Lucia Moholy. Hands Peeling Potatoes. C. 1930.

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Lucia Moholy’s
Idle Hands*

JORDAN TROELLER

I want to let you in on something:
I am actually not a photographer.

—Lucia Moholy1

A photograph taken by Lucia Moholy, sometime around 1930, depicts two
hands poised over a wooden bowl. One holds a potato, while the other wields a
small knife from which a ribbon of peel unfurls into the sitter’s lap. The peel
bends toward us, its surface dissolving into a gray haze as it passes through the
shallow plane of focus. That arc gestures to Moholy’s single-minded gaze, her
foregrounding of certain, seemingly unimportant details, while allowing others
to fade into a blur or be cut off entirely, with the camera’s aperture opened up
to its full diameter. Minuscule furrows in the skin become monumental, like
cracks in a desert floor. We can even make out the ridges of the thumb pad
pressing against the knife, ridges that would index the sitter’s identity if we knew
who this was—which we do not, Moholy having cropped off the body at the neck
and knees and left much of what remains in harsh shadows. Even the edge of the
bowl curves in and out of clarity. As if a purposefully careless image, fixed by
what would seem to be an untrained hand, the photograph purports to offer us
an “artless” scene, a visual counterpart to Moholy’s own curious disavowal of the
medium cited above.

One question that this essay poses is whether the photograph—and others
like it, in which Moholy portrays hands stilled in acts of domesticity—is an image
of labor. And by that I do not mean whether the potato-peeling counts as labor

*
This essay benefited from Maria Gough’s encouraging comments, as well as the assistance of
Barbara Günther and Silke Mehrwald at the Archiv der deutschen Frauenbewegung in Kassel,
Germany, who facilitated the discovery of previously unknown photographs by Lucia Moholy. I am also
grateful to Laura Frahm, Rolf Sachsse, Robin Schuldenfrei, Trevor Stark, and, above all, Susan Laxton
for feedback on various drafts. An earlier version was presented at the Whitney Independent Study
Program in March 2019, and I thank the participants, as well as Ron Clark, for the opportunity to dis-
cuss these ideas with them.
1.
Lucia Moholy, unpublished interview with Rolf Sachsse, June 18, 1982 (all translations are
mine unless otherwise noted). My thanks to Rolf Sachsse for kindly making available material from his
personal archive.

OCTOBER 172, Spring 2020, pp. 68–108. © 2020 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00393

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OCTOBER

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Tina Modotti. Hands of the Puppeteer. 1929.

(we all know it does), but rather whether Lucia Moholy’s own labor, as the author
of this image, does. For despite taking on an image of labor, the photograph’s for-
mal properties mark it as structurally different from those photographs of the
industrializing 1920s that we immediately recognize as depicting work, images that
isolate and augment the laboring body as productive: August Sander’s bricklayer
confronting the camera comes to mind, whose hand authoritatively stabilizes the
weight on his shoulders, but so does Tina Modotti’s Hands of the Puppeteer, in which
the tools of the artist, rather than wooden bowl and paring knife, signify a heroic
(and masculinized) street performer in contrast to Moholy’s apron-clad homemak-
er. Modotti took this photograph in 1929, while still in Mexico and active in the
country’s radical agrarian movement, a year prior to her arrival in Berlin. Moholy,
who was also living in Berlin, may have learned of it in a small exhibition that was
organized by fellow photographer Lotte Jacobi.2 In an era of the worker-photogra-
pher, who analogized photographic labor to wage labor and declared the camera

2.
On the exhibition, see Margaret Hooks, Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary
(London: Pandora, 1993), p. 214. Modotti resided in Berlin between April and October 1930. A client
of Lucia Moholy’s colleague Umbo (Otto Umbehr) at Johannes Itten’s school in Berlin was Egon
Erwin Kisch, who had seen the show organized by Jacobi and written positively about it.

Lucia Moholy’s Idle Hands

a “tool,” Moholy’s anonymous subject, sitting and preparing food, appears domes-
ticated in comparison, the feminized Other to Modotti’s working artist.3

If Hands Peeling Potatoes departs from more familiar representations of labor
in the interwar period, it also stands out within Moholy’s own oeuvre. Comprising
a vast body of work, her career as a photographer is all too often reduced to those
iconic views of Bauhaus architecture and its design objects, which she took as the
school’s official photographer in all but name. This was a role that Moholy volun-
tarily stepped into between April 1923, when she arrived at the school in Weimar
as the wife of László Moholy-Nagy, and April 1928, when the couple left and
moved back to Berlin. During these five years, which were primarily spent in
Dessau, Moholy produced the corpus of photographs that now overwhelmingly
defines her seven-decade-long career, a career that spanned journalism, architec-
tural photography, portraiture, art history, print-based reproductive technology,
and library science. The some 560 negatives taken at the Bauhaus transformed the
school and its accomplishments into a media phenomenon during its existence
but also afterward, as they circulated in journals and newspapers, as well as the
books authored by Bauhaus faculty members—publications that also established
these authors’ individual reputations.4 Moholy was not paid for this labor nor
given a title; in fact, many of these images, when attributed at all, were subsequent-
ly misattributed to her husband.5 Hers was a kind of labor, not unlike that of
housework, that was real but negated in its recognition—rendered as idle, in the
sense of nonproductive, and thus unremunerated.6 This was the case because such
labor was expected of her as one of the Meisterfrauen, to use her term, “those wives

3.
Tina Modotti, “On Photography” (1929), cited in Hooks, Tina Modotti, p. 193. Compare
Modotti’s text with Moholy’s exposé for a manuscript, “Der Amateur bei sich zuhause,” in which she
implores readers of all social classes, whether they live in “bourgeois” or “proletarian” homes (but espe-
cially “housewives”), to take up a photography of everyday life —a claim, avant la lettre, for the personal
as political: see Sachsse’s short introduction to the text and the facsimile in Manifeste! Eine andere
Geschichte der Fotografie, ed. Franziska Maria Scheuer (Göttingen: Steidl, 2014), p. 391; pp. 208–09.
(Thanks to Steffen Siegel for locating this for me.)

Robin Schuldenfrei, “Images in Exile,” History of Photography 37, no. 2 (May 2013), p. 186. My
4.
argument builds on Schuldenfrei’s insight into (mis)perceptions of Moholy’s authorship by Walter
Gropius and others who later used her Bauhaus negatives without her permission, even withholding
the negatives for decades, despite repeated requests on her part that they be returned.

5.
This is compounded by the fact that Moholy-Nagy’s name is often abbreviated to “Moholy” in
the literature, thus making it challenging even linguistically to reassert his wife’s presence. In what fol-
lows, I use their full last names to refer to each respectively (i.e., “Moholy” for her and “Moholy-Nagy”
for him). On how Moholy was cast as the passive, supportive wife in contrast to her active, productive
husband, see 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, 2009), p. 170. See also Mercedes
Valdivieso, “Eine ‘symbiotische Arbeitsgemeinschaft’: Lucia and László Moholy-Nagy,” in Liebe Macht
Kunst: Künstlerpaare im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Renate Berger (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), pp. 65–85.

6.
I use the term “housework” as theorized by Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Selma
James, in the 1970s, as a qualitatively different kind of labor under capitalism than wage labor, one that is
to be continually “transformed into a natural attribute rather than to be recognized as a social contract,”
thus “reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work.” Silvia Federici, “Wages Against
Housework” (1975), in Wages for Housework: The New York Committee 1972–1977, History, Theory, Documents,
ed. Silvia Federici and Arlen Austen (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2018), p. 203 (emphasis in original).

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OCTOBER

of the Bauhaus masters, who had no official status and yet crucially participated in
the history and reception of the Bauhaus” through “critique, engagement, ambi-
tion, and independent work.”7

Attesting to that “independent work,” Hands Peeling Potatoes was taken not at
the Bauhaus but 220 kilometers south of Dessau, as part of a very different kind of
pedagogical experiment. Named after the abandoned farm that it acquired in
1923, Schwarze Erde (“black earth”), or Schwarzerden, as it is better known, was a
school by and for women as well as a self-sustaining agricultural commune whose
members daily practiced what sociability might look like outside of both patriarchy
and industrial capitalism. A remarkable, though little-known, episode in the
German women’s movement, the commune was established by the poet Marie
Buchhold and the pedagogue Elisabeth Vogler. Both were highly critical of the
capitalist economy as leading to “a one-dimensional, unequal division of produc-
tion” whose consequences were “in favor of accumulation at the exhaustion of the
worker . . . the disempowerment of millions for the benefit of a few.”8 As if this
were not enough to raise eyebrows, coming as it did from a rural corner of the
Rhön Mountains populated mostly by Catholic farming families, Schwarzerden
extended its critique beyond one of class to one of gender, arguing that capitalism
wrought particular damage on women. Not only did the bourgeois institution of
marriage limit opportunities for women in the workplace and exploit the unpaid
domestic labor that they performed in the home, the founders argued, it also led
“only too easily” to the exclusion of women from their larger community and from
these essential social bonds as “the fertile wellspring of resistance.”9

