by Mary Jo Bang
She and Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus together in 1926 and separated in 1929. In 1933, after Theodor Neubauer, a Communist Party deputy in the Reichstag, was arrested in her apartment, she fled the same day, leaving her negatives in the care of Moholy-Nagy. When he left Germany, he gave the negatives to Gropius for safekeeping. Lucia Moholy made her way to France, and then to England, where she worked to secure Neubauer’s release. She eventually opened a studio and worked as a portrait photographer, elaborating her ideas about portraiture in her book, A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939 (London: Penguin Books, Ltd. 1939). Her studio was bombed by the Allies in 1945, the same year Neubauer was guillotined in Brandenburg prison.*
The remaining war years were spent working for a microfilm service connected to the British intelligence organization at Bletchley Park. Moholy-Nagy, teaching at the newly reopened Bauhaus school in Chicago, offered her a job teaching photography if she could get a visa; however, her countless visa applications were denied. After the war she began to see the Bauhaus monographs that had been published in the States. She saw that Gropius had used her images repeatedly without attribution in order to establish his name and that of the Bauhaus in America. There are letters sent to Gropius during the war years asking whether he knew where she could find her negatives because she had been invited to give lectures in London about the Bauhaus but couldn’t do so without images. He wrote back suggesting she reproduce images from the prints in the pages of old magazines. There are letters sent to lawyers after the war, asking whether she could be compensated after the fact for the negatives’ use. There are letters in which she begged Gropius to return her negatives. There is his reply in which he wrote that he needed them, and insisted that she had given him the negatives when she “chose” to leave Berlin. There are prints with her name stamped on the back crossed out and Gropius’s added. The letters are in the Bauhaus archives in Berlin and in the Gropius archives at Harvard.
Some half of her glass negatives were eventually returned to her, sent by Gropius C.O.D., in shoddy packaging, with significant loss. In the late 1950s, she was hired to set up a photographic archive and laboratory in Turkey. Eventually, she moved to Switzerland where she worked at a publishing house that specialized in art criticism and art education. In 1983, she published an article titled “The Missing Negatives” in the British Journal of Photography, documenting the history of the use of her negatives without attribution—a final effort to close the gap between the work she had made and her ownership of it. She spent the rest of her life exhibiting her work and working to correct historical inaccuracies in books and articles about Moholy-Nagy’s early work, much of which had been made by the two of them together in the darkroom. She died in 1989 at the age of 95, outliving most of the other principals of the Bauhaus school and movement. These poems are not about her but were written by someone who knew of her.
* Neubauer was interned in the Buchenwald concentration camp from 1933 to 1939; he died in Brandenburg prison on February 5, 1945.
NOTES
COVER IMAGES: Four photograms attributed to László Moholy-Nagy: Laci und Lucia, 1925; Untitled 1925; Untitled 1923–24; Eiffel Tower and Peg Top, 1928. All four, based on the dates, were likely collaborative images made by Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy.
TITLE: A Doll for Throwing: Alma Siedhoff-Buscher’s Bauhaus Wurfpuppe (translated variously as throw doll, throwing doll, or doll for throwing) was a flexible and durable woven-yarn doll with a round wooden head—which if thrown, it was said, would always land with grace. A ventriloquist is said to “throw” his or her voice into a doll that rests on the knee.
A MODEL OF A MACHINE: Sven Wingquist, Self-Aligning Ball Bearings, 1907, and Outboard Propeller, 1925, Aluminum Company of America, from Machine Art (MoMA Exhibition #34, March 5-April 29, 1934, organized by Philip Johnson).
OF MANNEQUINS AND BUILDING EXTERIORS: Getty Research Institute: Inventory of Bauhaus Student Work 1919–1933: photographs, including 2 of mannequins and 2 of building exteriors, ca. 1930.
SELF-PORTRAIT AS A PHOTOGRAPH OF A PLATTER: Getty Research Institute: Inventory of Bauhaus Student Work 1919–1933: Hans Finsler, n.d., 1 photograph of a platter of chocolates.
THE CHESS SET ON A TABLE BETWEEN TWO CHAIRS: Chess set, 1924, pear wood, natural and stained black, Josef Hartwig designer, manufactured: Bauhaus, Weimar.
ONE GLASS NEGATIVE: Getty Research Institute: Inventory of Bauhaus Student Work 1919–1933: Franz Ehrlich, ca. 1928–1932, 1 glass negative titled “Studier arbeit.”
TWO NUDES: László Moholy-Nagy, photograph of Lucia Moholy and Edith Tschichold, ca. 1925.
STILL LIFE WITH GLASSES: Iwao Yamawaki, silver gelatin print, 1930–39.
