January 1983), 6. She also utilised 9 cm×12 cm photographic film stock in this period. 15 – Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, New York: Harper Brothers 1950, 133. 16 – Ibid., 67. 17 – Lucia Moholy forged links to important British academic figures, as well as titled nobility. She was probably a key figure in getting British patrons interested in Neubauer's case who then exerted external pressure on his behalf. For example, on 21 April 1934 the London Times published a letter by Princess Elizabeth Bibesco, daughter of former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and wife of a Rumanian prince, calling for an international press campaign to save his life; likewise signers were sought among professors at Oxford and Cambridge for a petition asking for Neubauer's release. Peter Crane, Wir leben nun mal auf einem Vulkan, trans. Rolf Bulang, Bonn: Weidle Verlag 2005, 227–8. Elizabeth Fox Howard, an English Quaker, became involved with the effort to free several key political prisoners, and travelled to Germany on several occasions, including flying from England to Berlin to plead on behalf of Neubauer (whom she refers to as Dr T [note 78]). See Elizabeth Fox Howard, Across Barriers, Essex: Chigwell Press 1941, 65 and 71–8. For more on the circumstances of Theodor Neubauer's captivity and the intervention of patrons on his behalf, see Peter Crane, Elizabeth Fox Howard and Sonja Müller, Theodor Neubauer: Lebensbilder großer Pädagogen, Berlin: Volk und Wissen 1971. The author would like to acknowledge and thank Peter Crane for his generous sharing of information pertaining to Neubauer. 18 – Moholy to Heinrich Jacoby, 1 October 1947, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 120. Letter in German. Reprinted in Sachsse, Lucia Moholy: Bauhaus Fotografin, 81. 19 – Lucia Moholy, ‘Summary of Events’, February 1956, page 2, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 79. 20 – She did not, as was common in this period, receive any financial support from her former husband. 21 – Elizabeth Otto, ‘Designing Men: New Visions of Masculinity in the Photomontages of Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-Nagy’, in Bauhaus Construct, 183–204, esp. 188–90. On Moholy's portraits, see Matthew S. Witkovsky, ‘Lucia Moholy Photograph of Georg Muche’, in Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, ed. Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, New York: The Museum of Modern Art 2009, 236–41. While it does not affect the image Moholy-Nagy wanted to project, according to Lucia Moholy the garment was in actuality not a machinist's suit but a dark orange fishermen's coverall from Northern France, as noted by Sachsse, ‘Telephon, Reproduktion und Erzeugerabfüllung. Zum Begriff des Originals bei László Moholy-Nagy’, presented at the Internationales László Moholy-Nagy Symposium, Bielefeld, Germany, 1995. 22 – In May 1936 Moholy was given official permission to reside in England for a year and to open a private studio for photographic work on private commission, but she was not allowed to open a ‘shop or business premises’. See letter from K. G. Davies, Private Secretary, Home Office to Herbert Samuel, 23 May 1936, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 129. 23 – Margot Oxford and Asquith to Moholy, 6 March 1936, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 56. 24 – Lucia Moholy, A Hundred Years of Photography: 1839–1939, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1939. 25 – See ‘Konzept einer Kulturgeschichte der Fotografie’, ca. 1930 and ‘Exposé zu einer geplanten Kulturgeschichte der Fotografie’, 1932, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 1. Excerpts are reprinted in Sachsse, Lucia Moholy: Bauhaus Fotografin, 76–7. 26 – ‘Foto-buch’, n.d., typescript, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 1. 27 – By Moholy's own representation, see BHA, LM Archive, Folder 131. 28 – Moholy, Hundred Years of Photography, 164. 29 – Ibid., 165–6. 