Moholy visited Schwarzerden on several occasions between 1922 and 1930, a
period that coincided with her Bauhaus affiliation. She took dozens of pho-
tographs on her visits, often with the large-format wooden camera that she used in
Weimar and Dessau, which she valued for its capacity to render detail.10 And like
her activity at the Bauhaus, this engagement blurred the line between work and
leisure; she had made friends with Buchhold, Vogler, and Tilla Winz, another
leading member, long before she arrived in Dessau and seemed to have donated
her skills as a photographer to the commune. Many of her photographs appeared
in its publicity materials, devising—as at the Bauhaus—a visual language for a ped-
agogically motivated social movement that, in this case, rejected marriage, mother-
hood, and traditional forms of female wage labor. Other photographs taken at
Schwarzerden, though, are clearly personal documents, intimate portraits of a

7.
Lucia Moholy Papers, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.

Lucia Moholy, “Zur Zeit als ich mein Elternhaus verließ . . . ” (Zurich, after 1974), pp. 16–17,

8.
Marie Buchhold, “Sommerkurs I, July 1925,” cited in Ortrud Wörner-Heil, Vor der Utopie zur
Sozialreform: Jugendsiedlung Frankenfeld im Hessischen Ried und Frauensiedlung Schwarze Erde in der Rhön
1915 bis 1933 (Darmstadt: Hessische Historische Kommission Darmstadt, 1996), p. 458. Marta
Neumayer is sometimes referred to as a third founding member, although Wörner-Heil argues that the
roles played by Buchhold and Vogler, given their close relationship, were more substantial.

9.
Utopie zur Sozialreform, p. 461.

Marie Buchhold, “Die ländliche Wirtschaftsgemeinde” (1925), cited in Wörner-Heil, Vor der

10.

Lucia Moholy, “The Missing Negatives,” British Journal of Photography (January 7, 1983), p. 6.

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Page from an album in the Schwarzerden Papers,
Archiv der deutschen Frauenbewegung, Kassel,
with photographs by Lucia Moholy.

OCTOBER

tightly knit community of women
that bear striking similarities to her
portraits at the Bauhaus. Later circu-
lating as gifts among the women and
filling the pages of personal photo
albums, these photographs not only
attest to a neglected chapter in the
history of German feminism, they
gesture to a form of radical politics
held together by intimacy between
women and non-normative forms of
family, one that posed a powerful
alternative to the sociability on offer
in Dessau.11

What follows focuses on the
photographs that Moholy took at
Schwarzerden, considering what
the commune was and what it
became through her lens. I propose
that her capacity
lend
Schwarzerden a viable representa-
tional idiom derived from her expe-
rience of marginalization at the
Bauhaus, and that we should see
these photographs as the revaloriza-
tion of a kind of feminized photo-
graphic labor that was systematical-
ly negated at the Bauhaus, and, as
such, as an oblique commentary on
the gendered nature of avant-garde
discourse in the 1920s. Many,
including Moholy herself, underval-
ued her work, dismissing it in rela-

These albums are located in the
11.
papers of Schule Schwarzerden at the Archiv
der deutschen Frauenbewegung in Kassel,
Germany (hereafter “AddF, Kassel”). As
Susan Laxton pointed out to me, it may be
that this alternative sociability was closer to
that of the early Bauhaus under Johannes
Itten; see Elizabeth Otto, Haunted Bauhaus:
Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer
Identities, and Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2019), pp. 26–32.

Top: Moholy.
Portrait of Tilla Winz. 1927.
Bottom: Moholy.
Portrait of Florence Henri (in Profile). 1927.

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Lucia Moholy’s Idle Hands

tion to the supposedly more “artistic” output of her male colleagues. This hap-
pened first in relation to her husband’s photograms—which originated on one of
their early trips to the Rhön Mountains—and then later in relation to the cult of
authorship more broadly at Gropius’s Bauhaus. Coded as “reproductive,” in dis-
tinction to the “productive” work of her male colleagues, Moholy’s photography
was not maliciously ignored so much as it was naturalized as a labor of love on the
part of a devoted wife, whose status as an artist was never seriously considered.

Where I depart from previous feminist readings of Moholy’s work at the
Bauhaus is to argue that this naturalization only partly had to do with gender; a
more encompassing explanation requires looking at the terms of
production/reproduction in which it unfolded—terms articulated by Moholy-
Nagy, above all, but also, perversely, by Moholy herself, as it was she who com-
posed the Hungarian artist’s texts during this period (having a better grasp of
the German language than he did and having trained professionally as an edi-
tor and translator). Understanding the language in which that rejection was
articulated illuminates how recalcitrant notions of photographic transparency
persisted, paradoxically, within the rhetoric of radicalized vision. Contending
with the character of labor on both sides of Moholy’s camera, in other words,
requires grappling with the contradictions of originality at the heart of New
Vision photography.12

On August 10, 1922, László Moholy-Nagy wrote to Theo van Doesburg from
the small village of Weyhers in the Rhön Mountains, where he and Lucia Moholy
were spending the summer. Trying to lure the Dutch artist, then living in Weimar,
to come out for a visit, he describes their humble accommodations:

“Vogler, Biology, Loheland”

I’ve asked around what it would cost if you wanted to come here for a
while. In the village guesthouses board and lodging for one person
costs 150 marks per day. We live with farmers, but they haven’t yet told
us what we’re to pay. We hope, of course, that it will be much cheaper.
Otherwise a catastrophic bankruptcy awaits us. Of course—if you have
serious intentions to come here (the scenery is beautiful) and are satis-
fied with very simple food (soured milk, salad, cured meats, vegetables,

12.
My formulation of these issues owes a debt to Anne Wagner’s exemplary study Three Artists
(Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe (Berkeley: University of California,
1996), and particularly her challenge to a one-dimensional biographical recovery of women artists: “I
have returned to the familiar ratio, female to male, to make visible its inherent complexity and incom-
pleteness—and above all to show that those qualities are importantly a matter of visual form. When
transposed to visual representation, the relationship need not always—did not always—involve subordi-
nation and dependency. I think it is high time we learned to think more deeply about the representa-
tional purposes and ambitions of work by women, and to assess their place in a cultural dialogue. Only
if we do so will we begin to give them their due” (p. 285).

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potatoes—though not all at once!)—then maybe we could ask local
farmers whether or not you could be housed? The cost would then be
half (or a little cheaper).13

The letter reminds us of how crucial friendships were to the early-twentieth-cen-
tury avant-garde: that work got done around the dinner table; that money was a
constant worry; that intellectual labor was never far from the necessity to put
food on the table and pay the rent. But the statement also testifies to Moholy-
Nagy’s ambivalence toward a place where he seemed to feel out of his element
and clung to his male colleagues: “The farmers, though,” he wrote smugly, “are
real sticks-in-the-mud. So please write to me in this respect. I’m curious whether
Lissitzky is already in Weimar? A trip with him and Röhl and Graeff—even in the
case of only a short stay—would be very nice. Please think about it.”14

At the time of this letter, the couple had been married for a year and a
half. They had met in Berlin in April or May 1920 and shortly thereafter began
sharing an apartment before marrying on her twenty-seventh birthday on
January 18, 1921. She then took on his last name and he acquired her Czech citi-
zenship, which he needed to remain in Germany. While the Prague-born Lucia
Schulz had been in Germany since 1914, working as an editor and journalist,
Moholy-Nagy was a new arrival from Hungary, where he had participated in the
short-lived Soviet Republic. His situation, unlike hers, was precarious. Trying to
make his way as a painter and doing side work as the Berlin correspondent for
the avant-garde Hungarian journal MA, Moholy-Nagy brought in little money;
his first show at Herwarth Walden’s gallery in Berlin sold few works. It was her
salary that sustained the couple in these early years.15 Eager to escape “all the
business” of Berlin, as Moholy-Nagy described his artistic engagements, but
needing to find an alternative to the pricey seaside, the couple found respite in
Weyhers in the Rhön because it was affordable—even if, in Moholy-Nagy’s mind,
terribly provincial.16

Whereas he complained of intellectual boredom, she saw things differently.
The visits to the Rhön, which the couple took regularly throughout the 1920s,
were in her mind “self-evident,” the consequence of shared intellectual interests

13.
László Moholy-Nagy to Theo van Doesburg, August 10, 1922; reprinted in Theo van
Doesburg, Grondbegrippen der nieuwe beeldende kunst, ed. Umberto Barbieri et al. (Nijmegen: Socialist
Uitgeverij, 1983), p. 102.

14.

Ibid.

15.
In June 1920, she was hired by the publishing house Rowohlt, where she performed editorial
duties as well as oversaw the company’s press and public relations; see Rolf Sachsse, Lucia Moholy
(Düsseldorf: Marzona, 1985), p. 9. It is unclear when Moholy stopped working for Rowohlt; Sachsse
states here that her duties ended on July 31, 1921. Elsewhere, he reports that she continued working
there until 1923, when the couple moved to Weimar; see Rolf Sachsse, Lucia Moholy: Bauhaus-Fotografin
(Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 1995), p. 12.