ON THE BALCONY OF THE BUILDING: Umbo (Otto Umbehr) photograph of Hannes Meyer (director of the Bauhaus school from 1928–1930) with student Hilde Reindl on the balcony of the Bauhaus building, 1928, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Irene Bayer-Hecht, Bauhaus, Dessau (From a Balcony), silver gelatin print, 1925–28, Museum of New Mexico. Bauhauslers on a balcony of the studio building, 1931, Stiftung Bauhaus, Dessau.
THE MIRROR: László Moholy-Nagy, Photogram Number 1—The Mirror (Der Spiegel. Fotogram Nr. 1), negative 1922–1923; print ca. 1928.
ADMISSION: Walter Gropius, “Bauhaus Manifesto and Program” (1919): “Admission: Any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex, whose previous education is deemed adequate by the Council of Masters, will be admitted, as far as space permits.”
NEWS OF THE DAY: News of the Day (Neues von Tages) is a comic opera by Paul Hindesmith (libretto by Marcellus Schiffer), first performed in 1929. It parodies celebrity, marriage, and modern life. Onstage, a nude woman in a bathtub sings about the pleasures of hot running water.
A NUMBERED GRAPH THAT SHOWS HOW EACH PART OF THE BODY WOULD FIT INTO A CHAIR: Assorted papers related to Bauhaus designers, 19191984: Bauhaus Konvolut, design for a seat which accommodates a man 170 cm. tall. Pencil drawing which shows with a numbered graph how each part of the body would fit into a chair.
THE HUMAN FIGURE IN A DRESS: Oskar Schlemmer, Triadic Ballet (Triadisches Ballett), 1922; Oskar Schlemmer, Highly Simplified Head Construction (Profile) (Einfache Kopjkonstruktion [Profil]), pencil and ink, 1928, Bühnen-Archiv.
OUR GAME. OUR PARTY. OUR WORK.: “Our Game. Our Party. Our Work.” was the title of a lecture given by Johannes Itten, master teacher of the “preliminary course,” upon his arrival at the Bauhaus in 1919. Rudolf Lutz designed a poster for the event.
PORTRAIT IN THE FORM OF EPHEMERA: Black and white photograph of Alan Turing, on the steps of the bus, with members of the Walton Athletic Club, 1946 (www.turing.org.uk). Article by Lucia Moholy, “The ASLIB Microfilm Service: The Story of Its Wartime Activities,” Journal of Documentation 2 (December 1946): 148–51.
PHOTOGRAPH PRINTED WITH HATCH-MARKS OR LINES ACROSS THE PORTRAIT: Getty Research Institute: Inventory of Bauhaus Student Work 1919–1933: Lotte Beese, ca. 1928, photograph of Xanti Schawinsky printed with hatch-marks or lines across the portrait.
SELF-PORTRAIT IN THE BATHROOM MIRROR: Ilse Gropius, silver gelatin print ca. 1926–27, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.
IN THE GARDEN BEHIND THE MASTER’S HOUSE: László Moholy-Nagy, photograph of Lucia Moholy, ca. 1925.
IN THIS PHOTOGRAPH I AM UNTITLED: Lucia Moholy, Self-portrait, silver gelatin print, 1931.
THE DOLL SONG: A song from The Tales of Hoffman (Les Contes d’Hoffmann), an opera by Jacques Offenbach, based on three short stories by Ernst Theodore Wilhelm Hoffmann, pen name E.T.A., staged at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin (Krolloper de Berlin). László Moholy-Nagy designed the sets for Hoffmann’s Erzählungen in 1929 and for Madame Butterfly in 1931. Lucia Moholy filmed the sets. From 1933 to 1942, the building housed the government of the German Reichstag. It was bombed by the Allies during WWII and finally demolished in 1951.
STAIRWAY, SEASIDE: László Moholy-Nagy, Stairway in the Bexhill Seaside Pavillion (Sussex, England), silver gelatin print, 1936. Karla Gr
osch (1904–1933), a trained dancer and one of only two female teachers at the Bauhaus in Dessau, taught gymnatics there from 1928 to 1932. In 1929, she performed in Oskar Schlemmer’s Glass Dance and in Metal Dance. In a letter to Max Werner Lenz, an actor with whom she had an affair, Grosch wrote, “… this is the way I am, light-dark, warm-cold, up-down.” In 1933, pregnant with Lenz’s child, she immigrated to Palestine with a Bauhaus student and architect, Franz (Bobby) Aichinger. In Tel Aviv, in May of that year, she died of a heart attack while swimming in the sea.