30 – For a contextual synopsis of these discussions via an analysis of texts by authors such as Josef Maria Eder, Helmut Gernsheim, Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, Beaumont Newhall and Erich Stenger, see Claude W. Sui, ‘Helmut Gernsheim: Pioneer Collector and Historian of Photography’, in Helmut Gernsheim: Pioneer of Photo History, ed. Alfried Wieczorek and Claude W. Sui, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz 2003, 27–34. See also Martin Gasser, ‘Histories of Photography 1839–1939’, History of Photography, 16:1 (Spring 1992), 50–60; and Matthew S. Witkovsky, ‘Circa 1930: Art History and the New Photography’, Etudes Photographiques, 23 (May 2009), 139–49. For a discussion of Moholy's A Hundred Years of Photography within the context of contemporaneous histories of photography, see the relevant sections of Miriam Halwani, ‘Marginalien zur Geschichtsschreibung der Fotografie 1839–1939’, PhD diss., Universität Hamburg 2010; and Miriam Halwani, Geschichte der Fotogeschichte, 1839–1939, Berlin: Reimer, 2012. 31 – Moholy, Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy, 55–6. 32 – Gernsheim knew Moholy in London; he met her in the late 1930s when she attended an exhibition of his photographs and came to know her work during subsequent visits to her studio. He cites her book as ‘probably the first book on the history of photography’ that he read. Helmut Gernsheim interviewed by Val Williams, 1995, An Oral History of British Photography © British Library, catalogue reference C459/66. 33 – BHA, LM Archive, Folder 133. She was made an ‘Associate’ of the Royal Society of Photography in May 1938. 34 – Moholy to Mrs Cavendish Bentinck, 23 February 1937, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 55. 35 – Letter, Lucia Moholy to László Moholy-Nagy, 16 November 1940, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 150. 36 – Franz Schulz, Affidavit of Support for Lucia Moholy, 7 October 1940, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 150. 37 – Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Moholy, 7 July 1940, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 100. It is notable that almost all of the correspondence between members of the Bauhaus circle after leaving Germany was written in English. Although this was sometimes the result of a letter being dictated to a secretary, in most instances this was not the case. Writing exclusively in English, perhaps, reveals one of the ways in which Bauhaus members attempted to quickly assimilate in their new host countries. They may have also written in English to avoid the suspicion that they were enemy spies or to not draw attention to themselves as German-speakers, generally, by those encountering their mail. (Where correspondence was originally in German, this will be noted.) 38 – Eventually Moholy conceded defeat and remained in England. In 1959 she moved permanently to Switzerland, where she lived until her death in 1989 at the age of ninety-five. 39 – In this period in Britain many photographers would not publicly affirm their ties to Judaism or outright negate their Jewish heritage, yet the role that Jews played in photography is significant. See Michael Berkowitz, ‘Beaumont Newhall and Helmut Gernsheim: Collaboration, Friendship, and Tension amidst the “Jewishness” of Photography’, Perspectives, Journal of the Woolf Institute (Spring 2010), 17–21; and Berkowitz, ‘Photography as a Jewish Business: From High Theory, to Studio, to Snapshot’, Eastern European Jewish Affairs, 39:3 (2009), 389–400. 40 – Rolf Sachsse's dates indicate that Moholy was twenty when she left for Wiesbaden yet she states in the short biographic paragraph of A Hundred Years of Photography that she was eighteen. See Sachsse, Lucia Moholy: Bauhaus Fotografin, 12; and Moholy, Hundred Years of Photography, back overleaf. 41 – Sachsse, Lucia Moholy: Bauhaus Fotografin, 11. 42 – Donald Kuspit, ‘Meyer Schapiro's Jewish Unconscious’, Prospects, 21 (October 1996), 491–508. 43 – See correspondence spanning the period from 9 March 1936 to 13 June 1947 in BHA, LM Archive, Folders 129 and 130. She resided in England without a valid passport. See Moholy to Herbert Samuel, 19 October 1946, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 129. Moholy's application for naturalisation was submitted 12 September 1939; she was awarded British citizenship in June 1947, expedited through the intervention of Samuel, a powerful friend with connections to the British Home Office. 44 – See BHA, Lucia Moholy Archive, Sammlung Briefe Moholy-Karsten. 