16.

László Moholy-Nagy to Doesburg, July 26, 1924; reprinted in Doesburg, Grondbegrippen, p. 107.

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and the “fruitful mental labor” that she and he were able to pursue in the “invigo-
rating” climate of the Rhön:

Staying in one of the many little senior cottages with a view of meadows
and mountains, where we were allowed to lead a modest summertime
existence according to our own wishes, we soon came to know many
other people who, in this harsh—at the time, still unfrequented—
region had found, or had hoped to find, the rhythm of their lives.
Among them was Elisabeth Vogler, already then filled by an enthusias-
tic will towards new life, which was to be realized a few years later in the
founding of the Schule Schwarzerden.17

Her tone, unlike that of her husband, embraces the community of the rural area,
and the women of nearby Schwarzerden above all. That community had been long
in the making; it can be traced to friendships that Moholy had cultivated in the
German youth movement, in which she was an active participant.18 In 1918, while
working at the Leipzig publisher B. G. Teubner, Moholy met several fellow mem-
bers with whom she would become lifelong friends, including the activists
Friedrich Vorwerk and Paul Vogler, who was Elisabeth Vogler’s brother. These
contacts brought her to Hamburg in December 1919, where she began working
for one of the movement’s publishers, Adolf Saal, whose bookstore Moholy later
described as “a meeting place” of socially engaged intellectuals.19 Saal was a central
figure within the youth movement, publishing its main journal, the Freideutsche
Jugend, and directing the eponymous publishing house. It was while working for
Saal that Moholy, likely through Paul Vogler, first met Marie Buchhold and
Elisabeth Vogler, the two founders of Schwarzerden.20

A pressing concern for all three women at this moment was what Elisabeth
Vogler described as the “body-soul problem.”21 In an article for Freideutsche Jugend,
Moholy elaborated the stakes of this “problem” in the terms of the symbolic.22
Defining her use of “symbol” in terms of speech (Sprache), visual representation

17.
Gymnastikschule Schwarzerden, Rhön, 1977), p. 33.

Lucia Moholy’s contribution to Karin Oeking, Elisabeth Vogler (Gersfeld-Bodenhof:

18.
When and how Moholy became involved in the Jugendbewegung is not known; for an account
of her relationship to the movement and its impact on her intellectual formation, see Oliver Botar,
“The Origins of László Moholy-Nagy’s Biocentric Constructivism,” in Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, ed.
Eduardo Kac (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 320–30.

19.
Moholy, “Autobiographical Notes”; cited in Botar, “The Origins of László Moholy-Nagy’s
Biocentric Constructivism,” p. 321. Paul Vogler, then studying economics in Hamburg, turned to medi-
cine out of a desire, Botar writes, to reform what he saw as the capitalist/corporate nature of the med-
ical system. See p. 329 for Moholy’s description of Adolf Saal’s bookstore.

20.
Freideutsche Jugend.

Wörner-Heil, Von der Utopie zur Sozialreform, p. 188. Marie Buchhold was then an editor at the

21.

22.

Ibid.

Lucia Schulz, “Symbol,” Freideutsche Jugend 5, no. 10 (October 1919), pp. 406–08.

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OCTOBER

(Bilder einer ewigen Welt), and religious signification (Wege von Mensch zu Gott),
Moholy describes a new set of conditions for her generation, in which such sym-
bolic relations no longer tie the subject to the external world; the self is inextrica-
bly bound to that reality in ways that exceed representation. In Nietzschean lan-
guage, Moholy describes this encounter with the world as a “sublimation” of “lan-
guage as symbol. No symbol can any longer bind me with the world that I [now]
am. Two become one, and language dies.” Evoking Vogler’s terminology, Moholy
explains how this insight reengineers the relation between body and subjectivity:
“Body [Leib] und soul [Seele] arise out of the same foundation [Wurzel, literally
‘roots’]; they are one. We no longer know the spiritual content of a corporeal
world . . . we are God.”

With its references to an embodied nature, Moholy’s text anticipates the
agrarian imagination of what would become Schwarzerden’s feminist politics, a
politics rooted in the German youth movement. While Oliver Botar has uncovered
the extent of Moholy’s engagement with the Freideutsche Jugend, and especially its
influence on her husband’s “biocentric pedagogy,” I invoke it here to point to its
consequences for an environmentally conscious female communalism in interwar
Germany, one that Botar himself suggests in describing Buchhold as “an unrecog-
nized pioneer of eco-feminism.”23 The movement’s rejection of anthropocentrism
and its embrace of a neo-vitalist, ecological view of the world, although varied
across practitioners, took a particular form in Buchhold’s writings and in Vogler’s
pedagogy, as both occupied themselves with the question of gender equality, par-
ticularly within “co-education.”24 For Buchhold, this was an engagement with the
role of Eros in the relationship between student and teacher; for Vogler, with new
forms of “bodily training [Körperlehre]” that departed from both contemporary
forms of Expressionist dance, on the one hand, and structured gymnastics, on the
other.25 For Moholy, it meant revising categories of signification in terms of the
symbolic. For all three, though, how to live communally as women in an economi-
cally dire postwar Germany was central and took concrete form in their participa-
tion in several experimental communities, including the Marxist colony
Barkenhoff near the Bremen Soviet Republic, in which Moholy participated as an
undercover informant.26

23.

24.

25.

Botar, “The Origins of László Moholy-Nagy’s Biocentric Constructivism,” p. 333.

See Buchhold’s article in Freideutsche Jugend 5, no. 11 (November 1919), pp. 475–78.

Wörner-Heil, Von der Utopie zur Sozialreform, p. 349.

26.
Heinrich Vogeler, a leading member of Barkenhoff, recalled, “The now wife (and very good
photographer) of the abstract painter Moholy-Nagy” and Klara Möller “committed themselves—under
the cloak of medical aid—to providing news and information to those workers who had fought in the
battles.” Heinrich Vogeler, Werden: Erinnerungen mit Lebenzeugnissen aus den Jahren 1923–1942, ed.
Joachim Priewe and Paul-Gerhard Wenzloff (Berlin: Rütten and Loening, 1989), p. 277; cited and
trans. in Sandra Neugärtner, “Utopias of a New Society: Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, and the
Loheland and Schwarzerden Women’s Communes,” in Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body
Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School, ed. Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler (London:
Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 77 (trans. modified).

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Lucia Moholy’s Idle Hands

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Moholy. Portrait of
Elisabeth Vogler,
From Above. 1927.

An autobiographical note in Moholy’s papers alludes elliptically to her activi-
ties in the Rhön during the summer of 1922: “Vogler, biology, Loheland.”27 The
three terms abbreviate Moholy’s intellectual interests at this moment: Elisabeth
Vogler’s nascent commune that she was then planning with Buchhold (both of
whom were living that summer in the village of Rabensnest near to where László
and Lucia were staying); a continued conversation around the social ramifications
of a biological worldview, which she was having with Moholy-Nagy; and, lastly, an
encounter with Loheland, another intentional community centered on questions
of the body, land, and craft, but one, as I argue, of a very different kind than
Schwarzerden (although they have often been compared). Moholy’s visits to near-
by Loheland would have been mediated through Elisabeth Vogler, who had spent
six months at the school, studying and teaching theories of the body, in early
1920—just months after she and Moholy had met in Hamburg. Vogler left the
school early, however, disagreeing with the founders’ anthroposophical approach
and later arguing against the exclusive character of such Rudolf Steiner–inflected

27.
Berlin.

Lucia Moholy, “Autobiographical Notes,” p. 14, Lucia Moholy Papers, Bauhaus-Archiv,

OCTOBER

methods, as she set out a conception of the body that put communalism at the
center of a feminist pedagogy.28 Moholy’s developing conception of the body and
its representation in the terms of symbolism, as the radical lamination of sign with
referent, prefigured the photogram experiments that she would “implement” with
Moholy-Nagy—an “invention,” as her husband would later describe it, that took
place in the very same context in which Moholy would later dramatically reject
those masculinist terms of production.

If the Rhön was in many ways her territory, as the site of proto-feminist elabo-
rations of the German Jugendbewegung, it was also where she and Moholy-Nagy
began to experiment with the photogram. “I clearly remember how it came
about,” she recalled, matter-of-factly:

The Artist as (Re)producer

During a stroll in the Rhön Mountains in the summer of 1922, we dis-
cussed the problems arising from the antithesis Production versus
Reproduction. This gradually led us to implement our conclusions by
making photograms, having had no previous knowledge of any such
steps taken by Schad, May Ray, and Lissitzky (or others for that mat-
ter). . . . The deliberations which formed the basis of our activities were
published in De Stijl 7/1922 and reprinted in other magazines.29

The publication to which Moholy refers is the essay “Production-Reproduction,”
a short statement that sets out two opposing terms that would become crucial for
the reception of not only his but also her photographs.30 Drawing biological
comparisons, the essay proposes a definition of subjectivity as physiological:
“Man is most realized when his constituent faculties—the cells as well as the
most complicated organs—are developed to their full potential.” As a privileged
means of shaping those faculties, art constitutes “creative activity [gestaltende
Tätigkeit]” and, as such, is to be distinguished from “reproductive” activity as the
“reiteration of already existing relations.” If iteration entrenches old habits, cre-
ativity “produces new, so far unknown relations,” for it is “above all Production
(productive creativity) that serves human development.” This definition of “cre-
ative activity” is then elaborated with the example of technological means of

28.
pp. 191–92.