THE GAME OF ROLES: The title of Luigi Pirandello’s The Game of Roles (Il giuoco delle parti) is usually mistranslated into English as The Rules of the Game. The play was first performed in 1918. The characters in Pirandello’s play, Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore), are rehearsing this play. These two plays, plus Tonight, We Improvise (Questa sera si recita a soggetto) form a trilogy. The actors in Xanti Schawinsky’s non-narrative “spectodrama” titled Play, Life, Illusion (1936–1937) are rehearsing Tonight, We Improvise. In an article in The Drama Review 15 (no. 3, Summer 1971), Schawinsky wrote that the rehearsal scene is one “in which a clashing encounter, reality and illusion, create staggering confusion” (quoted in Xanti Schawinsky: Head Drawings and Faces of War, The Drawing Center, 2014).
FRAGMENT OF A BRIDE: Grete Stern and Ellen (Rosenberg) Auerbach, silver gelatin print, 1930. In 1929, Stern and Auerbach opened an advertising studio under the name “ringl+pit,” said to be their childhood nicknames.
GESTURE DANCE DIAGRAM: Oskar Schlemmer, sketch, 1926. Gesture Dance was one of several dances that grew out of Schlemmer’s 1922 Triadic Ballet. The others were Form Dance, Space Dance, Scenery Dance, and Hoop Dance.
THE HEAD OF A DANCER: Lotte Jacobi, photograph of Niura Norskaya, silver gelatin print, 1929.
THE TRANSFORMATION ANXIETY DREAM: László Moholy-Nagy, The Transformation/Anxiety Dream, fotoplastique, 1925.
THE BRACELET: László Moholy-Nagy, bracelet, steel and plastic, n.d.
A BALLET BASED ON THE NUMBER THREE: Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet (Triadisches Ballett), which premiered in 1922, had three acts, each associated with a different color; three dancers (two male, one female); twelve dances; and eighteen costumes.
THE SHATTERED MARRIAGE: László Moholy-Nagy, The Broken Marriage (Die zerrüttete ehe), sometimes translated as A Marriage Gone to Pieces, fotoplastique, 1925.
ME, A CHRONICLE: Marianne Brandt, me (Metal Workshop) in 9 years of the Bauhaus. a chronicle (me [Metallwerkstatt] in 9 jahre Bauhaus. eine chronik), 1928, photomontage of silver gelatin prints on white cardboard.
THE POSSESSIVE FORM: Based on a Lucia Moholy resume found in the Lucia Moholy collection at the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.
THE SCURRYING WHITE MICE DISAPPEAR: Robert Walser, in “A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories” in Fritz Kocher’s Essays (pub. 1904), translated by Damion Searls, New York Review Books, 2013, p. 17: “It is as though you could hear thought itself softly whispering, softly stirring. It’s like the scurrying of little white mice.”
THINGS TO COME: A 1936 film adapted by H. G. Wells from The Shape of Things to Come, his 1933 sci-fi novel. Ninety seconds of uncredited Moholy-Nagy designs are incorporated into the film.
SHE HE AT THE FLOWER BASKET: Matilde (Til) Brugman’s “she he” (1917-1922) is a poem in French and English in which the word Houbigant appears. Houbigant Parfum was founded in Paris in 1775. The original shop was called A la Corbeille de Fleurs (At the Flower Basket). The title gestures to the fact that most flowers are bisexual. Those which are, are considered “perfect” since they have both male (androecium) and female (gynoecium) reproductive structures, i.e., male stamens and female ovaries. Lilies, roses, and most plants with large showy flowers are bisexual. This corresponds in psychology to the Jungian notion that there are female elements (anima) in every male psyche and male elements (animus) in every female.
LONG-EXPOSURE PHOTOGRAPH OF A MAN: Getty Research Institute: Inventory of Bauhaus Student Work 1919–1933: Unidentified student, ca. 1922, 1 double-exposed or long-exposure photograph of a man sitting in a Breuer chair.
PORTRAIT AS SELF-PORTRAIT: Lucia Moholy, portrait of László Moholy-Nagy, silver gelatin print, 1925.
LAST NAME FIRST FIRST NAME LAST: Based on multiple resumes found in the Lucia Moholy collection at the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER, BERLIN: Marianne Breslauer, silver gelatin print, 1933.
THE NEW OBJECTIVITY: Irene Bayer-Hecht and Herbert Bayer, Costume for the“New Objectivity” Party (Figurine für das Fest “Neue Sachlichkeit”), 1925.
THE ICON IN THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY: “Icon in the hands of the enemy: The Nazi party’s school for administrators, ca. 1938,” photo caption in The Bauhaus Building in Dessau, Spector Books, p. 112.
ONE PHOTOGRAPH OF A ROOFTOP: Getty Research Institute: Inventory of Bauhaus Student Work 1919–1933: Lucia Moholy-Nagy, 1931, 1 photograph of a rooftop.