45 – On the negatives generally, see Moholy, ‘The Missing Negatives’, 6–8 and 18; and Sabine Hartmann, ‘Anmerkungen zum fotografischen Nachlaß’, in Sachsse, Lucia Moholy: Bauhaus Fotografin, 113–16. Regarding the appropriation of the negatives by Gropius, see Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei, ‘Introduction’, in Bauhaus Construct, 1–9; Mercedes Valdivieso, ‘Lucia Moholy, el ojo anónimo que retrató la Bauhaus’, La Balsa de la Medusa, 40 (1996), 85–7; Valdivieso, ‘Eine “symbiotische Arbeitsgemeinschaft”’, 84 (endnote 40); and Müller, Bauhaus Women, 146–8. On the acquisition of the negatives by the Bauhaus Archive, Berlin in 1992, see Sibylle Hoiman, ‘Lucia Moholy: Zur Geschichte ihres Nachlasses im Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin’, Special Delivery: Von Künstlernachlässen und ihren Verwaltern, ed. Volkmar Hansen, Ulrike Horstenkamp and Gabriele Weidle, Bonn: Arbeitskreis selbständiger Kultur-Institute e.V. 2011, 170–81. 46 – Gropius's shipment reached him on 20 October 1937. Letter Gropius to Alfred Barr, 21 October 1937, Walter Gropius Papers (MS Ger 208), Houghton Library, Harvard University. 47 – Lucia Moholy to László Moholy-Nagy, 19 July 1946, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 99. 48 – As Moholy recalls in a letter to Gropius: ‘When I left, all my things i.e. books, pictures, household goods and negatives were in one place, and I know nothing about subsequent arrangements. When Moholy and Sybil [sic] came to London, some of my furniture and a few other odd things came along in their lift – but not unfortunately the negatives. I presume they were left behind on account of their weight, being glass. […] It was of course impossible to do anything about it during the war years. When, later, I wrote to Moholy asking him about the circumstances, he was too ill to reply. When Sybil [sic] came to London on her way to Germany, I brought the subject up, and it was then that she said (I had never heard it before) that the negatives were moved to your place. And, she continued, as the house was bombed, the negatives, no doubt, have been destroyed.’ Moholy to Gropius, 21 Jan. 1954, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 75. 49 – Moholy to Gropius, 1 June 1950, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 74. The Moholy-Gropius correspondence all occurred in English. 50 – Ibid. 51 – Cable, Gropius to Moholy, BHA, Archive Gropius, GS 19/1, Folder 469. 52 – Gropius to Moholy, 20 June 1950, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 74. 53 – Moholy to Gropius, 12 June 1950, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 74. The typescript for the lecture notes, telegraphically, at the conclusion: ‘Slides – few – difficult to come by’. ‘Lecture for the London School of Printing and Graphic Arts’, 8, typescript with handwritten corrections, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 8. 54 – Moholy, ‘The Missing Negatives’, 7. 55 – Moholy to Gropius, 21 January 1954, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 75. 56 – Ibid. 57 – Gropius to Moholy, 25 February 1954, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 75. Gropius had, in fact, already deposited the negatives with the museum by March 1950, as the curator writes to Gropius: ‘I wish to take this opportunity to thank you for your very generous gift of some two hundred negatives of Bauhaus material. These will prove of enormous value to us and I shall proceed with having the prints made in the near future. I understand you would like to have prints for your own record and I shall be very happy to send these to you’. Charles L. Kuhn to Gropius, 9 March 1950, Walter Gropius Papers (MS Ger 208). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Evidently the prints were not promptly delivered and Gropius, eager for the material, made the following request to the museum a year later: ‘I wonder whether I could get copies of the negatives on Bauhaus production which you promised me when I handed all the negatives out to be stored in the Museum. I would highly appreciate having a set of these copies in my personal file’. Gropius to Kuhn, 23 January 1951, BHA, Walter Gropius Archive, GN Kiste Nr. 6, Folder 478. The museum did make copies which remain in the collection today, see figures 5, 6, and 8. 58 – Moholy to Gropius, 20 March 1954, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 75. 