Neugärtner, “Utopias of a New Society,” p. 83; Wörner-Heil, Vor der Utopie zur Sozialreform,

29.
Moholy’s own translation of a statement that she originally made in her essay “Das Bauhaus-
Bild” (1968), in Lucia Moholy, Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy: Dokumentarische Ungereimtheiten/Moholy-Nagy,
Marginal Notes: Documentary Absurdities (Krefeld: Scherpe, 1972), p. 59. See the translation of “Das
Bauhaus-Bild” in this issue.

30.
László Moholy-Nagy, “Production-Reproduction,” De Stijl 5, no. 7 (July 1922), pp. 97–100.
The authorship of this essay is contested, as I discuss. Historically, it has been published as the sole
work of Moholy-Nagy, but it is increasingly believed to have been significantly developed, if not co-writ-
ten, by Lucia Moholy.

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reproduction, including photogra-
phy, which, up until that point, has
only been “used for reproductive
purposes” but could be “revaluat-
ed”—a key term in the argument—
“to use the light sensitivity of the sil-
ver-bromide plate to capture and fix
light-effects (movements in the play
of light) produced by our manipula-
tion of mirrors or lenses, etc.”31

The photograms that the couple
began producing upon their return to
Berlin that fall were unique objects;
there is no evidence that Moholy-Nagy
ever made photograms directly on the
silver-bromide plates of which he
writes (and which would have allowed
him to replicate such images).32 This
was certainly the case with the earliest
photograms, made on daylight paper,
which required only water (rather
than an outfitted darkroom) to devel-
op the image, but it also holds true for
those photograms that the couple
made in the basement darkroom of
their Master’s House in Dessau, which they moved into in 1926.33 Moholy-Nagy sub-
jected the unique prints to a series of photographic operations, a process that he
termed “revaluation [Umwertung]” and that included tonal reversal and mirror-
imaged compositions. He also had his photograms enlarged to resemble a common
format for paintings at that time (60 x 90 cm), as well as cut up and reassembled,
sometimes as collages but also as the juxtaposition of two photograms, as in the case

László Moholy-Nagy. Untitled. 1925–26.
© 2020 Estate of László Moholy-Nagy/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.

31.
László Moholy-Nagy, “Production-Reproduction,” in Photography in the Modern Era: European
Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 1989), pp. 79–80 (trans. modified).

Renate Heyne and Floris M. Neusüss, eds., Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms: Catalogue Raisonné
32.
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), p. 41. Moholy attributes part of this to “trying to keep expenses down”:
“Neither at Dessau, nor later in Berlin, where a well-appointed laboratory had been installed, did we
dare to use highly sensitive emulsions as a primary base for producing photograms. If reference was
made in Painting, Photography, Film to ‘silver bromide plates,’ this was perfectly true in theory, but did
not apply to everyday practice.” Moholy, Marginal Notes, pp. 61–62.

33.
On the darkroom in that house and its impact on several photographers at the Bauhaus, see
Wolfgang Thoener, “Das Fotografenhaus/The Photographers’ House,” in Die Zeitschrift der Stiftung
Bauhaus Dessau 4 (November 2012), pp. 42–53.

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of a hand juxtaposed with the profile of a face.34 Because of the unique character of
the photogram, the expenses involved in making the photograms resistant to further
exposure from light, and the fact that contact printing was unreliable, these opera-
tions often necessitated taking a photograph of the original in order to replicate it.
Significantly, it was Lucia Moholy who carried out these reproductions.
Moholy-Nagy neither had nor was interested in acquiring the extensive technical
knowledge of photographic reversal required to create these “revaluations.” As
Beaumont Newhall put it, “Moholy[-Nagy] did very little darkroom work.
Certainly, so far as his camera pictures were concerned, he had no interest what-
soever in what we call the ‘fine print.’ To him the image which the camera or
the photogram could capture was the exciting thing.”35 Moholy, by contrast, had
almost a decade of professional experience in print technology by the time the
couple arrived at the Bauhaus. She expanded this knowledge by apprenticing
with the studio photographer Hermann Eckner in Weimar and studying briefly
at the Akademie für Graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe in Leipzig, where she
acquired “the fundamentals of reproduction techniques.”36 It was here, too, that
Moholy began studying the history of photography, with which she was already
familiar, having studied art history (as well as philosophy) at the university in
Prague; Moholy-Nagy, by contrast, began studying law in Budapest, under pres-
sure from his parents, but never completed his degree. It was not simply that her
husband had no interest in the technical knowledge around photographic
reproduction, as Moholy herself was quick to point out. It was rather that he,
like his male colleagues, viewed such knowledge as derivative, the work of “tech-
nicians,” in comparison to the more consequential work of the painter and
architect.37 Or, as Moholy-Nagy put it succinctly in explaining why he would not
be the one to set up the darkrooms at the New Bauhaus in Chicago: “I am not a
photographer, but a painter.”38

34.
Heyne and Neusüss, Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms, p. 40. The small formats (13 x 18 and 18 x
24 cm) were best for the arrangement of objects onto the photosensitive surface but meant that for any
larger sizes, one would have to rephotograph the image in order to print it at an enlarged size.

Beaumont Newhall, taped remarks transcribed by Alice Swan in November 1973, cited in
35.
Leland D. Rice and David W. Steadman, eds., Photographs of Moholy-Nagy from the Collection of William
Larson (Claremont, CA: Pomona College, 1975), p. 7.

36.
Moholy, Marginal Notes, p. 85. On the photography class there, see Rolf Sachsse, “Beginnen
wir! Die photographischen Abteilungen der Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst in Leipzig zwi-
schen 1890 und 1950,” in Fotografie: Leipziger Schule, Arbeiten von Absolventen und Studenten 1980–93, 100
Jahre Fotografie an der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, ed. Joachim Jansong (Leipzig:
Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst, 1993), pp. 7–15.

37.
Ibid., p. 77. See also Sachsse’s remarks in an interview with Moholy (June 17, 1983), in which
he proposes that one reason there was no photography workshop at the Bauhaus under Gropius’s lead-
ership may have been because Gropius regarded photography as a “vehicle for delivering images of his
built objects” and photographers as “technicians [Handwerker].”

38.
László Moholy-Nagy, cited in Henry Holmes Smith, “Across the Atlantic,” in Rice and
Staedman, Photographs of Moholy-Nagy, p. 18. On the exchange between these two media in his work, see
Joyce Tsai, Moholy-Nagy: Painting after Photography (Berkeley: University of California, 2018).

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As their Bauhaus colleague Max Gebhard recalled, “In my opinion, Lucia’s
labor was decisive for the photographic work of Moholy-Nagy, for the photograms
as well as the photographs that were produced over the course of several years. I
often experienced her coming out of the darkroom with a still wet photograph
and into [Moholy-Nagy’s] studio, and the two would talk about it.”39 Because
Moholy-Nagy often required images for specific purposes, this work of enlarge-
ment and replication could be quite complex. One could not simply replicate the
original photogram, “for in photogram-making,” as Moholy explained, “every
phase is subject to varying influences, and the ultimate effects are not to be fore-
seen or calculated with any amount of certainty. The grading of tone values, more-
over, is largely a matter for ad hoc decisions during the process of chemical treat-
ment in the laboratory.”40 In lieu of being able to simulate the same results,
Moholy had to make reproductions of existing works, which she did either
through contact printing or, as was more often the case, through photographing
the photogram. This process was made more complex by Moholy-Nagy’s desire to
illustrate both the positive photogram as well as its negative inversion, which
meant that suitable negatives for publishing had to be produced of both the origi-
nal photograph and its mirrored, tonal-inverted opposite.41 These processes often
required devising inventive methods in lieu of proper equipment—pinning the
photogram to a board, for instance, when mounting it under glass was not possi-
ble—and detailed postproduction in order to crop out the thumbtacks. It some-
times resulted in substantial errors, like the loss of tonal values and blurred edges
if the camera was not perfectly parallel to the original.42 Sometimes entire pho-
tograms would go missing or were never returned from the publisher, and
Moholy-Nagy, believing he had already made the “work,” would ask Moholy to
refabricate it in the darkroom—even though, as she explains, this was never simply
re fabrication, but rather the creation of a new work. Her skill became indispens-
able for realizing his ambitious vision—a vision that was all the more challenging
to implement given that the artist had little understanding of the steps involved in
bringing it to fruition.

Statements like Gebhard’s observation of Moholy’s labor appear all too fre-
quently in testimony from former Bauhaus members. Often, these comments

39.
Fotomontagen und -collagen 1922–1943 (Berlin: Anabas, 1980), p. 181.

Max Gebhard, cited in Irene-Charlotte Lusk, Montagen ins Blaue: László Moholy-Nagy,

40.