MASTERS’ HOUSES: Lucia Moholy, Double House Northwest Side (Kandinsky-Klee), silver gelatin print, 1926 / Walter Gropius (architect), Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.
TOMB IN THREE PARTS: Paul Klee, watercolor and graphite on paper, 1923.
THE EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS: The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals: With Photographic and Other Illustrations is a book written by Charles Darwin and published in 1899 by D. Appleton and Company, New York. The Disintegration Loops is a series of four albums by American avant-garde composer William Basinski. The albums are a record of his attempt to transfer earlier recordings of “easy-listening” radio music, which had been made on magnetic tape, to a digital recorder. The tape, however, slowly deteriorated, creating a haunting sound that in time becomes elegiac. The recording coincidentally finished on 9/11/2001.
MASK PHOTO: Gertrude Arndt was a student in the weaving workshop from 1923 to 1927. In 1930, she produced a series of forty-three “mask portraits” (self-portraits in costume). Today her work is seen as anticipating Cindy Sherman’s film still series. “You just need to open your eyes and already you are someone else, or you can open your mouth wide or something like that, and a different person has already appeared. And if you dress up in costume as well … It’s like looking into the mirror and making faces … Basically a mirror image.”—Gertrude Arndt on her “Mask Portraits” (http://bauhaus-online.de/en/atlas/werke/mask-portrait)
AN ANATOMICAL STUDY: Getty Research Institute: Inventory of Bauhaus Student Work 1919–1933: Erich Mrozek, n.d., 1 drawing of anatomical studies, possibly for Oskar Schlemmer’s course “Man.”
THE MISSING NEGATIVES: “The Missing Negatives” is the title of an essay written by Lucia Moholy and published in 1983 in the British Journal of Photography, 130 (7.1), pp 6–8, 18. The essay covers the unauthorized and unattributed use of her negatives by Walter Gropius during the war years and her legal efforts to have the negatives returned to her after the war.
HAVING BOTH THE PRESENT AND FUTURE IN MIND: Implosion of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, St. Louis, Missouri, 1972, black and white photograph, Lee Balterman. The architectural critic Charles Jencks, in his 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, called the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, built in 1951–1955 by architect Minoru Yamasaki, “the death of Modern Architecture.” Katharine Bristol, in an article titled “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” published in 1991 in the Journal of Architectural Education: “By continuing to promote architectural solutions to what are fundamentally problems of class and race, the myth conceals the complete inadeuqacy of contemporary public housing policy.” In Marginal Notes (55), Lucia Moholy writes of László Moholy-Nagy, “He always had the present and future in mind, hardly ever looking back to the historical past …”
DISCLAIMER
While this book draws on historical research, it is a work of poetic fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents outside the Notes section are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
“When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.”—Emily Dickinson (in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, dated July, 1862)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the librarians at the Getty Research Institute in L.A. More thanks to Dr. Annemarie Jaeggi, Director of the Bauhaus, and her staff at the Library and Archive at the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin. Thanks also to Gahl Hodges Burt and Christine Wallich and the staff and Board of Trustees at the American Academy in Berlin for a 2015 Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellowship that allowed me to spend time at the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin where the papers and photographs of Lucia Moholy and other Bauhaus women photographers are housed. Thanks to the fellows at the Academy for their interest in my project. Thanks to Dr. Rolf Sachsse, biographer of Lucia Moholy, for sharing with me his knowledge of Lucia Moholy and the Bauhaus community. Thanks to Emily Pulitzer and the Pulitzer Foundation where I first saw Lucia Moholy’s photograph Walter and Ilse Gropius’s Dressing Room displayed during the exhibition In the Still Epiphany. Seeing that image sparked my interest in Lucia Moholy and in the Bauhaus school and movement. That interest in time became an obsession, the final result of which is this book of poems.
Special thanks to book artist Ken Botnick for designing and publishing a limited edition artist’s book of twenty-six poems from the manuscript, published by Emdash Design Studio under the title The Illusion of Physicality. Additional thanks are due for his design of the interior of A Doll for Throwing. Continued deeply affectionate thanks to Bill Clegg, and to Jeff Shotts, Fiona McCrae, and everyone at Graywolf Press who helped to produce this book. And thanks of the sort for which words are inadequate to friends and colleagues for their steadfast support and affection, especially Mark Bibbins, Timothy Donnelly, Jennifer Kronovet, Lynn Melnick, David Schuman, and Monica de la Torre (among many others who go unnamed here). Thanks to the Poetry Foundation for featuring the poem “Two Nudes” on poetrynow, a partnership between the Poetry Foundation and WFMT radio.