59 – Moholy consulted both international and copyright lawyers for assistance in first getting her negatives back from Gropius – before he will release them he wants her to sign a legal document negating her claims to any compensation in the years he held the negatives – and attempting to obtain compensation for her loss of their use. Gropiu maintained that storing them and shipping them back would be compensation enough (although they are ultimately shipped back at Moholy's expense). 60 – Charles Aukin (Moholy's lawyer) to Gropius, 3 May 1957, BHA, Archive Gropius, GS 19/1, Folder 471. 61 – Sabine Hartmann, ‘Anmerkungen zum fotografischen Nachlaß’, 113. 62 – Moholy to Gropius, 30 October 1954, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 75. The letter is excerpted here as it appears in the original, in English with the German parenthetical ‘zu treuen Händen’, a precise phrase for the safekeeping of objects in trust, added here in German as if to underscore to Gropius, by invoking his mother tongue, his responsibility to her. 63 – Charles Aukin to Gropius, 17 October 1956, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 79. 64 – Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Lucia Moholy, 7 August 1947, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 100. 65 – Moholy to Gropius, 30 October 1954, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 75. 66 – Lucia Moholy, ‘Summary of Events’, February 1956, 8, BHA, Archive LM, Folder 79. 67 – Moholy also maintained a meticulous card catalogue of her images, with each image identified by number, size and subject. Despite its bulk, the card catalogue was of enough importance to her that it was among the few possessions she brought with her into flight. The card catalogue is available as part of the Lucia Moholy collection at the Bauhaus Archive, Berlin. 68 – After protest over the omission of her name in the photograph credits, Moholy was credited for the 1955 reprint translated into German, but only for thirteen images out of the forty-nine used. 69 – For an examination of the ways in which the exhibition neutralised the school's social and political history, in light of period political events and Gropius's own status as an exile, see Karen Koehler, ‘The Bauhaus, 1919–1928: Gropius in Exile and the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., 1938’, in Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich, ed. Richard A. Etlin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002, 287–315. Koehler points out the importance of recognising ‘the extent to which the decisions made in 1938 by the organizers of the MoMA exhibition have had a lasting effect on the Bauhaus legacy’ (‘The Bauhaus’, 309). See also Karen Koehler, ‘Angels of History Carrying Bricks: Gropius in Exile’, in The Dispossessed: An Anatomy of Exile, ed. Peter I. Rose, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 2005, 257–80. 70 – Although the organisers, including Gropius himself, wanted the exhibition to cover the entirety of the school's history, they had to limit it to Gropius's tenure as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, despite multiple entreaties, refused to participate due to what Gropius, in a letter to Alfred H. Barr, Jr, cites as ‘the difficulties in Germany’. As Gropius continues in the letter: ‘We were eager to avoid any difficulties and to make the show as objective as possible. If we show anything of the period following my departure from the Bauhaus, there might result disagreeable situations which I do not want to face; and, without their [the other former directors’] cooperation, I do not feel entitled to describe their own intentions’. Gropius to Barr, 8 September 1938, BHA, Walter Gropius Archive, GN Kiste Nr. 6, Folder 249. 71 – ‘Notes on the Reception of the Bauhaus Exhibition’, MoMA, by Alfred H. Barr, Jr, 19 January 1939, BHA, Walter Gropius Archive, GN Kiste Nr. 6, Folder 249. However, Mary Anne Staniszewski argues that the show was perceived by the public, critics and the Museum itself as a failure. See ‘The Bauhaus Debacle’, in Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1998, 142–52. In terms of popularising the school in the United States, helping its former members establish themselves in exile, and allowing certain protagonists such as Gropius, Bayer, Moholy-Nagy and Breuer to forge close ties to key people within MoMA, relationships that would serve them well for the rest of their careers, the exhibition should be viewed as a success. 