Moholy, Marginal Notes, p. 63.

41.
See explanations of this terminology in Heyne and Neusüss, Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms,
p. 41. Lucia Moholy distinguishes between these reproductive methods in Marginal Notes, p. 64, and
evokes a comparison with the contemporary practice of the multiple in the 1970s.

Heyne and Neusüss, Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms, pp. 52–53. Many photograms bear added
42.
graphite and ink, techniques then typical for improving the registration of photos in print and in
which Moholy had been trained; see Julie Barten, Sylvie Pénichon, and Carol Stringari, “The
Materialization of Light,” in Moholy-Nagy: Future Present, ed. Matthew Witkovsky et al. (Chicago: Art
Institute of Chicago, 2016), pp. 188–202.

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OCTOBER

reverse gender stereotypes, such that Moholy’s pragmatism is figured as the ratio-
nal counterpart to the “feverish sensory perception of his new vision.”43 Consider
Xanti Schawinsky in a letter to Moholy-Nagy’s second wife, Sibyl:

Lucia often sat in the atelier in Weimar and Dessau and it was said
that she kept an eye on him, making sure that he painted. She was a
serious person, who seldom laughed. Moholy-Nagy’s photography
was, without a doubt, supported by her technical contribution. She
took on his darkroom work, and, I believe, deserves a certain amount
of Moholy[-Nagy]’s reputation as a photographer; most of the pho-
tographs that are of any importance were made during that time.44

This “contribution” was at times figured as an “unusually close working arrange-
ment” (Moholy’s own words) and at other times as a collaboration.45 That is even
more apparent in her husband’s texts, beginning with the 1922 essay “Production-
Reproduction,” at which point the Hungarian artist could hardly write a postcard
to friends in German, much less craft a theoretical argument.46 “What he needed
was not only the translation of his stilted verbal attempts into fluent, written
German, and adequate expressions for thoughts that were often still in a very
nascent state, but also someone with whom he could think out loud in the creative
process and see it to the end—the last of which was very often left to me. The ini-
tial idea came from him, the argumentation was done together, and the formula-
tion was mine.”47 The formulation, but also, it would appear, the content of those
texts, given that a “methodical reading of scholarly, especially scientific, texts did
not appeal to him,” according to Moholy; it was she, in combination with him, who
generated what Otto Stelzer described as “the wealth of technological Utopias
buried in the footnotes of his book Painting, Photography, Film.”48 This was labor

43.
Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, cited in Valdivieso, “Eine ‘symbiotische Arbeitsgemeinschaft,’” p. 69.
Valdivieso describes this as a “reversal of gender binaries” in which the rational is aligned with the
female integer (pp. 78–81).

44.
Moholy-Nagy (Weingarten: Kunstverlag Weingarten, 1986), p. 425.

Xanti Schawinsky to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, August 25, 1948; reprinted in Krisztina Passuth,

45.
Moholy, Marginalien, p. 11.

Moholy, Marginal Notes, p. 55. The German phrase she uses is “symbiotische Arbeitsgemeinschaft”;

46.
Rolf Sachsse, “Moholy, oder: Vom Wert der Reproduktion,” in Das neue Sehen: von der
Fotografie am Bauhaus zur subjektiven Fotografie, ed. Rainer Wick (Munich: Klinkhardt und Biermann,
1991), p. 94. Before Moholy, it was Alfred Kemény who had helped to write her husband’s essays in
German.

47.

Moholy, cited in Valdivieso, “Eine ‘symbiotische Arbeitsgemeinschaft,’” pp. 68–69.

48.
Moholy, Marginal Notes, p. 54 (Moholy cites Stelzer’s postscript to the 1967 edition of
Painting, Photography, Film). Her role appears to have been extensive: “There was not a single text that
he sent out that I had not read, and there were moments, or opportunities, where I had to say, hey, lis-
ten, that’s just not true. Then he would say, well, then just say it the other way around. So his logic was
unreliable [unverlässlich].” Moholy, interview with Sachsse, June 17, 1983.

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Lucia Moholy’s Idle Hands

that, as Lothar Schreyer recalled, far exceeded that of simply correcting diction
and style and took on the character of co-authorship.49

Moholy’s decisive role in the photograms as well as the theoretical texts is
perhaps how we can begin to explain why Moholy-Nagy so vehemently cultivated
a mythology of originality. Artistic agency lay in verbal instruction. This is made
explicit in one of Moholy-Nagy’s most iconic works, his so-called telephone
paintings of 1922, which he claimed to have had made in conversation with a
fabricator over the phone; paintings that became emblematic of Moholy-Nagy’s
devaluation of physical labor as artistic meaning.50 But it is highly ambiguous as
to whether those gestures actually accomplish what Moholy-Nagy claimed for
them, for invocations of the artist’s “touch” persisted, even if they were purport-
edly emptied of significance in being assigned to an iconographic register. A
paintbrush, the preoccupation with hands, even the smuggling in of a signature,
retooled in stenciled script—and ironically no different from Lucia’s name at
this time—effectively reinstate an authorial conception of the work of art, even if
the mechanical is the vehicle by which it does so.51 This mythology distracted
attention away from his wife’s actual role in the realization of his artworks and
focused it instead on the question of who (of his male colleagues) had first “dis-
covered” the photogram (a debate in which Lissitzky had accused Moholy-Nagy
of plagiarizing Man Ray).52 Moholy-Nagy responded that he had come to the
photogram “through theoretical work,” referring to the 1922 essay. He further
distinguishes his approach from that of “a woman at Loheland,” whose use of
transparent organic materials placed onto photographic paper was, unlike his
use of the technique, he contended, “nothing more than the fixing of an acciden-
tally charming effect, nothing more than a naturalistic photograph that had come
about without an actual mastery of the photographic process.”53

49.
p. 238; cited in Valdivieso, “Eine ‘symbiotische Arbeitsgemeinschaft,’” p. 68.

See Lothar Schreyer, Erinnerungen an Sturm und Bauhaus (Munich: Langer-Müller, 1956),

50.
This was a mythology that Moholy deconstructs, tracing Moholy-Nagy’s declaration of the
paintings in 1946 “as having been ordered over the telephone” (in his Abstract of an Artist) back to the
actual circumstances in 1922, when he exclaimed, extremely satisfied with the fabricator’s work, that he
“might even have done it over the telephone!” See Moholy, Marginal Notes, pp. 75–76.

51.
On the issue of names, see Moholy, Marginal Notes, p. 52. “Nagy” was his proper last name
and he had added “Moholy” (adapting the name of his family’s estate), “a name which lacked any reali-
ty of its own for the simple reason that it was the bearer’s own invention.”

52.
Architekt Typograf Fotograf, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers (Dresden 1967, new ed. 1992), pp. 63–64.

El Lissitzky to Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, September 15, 1925, reprinted in El Lissitzky: Maler,

53.
Moholy-Nagy, “Fotoplastische Reklame,” Offset-, Buch- und Werbekunst 7 (1927), p. 388
(emphasis added). It is now well established that Moholy-Nagy refers here to photograms produced by
Bertha Günther, a teacher at Loheland from 1916 to 1926, who made small-format photograms on day-
light paper using plant material. See Herbert Molderings, “László Moholy-Nagy und die Neuerfindung
der Fotograms,” in Die Moderne der Fotografie (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2008), p. 51; see also
Molderings’s essay in Heyne and Neusüss, Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms, p. 18. In contrast to her hus-
band, Moholy argued that the making of these photograms was not a hobby of Günther’s but rather
“formed, in one way or another, part of the artistic training of the students at Loheland,” just as it
would Moholy-Nagy’s own pedagogy at the Bauhaus and New Bauhaus in Chicago (Moholy, Marginal
Notes, p. 61).

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Mastery indeed. Under these circumstances, the photograms of the 1920s
reveal the stakes of picturing hands in these years and the labor that they elided.
Given that this is Moholy’s own profile pictured here, in Untitled, whose “idle hand”
is it, exactly, that rested upon the photosensitive emulsion?54 And does it coincide
with the hand that chose the paper, prepared the chemicals, operated the enlarger,
adjusted the exposure, and carried the print from bath to bath? If so, what is left of
Moholy-Nagy here? Can we—should we—continue to describe the celebrated double-
portrait photogram of the couple as evidence of their “symbiotic working arrange-
ment”? Does this not incriminate exactly the opposite, the unequal division of labor
upon which the (masculinist) avant-garde relied, in both rhetoric and practice—
Moholy-Nagy, of course, being in good company here?55 In many photograms, the
presence of a female hand is unmistakable, just as we also encounter her stamp on
the backs of several prints, in and among his. As was to be expected, whatever shared
authorship Moholy-Nagy may have acknowledged in the 1920s was, in later years,
thoroughly erased, even during her and her husband’s own lifetime, as when the ini-
tial caption to the now-iconic “double portrait” later read “self-portrait,” and then
“double self-portrait,” referring to the male artist alone.56 “Labor” was a highly con-
tradictory term for someone who repeatedly stressed “production” and yet seemed
to have been incapable of realizing such work without the direct help of others, a
kind of “Raphael without hands,” as Rolf Sachsse has pointed out, “an avant-gardist
without any foundation in artistic technologies.”57

What we begin to see in the distinction between “production” and “repro-
duction” is that it describes a formal operation as much as it does a gendered divi-
sion of labor. She, skilled in replicative technologies and thus perceived as a kind
of stenographer, did “nothing more” than carry out the artist’s dictation, while he
claimed singular authorship through a jargon of authenticity that she, perversely,
helped to craft. We should recognize in such images not only the reassertion of
artistic genius in the very medium whose technology posed the greatest threat to
those conventions but, more significantly, the labor that made that reassertion
possible, the invisible hand of the artist-as-reproducer, who brought it into being.