72 – Gropius to Bayer, 14 November 1937, BHA, Walter Gropius Archive, GN Kiste Nr. 6, Folder 247. Letter in German. 73 – Gropius to Dorothy H. Dudley, MoMA, 4 January 1939, 2, BHA, Walter Gropius Archive, GN Kiste Nr. 6, Folder 248. 74 – Press Release, Bauhaus 1919–1928, 3, BHA, Walter Gropius Archive, GN Kiste Nr. 6, Folder 248. Despite this statement, the same press release announced that ‘about 700 individual items in wood, metal, canvas and paint, textiles, paper, glass and many other substances’ were on exhibit (Press Release, 1). 75 – Henry McBride, ‘Attractions in the Galleries’, New York Sun (10 December 1938), 11, cited in Staniszewski, The Power of Display, 151. 76 – Moholy also intended to author a book on the Bauhaus, taking pains to note that she had at her disposal ample material to richly illustrate it. For several variations of proposals sent to English and German publishers over a period of years between 1958 and 1963, see BHA, LM Archive, Folder 10. 77 – Moholy to Sigfried Giedion, 11 February 1955, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 76. 78 – Marcel Breuer to Moholy, 16 September 1958, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 68. This is in reference to Marcel Breuer, Sun and Shadow: The Philosophy of an Architect, Dodd, Mead & Company 1955. 79 – Marcel Breuer to S. Phelps Platt, Jr, Dodd, Mead & Company, 16 September 1958, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 68. 80 – See Magdalena Droste, ‘The Bauhaus Object between Authorship and Anonymity’, in Bauhaus Construct, 205–25; and Ise Gropius, Diary, BHA. 81 – There were, for example, vintage Moholy Bauhaus photographic prints stamped by Stoedtner, imported and mounted on cardboard by a New York service (Rudolf Lesch Fine Arts Inc.) that were part of a large set of general art and architectural images circulated in the United States for instructional use in art schools and in art history departments. I am grateful to Elizabeth Otto for bringing the holdings of such prints at the State University of New York at Buffalo to my attention. 82 – When Moholy discovered that the Stoedtner Archive was reproducing and selling her images and investigated further, she learned that prints and negatives in Stoedtner's collection not previously destroyed by bomb, fire and water damage during the war had been removed from Berlin to Düsseldorf in July 1948 in a British airlift, but that all business documents and correspondence (which would have definitively clarified how her images entered the Stoedtner archive) remained inaccessible in the Russian sector of Berlin. See Ottilie Stoedtner to Moholy, 28 July 1958, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 100. 83 – Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack to Moholy, 20 October 1964, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 86. (Hirschfeld-Mack is quoting letter, Gropius to Hirschfeld-Mack, dated 14 December 1962.) 84 – See Annemarie Jaeggi, Fagus: Industrial Culture from Werkbund to Bauhaus, trans. Elizabeth M. Schwaiger, New York: Princeton Architectural Press 2000, 107; and, more generally, the chapter entitled ‘Fagus and Photography’, 105–22. See also Annemarie Jaeggi, Die Moderne im Blick: Albert Renger-Patzsch fotografiert das Fagus Werk, Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung 2011. 85 – Gropius had already been circumspect about images in 1923, as he noted in a letter to Adolf Behne ‘that he could not give photographs of the Bauhaus to Behne [who was preparing his important history of architecture, The Modern Functional Building] because he was already planning a “special publication” [his own Bauhaus series book Internationale Architektur] that “obligated” him not to release illustrations beforehand’. Rosemarie Haag Bletter's introduction to Adolf Behne, The Modern Functional Building, Santa Monica: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities 1996, 32. 86 – For a consideration of the inverse, the examination of an archival photograph as a modernist object, specifically its role as a generator of multiple meanings and narratives of the Bauhaus, and more broadly in representing modernist visuality itself, see Paul Paret, ‘Picturing Sculpture: Object, Image, Archive’, in Bauhaus Construct, 163–80. 87 – Herbert Bayer to Moholy, 23 March 1955, BHA, LM Archive, Folder 66. 88 – Moholy, Hundred Years of Photography, 164.