54.
The phrase comes from Renate Heyne and Floris Michael Neusüss, who write of one pho-
togram of hands juxtaposed with paintbrushes as “the artist’s hand at rest, idle, in a certain sense, while
his picture is painted by the light.” See Heyne and Neusüss, Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms, p. 155. The
claim that “this may be a portrait of Lucia Moholy” is made on p. 153.

To cite just one example, Herbert Bayer wrote to the historian Andreas Haus: “We let our
55.
wives, who were photographers, work for us”; cited in Andreas Haus to Lucia Moholy, November 4,
1977, Lucia Moholy Papers, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.

56.
Popular Photography 5, no. 6 (December 1939), pp. 30–31; reprinted in Heyne and Neusüss,
Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms, p. 253. The caption to the image reads: “Moholy-Nagy laid his head down
on the projection paper to make the photogram shown above. He then turned his head on the paper
and made a second exposure.”

57.
Sachsse, “Telephone, Reproduktion, und Erzeugerabfüllung: Der Begriff des Originals bei
László Moholy-Nagy,” in Über Moholy-Nagy, ed. Gottfried Jäger and Gudrun Wessing (Bielefeld: Kerber,
1997), p. 74 (emphasis in original).

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Lucia Moholy’s Idle Hands

A Collective Corpus

This redefinition of the production/reproduction dyad has profound conse-
quences for the role gender played in the construction of avant-garde photographic
discourses. To grasp those consequences, though, we need to look more closely at
the photographs Lucia Moholy took during the years in which she was visiting
Schwarzerden while simultaneously living in Dessau as the wife of a Bauhaus master.
As others have pointed out, these two worlds had much in common: Both were
indebted to the German youth movement and its toppling of the hierarchy between
student and teacher, body and mind, older and younger generations. Both
embraced holistic conceptions of pedagogy in which physical movement, dance, and
gymnastics played central roles. And both were deeply invested in establishing col-
lectivity as the basis for a new social fabric in contemporary Germany.58 This shared
ground led to collaborations that exceed Moholy’s photographs: In 1930, Walter
Gropius drew up plans for a new building for Schwarzerden, whose design took
advantage of the hilly nature of the school’s property to create a two-level complex.59
Like the Bauhaus building in Dessau, living quarters for students were housed in the
same structure as the school’s library, seminar rooms, a large gymnastics hall, and
faculty offices, facilitating an educational experience that permeated everyday life.
Although the building was never realized, Moholy-Nagy’s wall-painting scheme for
the commune’s existing gymnastics hall was, thus implementing ideas he had devel-

Wörner-Heil, Von der Utopie zur Sozialreform, pp. 507–08. See also Neugärtner’s comparison of
58.
the Bauhaus and Schwarzerden in “Utopias of a New Society,” p. 87–91, and her assertion that
although Lucia Moholy’s “theoretical affiliations rested with Buchhold and Vogler,” the Bauhaus (e.g.,
Moholy-Nagy) was much closer to Loheland than to Schwarzerden (p. 91).

59.

Reginald R. Isaacs, Walter Gropius: Der Mensch und sein Werk (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1984), p. 550.

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Walter Gropius
(design) and
Stefan Sebök (draw-
ing). Perspectival
plan for Schule
Schwarzerden, 1930.
Gropius © 2020
Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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Moholy. Double Portrait of Elisabeth
Vogler and Tilla Winz. 1927.

oped on the dynamic construction of light and space.60 Moholy-Nagy, furthermore,
furnished Paul Vogler’s medical offices in Berlin with Bauhaus-designed tables,
chairs, cabinets, lighting fixtures, and textiles (an interior that Moholy also pho-
tographed). We can safely assume that these commissions were only possible
because of the relationships that she had cultivated through her personal and pro-
fessional connections with the women of Schwarzerden.61

Many of the photographs that Moholy took at the commune have the inti-
mate character of snapshots taken by close friends. One depicts Elisabeth Vogler
and fellow member Tilla Winz in a grassy meadow, sitting close enough to one
another that their bodies touch; both smile, while Winz looks down at her own
hands playing with a blade of grass. Moholy must have had the camera on a tripod,
because in another photograph—this time with Moholy pictured—the same roof

60.
Viet Loers, “Moholy-Nagys ‘Raum der Gegenwart’ und die Utopie vom dynamisch-konstrukti-
ven Lichtraum,” in László Moholy-Nagy (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1991), pp. 37–53. Schwarzerden’s newsletter
describes “gay pastel colors, gray and yellow, with a light-colored burlap wall covering”; see Mitteilung
des Bundes für sozialangewandte Gymanstik und Körperpflege 1 (July 1930), p. 5.

For more on Lucia and László’s friendship with Paul Vogler and his wife Paula Vogler (née
61.
Doodt), who had also studied medicine in Jena, see Botar, “The Origins of László Moholy-Nagy’s
Biocentric Constructivism,” p. 324, where he also illustrates a portrait that Moholy took of Paula Vogler
at Schwarzerden. See also Moholy’s contribution in Elisabeth Vogler, p. 33.

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Lucia Moholy’s Idle Hands

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Portrait of Lucia Moholy, possibly
taken by the artist. 1927.

(of the commune’s original building) and two trees appear in the background.62 All
three women wear white, button-down shirts and dark ties, as if Moholy did not sim-
ply visit when she came to the commune but conformed to the life of its members.
Moholy had much in common with the founding women of Schwarzerden: All were
around the same age (Vogler is thirty-five years old here, Winz thirty-one, and Moholy
thirty-three), all had participated in the German youth movement, all came from
bourgeois homes, with fathers who owned companies, worked as lawyers, and were
members of the clergy. Some of these women took great personal risks staying at the
commune against the wishes of families who wanted them to follow a “normal”
path.63 It was likely that Moholy had much more in common with these women than
with the other so-called Meisterfrauen at the Bauhaus, many of whom seemed less
interested in their female peers than they were in supporting their husbands. Ise
Gropius, for one, seemed to embrace her expected duties, whereas Moholy, although
clearly a willing participant, later in life expressed reservations about how “women’s
work” was treated at the Bauhaus.64

62.
The identification of this photograph as having been taken at Schwarzerden (and likely not
by Moholy-Nagy, as indicated in Sachsse, Lucia Moholy: Bauhaus-Fotografin) benefited from conversa-
tions with Meghan Forbes.

63.

Wörner-Heil, Von der Utopie zur Sozialreform, pp. 465–66.

64.
Lucia Moholy later reflected: “When it came to editorial work, I, of course, had to con-
tribute, and when one looks back, one can only say that that was the tendency then, that women

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Both photographs were taken on the grounds of Schwarzerden, which
included a forty-acre farm that sustained the commune’s members and functioned
as a working model of an alternative to what Ilse Hoeborn, another leading mem-
ber (and frequent subject of Moholy’s photographs), described as the often “one-
dimensional diet of potatoes and bread typical of proletarian children.”65 The
commune also consciously rejected the monetization of the land, criticizing the
use of chemicals, fertilizers, and agricultural technologies by the “capitalist farmer
and large landowner,” which pushed the earth to the point of “exhaustion
[Ausnutzung].”66 Although rejecting industrial food, the commune significantly
did not idealize pre-capitalist primitivism. Buchhold warned against the romanti-
cizing of commune life and the “danger that one becomes self-satisfied,” a danger
because “the political gets forgotten.”67 The rejection of the city was not a rejection
of urban life per se but of urban life in the form that it had become under capital-
ism, wherein, as Buchhold saw it, men devised jobs for women that excluded them
from creative work and stifled their potential for self-realization. To counter this,
the commune saw as its task the necessity of “contending with the current capital-
ist economy,” by generating a “collectively oriented living body.”68 The idea was to
model “life in a new sociological form,” as Buchhold put it, “a visible work, or bet-
ter a thing [Sache] through which and out of which we will realize something. It is
the Schwarze Erde, an attempt [Versuch] to build for ourselves an economy that
corresponds to our own logic, one which will allow us to create in it and out of it a
living organism.”69

The year of these two portraits was a decisive one for Schwarzerden; in 1927,
the commune realized its goal of becoming a state-recognized school. From the
start, Buchhold and Vogler had devised a pedagogical component as a way to intro-
duce the larger community to their more radical ideas, which they did through sum-
mer programs for children during their school holidays (in which city kids would

weren’t allowed to participate, even though they were very strong. Today, of course, it is different. Why
I played along, though, is another question” (Sachsse interview with Lucia Moholy, June 18, 1982).

In contrast, Ise Gropius wrote in her Bauhaus diary, which she later revised in the 1970s: “I did
not enter any of the workshops, since my particular talents lay in the literary field, which made me a
natural collaborator for the endless output of statements, articles, and reports that were required of my
husband.” Ise Gropius, cited in Valdivieso, “Ise Gropius: ‘Everybody Here Calls Me Frau Bauhaus,’” in
Bauhaus Bodies, p. 173. She also rationalized the unpaid labor of women at the Bauhaus by pointing to
its “meager budget,” such that there was never enough “secretarial help,” and so, “under great pres-
sure, the wives of the young masters would help out.” Ise Gropius, cited in Valdivieso, “Eine ‘symbioti-
sche Arbeitsgemeinschaft,’” p. 71 n. 29.

65.
an Kinderheimen,” Gymnastik 3, no. 1/2 (January 1928), p. 9.

Ilse Hoeborn, “Notwendigkeit der sozial-gymnastischen und körperpflegerischen Tätigkeit

66.
pp. 447–48.

Buchhold, “Bildungselemente,” p. 21, cited in Wörner-Heil, Von der Utopie zur Sozialreform,

67.
Kassel (emphasis in original).

Marie Buchhold, “Herbstrede auf der Schwarzen Erde,” November 4, 1923, box 41, AddF,

68.

“Ländliche Wirtschaftsgemeinde,” in Wörner-Heil, Von der Utopie zur Sozialreform, p. 467.

69.
Kassel.

Marie Buchhold, “Herbstrede auf der Schwarzen Erde,” November 4, 1923, box 41, AddF,

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spend weeks at a time in the country-
side) and “vacation courses” for work-
ing women based on gymnastics,
breathing work, and massage, as well as
lectures and cultural activities. Such
courses augmented programs that they
implemented in orphanages, women’s
prisons, and psychiatric wards. The
agricultural commune both modeled
the utopian dimension of this “social
work” and supported it financially, pro-
viding “an economic basis for the
future of our pedagogical work.”70
Finding a visual analogue for this peda-
gogical project, Moholy took pho-
tographs that appeared in the school’s
inaugural publicity materials. A sub-
stantial but unknown commission in
Moholy’s body of work, the series
recalls similar such uses of her pho-
tographs in Bauhaus publicity materi-
als, but in this case, the message deliv-
ered was not that of functional design
but rather a conception of the body
called for by Schwarzerden’s feminist
materialism. That materialism took
concrete form in offering women an
eighteen-month-long course of train-
ing in a new professional field that the
founders of Schwarzerden had devised:
“socially applied gymnastics.”71 At the end of the training period, women were quali-
fied to work in early-childhood and youth education, as nurses and health-care work-
ers, in prisons and mental institutions, and as caretakers, with the objective of achiev-
ing a more equitable society through physical and mental self-care. As the brochure
read, this “new social career,” intended “for the modern woman,” offered a form of
“creativity” and thus an alternative to alienated work: “As a creative woman [schaf-
fende Frau], you will find satisfaction in a career that makes a difference, that is never
repetitive, but always vital.”

Cover and interior page from the publicity
brochure “Schule Schwarzerden,” 1927,
with photographs by Lucia Moholy.

70.

“Ländliche Wirschaftsgemeinde,” in Wörner-Heil, Von der Utopie zur Sozialreform, p. 454.

71.
The curriculum was extensive and covered anatomy, nutrition, hygiene, air and sunbathing,
massage practices, sociology, history, the women’s movement, geography, and social welfare, as well as
music, singing, and drawing. All women eighteen years of age and older, who had some kind of sec-
ondary-school education, were invited to attend; see a copy of the brochure (box 41), whose cover
bears a landscape photograph by Moholy, and the course plans (box 15), AddF, Kassel.

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OCTOBER

Moholy’s photographs do not
simply illustrate the school’s activi-
ties, they find a visual analogue for
its pedagogical logic. In one
instance, she arranged three chil-
dren at a diagonal, with each
demonstrating one position of a
sequence known as the “crawling
exercise.”72 Moholy’s decision to
treat the individual body as a serial
unit recalls techniques she had
developed in her Bauhaus product
photography, whereby multiple
exemplars of identical objects, posi-
tioned in different ways, visualize a
spectrum of attributes within a sin-
gle image. This serial approach
employed standard studio techniques, such as neutral backgrounds, giving
these images the appearance of having been unauthored—again, attesting to
Moholy’s self-effacing approach to photography. Paradoxically, however, this
calculated arrangement produces a visual rhetoric of Sachlichkeit, or matter-of-
factness, one which served the ideology of functionalism (as opposed to
Expressionism) at the Dessau Bauhaus. It is particularly striking here, in the
treatment of juvenile bodies, because it injects a logic of seriality into a peda-
gogical project of holism, and then further renders those two attributes—repe-
tition and wholeness—compatible.

Moholy.
Children’s Chairs (1923).
1924–25.

One reason for that compatibility was a shared materialist commitment.
For the women of Schwarzerden, that took the form of a repeated insistence on
maintaining an “objective” understanding of their present, its challenges, and
the “tasks at hand.”73 Buchhold and Vogler were explicit in their approach to
the body as not therapeutic but social; they were not interested in gymnastics as
a form of treatment or restoration, mental or physical, but rather as a structural
means by which everyday life—in the home, workplace, and school—could be
reconfigured.74 For Moholy, it meant going one step further: desexualizing the

72.
The crawling exercise fell into the category of “functional” gymnastics, which, alongside “stat-
ic” and “rhythmic” gymnastics, was a central component of a curriculum devised by Vogler. Functional
gymnastics aimed to stimulate “the regeneration of the entire organism through the activation of vital
functions of individual bodily components.” See “Lehrstoffpläne,” box 15, AddF, Kassel.

73.
Kassel.

Marie Buchhold, “Herbstrede auf der Schwarzen Erde,” November 4, 1923, box 41, AddF,

74.
(January 1928), p. 6.

Buchhold and Vogler, “Sozial angewandte Gymnastik und Körperpflege,” Gymnastik 3, no. 1/2

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Lucia Moholy’s Idle Hands

body in order to heighten its generalizability. Faces are turned away from us and
genitals obscured. The pose, embodying a pedagogical principle, takes prece-
dence over the individual characteristics of the sitter—here is the body not as a
site of subjectivity but as an organism training to live within a collectivity. This is
why the unclothed, prepubescent body of the child becomes pervasive in these
photographs. Just as she has assumed the position of a passive observer, “merely”
reproducing someone else’s program, decisions of framing, focus, and arrange-
ment produce a photograph that asks us to assume the position of a disinterest-
ed viewer, to suspend the gendered conditions of representation. We are asked
to consider their position spatially, to see the body as a demonstration piece
rather than as an object of desire.75 At times, that materialist approach to the
body is so extreme that some photographs seem to go too far, to de-humanize
their subjects through sameness and seriality.

Moholy’s erasure of her own libidinal investment in the photographic
image, under the sign of Sachlichkeit, analogized Schwarzerden’s philosophy of
collectivity. Many of the exercises that Moholy depicts happen in small groups,
as if micro-experiments in the “dismantling of the self [Ich-Abbau]” that

That captions frequently accompany these photographs further disciplines their meaning. A
75.
special issue on Schwarzerden in the journal Gymnastik (ibid.) includes several photographs that she
very likely took in summer and fall 1927, one of which portrays a group of women outside with captions
underneath each pair or trio: “breathing in,” “breathing out,” “drumming” on the back, and so forth.

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Moholy. Children Demonstrating
Stretching Exercise. C. 1927.

OCTOBER

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Moholy. Blanche Moll and
Luise Möhl. 1927.

Buchhold called for as a challenge to the ego-driven patterns of bourgeois iden-
tity and private property.76 Although members of Schwarzerden were allowed to
have a minimum of personal effects, everything else was held as common prop-
erty. Individualism was a remnant of the nineteenth century to be dispensed
with, not unlike architectural ornament at the Bauhaus. In its place would be a
new emphasis on communication: Courses were built around “listening,” “lis-
tening to,” “understanding,” “accepting,” and “articulating.” Buchhold even
used the term Erosgemeinschaft (collectivity of Eros), founded on a principle of
communism with a small c, of living in common, not only materially but as a
means to reshape patterns of sociability, of subjective self-regard, and of one’s
own relationship to one’s body.77 Although mobilizing repetition and seriality,
Moholy’s photographs also feature the body in dialogue with other bodies. This
must have struck a chord with the leading women of Schwarzerden, given that
Ruth Hallensleben—a former preschool teacher and trained social pedagogue

76.

Wörner-Heil, Von der Utopie zur Sozialreform, p. 462.

77.
Ibid., p. 462 n. 98 and p. 463. Elisabeth Vogler had studied with the controversial early-twen-
tieth-century pedagogue Gustav Wyneken, who advanced the notion of an erotic relationship between
student and teacher, usually of the same sex. This raises the question of Schwarzerden’s lesbianism, of
which I found no hard evidence (Sachsse, though, recalls learning of an affair between Tilla Winz and
Florence Henri; in conversation with the author, June 6, 2019). Any expression of nonnormative sexu-
ality was no doubt complicated by living in a conservative part of rural Germany, of which the women
were keenly aware.

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Lucia Moholy’s Idle Hands

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Ruth Hallensleben. Exercise at
Schule Schwarzerden. 1938.
© Ruth Hallensleben /
Fotoarchiv Ruhr Museum.

(later known for her industrial photography)—mimicked her aesthetic to a
remarkable degree.78

Borrowing from the contemporary German educational reformer Fritz Klatt,
who also held courses at the school, Schwarzerden theorized a counter-version of
labor, one that was oddly in accordance with Moholy’s anti-individualist approach
to photography. Broadly defined in the terms of “creative rest [schöpferische
Pause],” as opposed to capitalist productivity, recovery and rejuvenation protested
capitalist efficiency as the primary means in which the body itself, under such con-
ditions, was exhausted.79 Such critiques not only build upon socialist and commu-
nist strategies of combating exploitation, they also anticipate the New Left–era
protests that embraced nonwork, idleness, and even sleep as a means of pointing

78.
Hallensleben was employed as a preschool teacher in Kassel until 1930 and had to leave this
profession after a court case was brought against her (likely on the grounds of homosexuality, which
Paragraph 175, in effect since 1871, had made illegal). She then undertook studies in photography in
Cologne and was allowed to practice from 1934 onward. Correspondence with Rolf Sachsse, March 8,
2020. Hallensleben did not have relationships with men, but she also—for obvious reasons—did not
embrace a lesbian identity; see Rolf Sachsse, “Eine deutsche Fotografin,” in Ruth Hallensleben:
Frauenarbeit in der Industrie, ed. Ursula Peters (Berlin: Dirk Nishen, 1985), pp. 74–79. On the use of
Paragraph 175 against female teachers during the Weimar Republic, see Marti M. Lybeck, Desiring
Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890–1930 (Albany: State University of New
York, 2014), pp. 117–21.

79.
Wörner-Heil, Von der Utopie zur Sozialreform, p. 457.

Marie Buchhold, “Schöpferische Pause,” a review of Klatt’s eponymous book, cited in

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OCTOBER

to the foundational antinomy between capitalism and sustainability.80 Labor, rede-
fined as unalienated—as “idle” in the eyes of capital—became directed toward
meeting the needs of the body, intellect, and emotional life, with the work of the
hands playing a prominent role in exercises like massage, partner movement-work,
and various forms of hand-based training like drawing with both the right and left
hands as well as modeling in clay. Whereas the most immediate purpose of such
“leisure” activities was to strengthen the hands, “to refine their sense of feeling
and to teach a sense of proportion,” a further goal was to introduce students to an
“expanded definition of gymnastic pedagogy,” which included an introduction to
the history of art, which “awakens the feeling for aesthetic values and deepens the
understanding of other times and other peoples,” so that students come out of
their program “neither one-dimensional nor unworldly.”81 The hand took on sig-
nificance not only as a healing entity, in massage and other forms of restorative
touch, but also as a source of self-care in the face of exploitation and as the “foun-
dation of artistic creation.”82

Hand/Head

This conception of idle creativity, as a kind of queering of conventional mod-
els of creation, for which Moholy found a unique visual language, stood in stark
contrast to Moholy-Nagy’s revalorization of the hand as the font of artistic value.
His integration of so-called hand sculptures as part of his courses at the New
Bauhaus in Chicago, where he arrived in 1937, guided students in exploring tac-
tile materials, like clay and wood, that they would shape into objects “modeled to
fit the sensibilities of the hand that grasps it.”83 Described as honing “the function
of the hands to catch, to press, to twist, to feel thickness, to weigh, to go through
holes, to use his joints, etc.,” these exercises served the liberation of sensory per-
ception only to the extent that the body could be retooled to better conform to
industrial capitalism. As Emma Stein has argued, in examining how World War II
shaped Moholy-Nagy’s curriculum in Chicago, such exercises were forms of
“wartime pedagogy,” whereby “creative programs” for veterans addressed “break-
downs, . . . psychopathic cases, . . . [and] injured industrial workers”—even impli-
cating wartime trauma in the capitalist workplace.84 In language that superficially
recalls that of Schwarzerden, Moholy-Nagy termed this “rehabilitation,” whereby
“buried energies” were to be “released for contemporary orientation” and thus

80.

81.

82.

83.

See Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2014).

“Lehrstoffpläne,” box 15, AddF, Kassel.

Buchhold, cited in Wörner-Heil, Von der Utopie zur Sozialreform, p. 468.

See Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (New York: Norton, 1938).

84.
Moholy-Nagy, “Better Than Before,” The Technology Review, 46, no. 1 (November 1943), cited
in Emma Stein, “László Moholy-Nagy and Chicago’s War Industry: Photographic Pedagogy at the New
Bauhaus,” History of Photography 38, no. 4 (2014), p. 401.

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Lucia Moholy’s Idle Hands

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Moholy. Lessons with Modeling Clay at Schwarzerden. 1927.

“can be applied to all types of work in the artistic, scientific, and technical
sphere.”85 But the difference is crucial: If Moholy-Nagy sought out exercises that
would respond to the destructive tendencies of industrial capitalism, in order to
better prepare the body to withstand that destruction, Schwarzerden’s restorative
practices sought to circumvent it altogether by proposing counter-models within
the context of a feminist and anti-capitalist critique.

The status of the hand figured prominently in such debates, because it
emblematized the vexed nature of authorship under such conditions of alienation.
Photography, for Moholy-Nagy, had the most to offer this “rehabilitation” of the
senses because, as he saw it, its mechanical basis undermined the role of human
agency and instead stressed the agency of materials and technologies. Moholy-Nagy
repeatedly espoused defamiliarization as the means by which one develops “an inte-
grally photographic approach that is derived purely from the means of photography
itself,” including extreme contrast of tonal values, oblique-angle views, distortion
using concave and convex mirrors, avoidance of perspective, X-ray technology, cam-

85.

Ibid.

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OCTOBER

eraless photographs, and “unknown forms of representation.”86 Such arguments
were mounted in the context of a debate on the respective advantages (and disad-
vantages) of photography and painting as media.87 Unfolding in the pages of the
avant-garde journal i 10 during the very months that Moholy likely took many of her
photographs at Schwarzerden, this was a debate from which she was excluded, even
though she had drafted a contribution and even helped to found the journal.88 (She
was, however, allowed to submit book reviews, presumably because the work in ques-
tion was not properly “hers” but a gloss on someone else’s.) Those debates centered
on the “objectivity” of photography in comparison to painting, wherein the trace of
the artist’s hand (often coded as “facture” in these debates) continued to guarantee
some degree of authorial intention.89 Although Moholy-Nagy took the position that
photography should be embraced as a medium for artists, arguing for a modernist
approach in which “photography relies on its own possibilities” and as a conse-
quence profoundly destabilizes authorial intentionality as a site of meaning produc-
tion, he—and every other participant in the debate—left the foundational definition
of “production” intact: artistic originality, guaranteed by the criterium of formal nov-
elty. The most consequential implications of mechanical reproduction, however,
remained untouched.90

These debates were part of a broader cultural understanding of the hand in
Weimar Germany to which the masculinist avant-garde fully subscribed: “In its per-
ceived immutability, [the hand] was seen as a true sign of character,” a belief evi-
denced by a contemporary fascination with palm reading and handwriting analysis.91
One thinks not only of its repeated use as an emblem for new visions of the artist as

86.
All of which are cited in Moholy-Nagy, “Unprecedented Photography,” trans. and reprinted
in Phillips, Photography in the Modern Era, pp. 83–85. On his rejection of photography as a form of
knowledge, see Susan Laxton, “Moholy’s Doubt,” in Photography and Doubt, ed. Sabine T. Kriebel and
Andrés Mario Zervigón (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 141–60.

87.
The debates were spurred by Ernst Kállai’s contribution “Malerei und Photographie” (which
illustrates a photograph by Moholy of a magnolia flower) in i 10 1, no. 4 (1927), pp. 148–57. When
Moholy-Nagy, as co-editor of the journal, included Kállai’s article, he invited several others to submit
responses; these were published as “Diskussion über Ernst Kállai’s Artikel ‘Malerei und Fotografie
[sic],’” i 10 1, no. 6 (1927), pp. 227–40, and ends with a response by Kállai.

88.
See Moholy, “International Avant-Garde, 1927–1929,” in this issue. An undated typescript in
Moholy’s papers at the Bauhaus-Archiv, with the title “malerei und fotografie,” suggests that she drafted
a contribution to the debate; whether she was invited and then rejected, or not invited in the first
place, is not known.

89.
On the various meanings of facture in the Russian context (of which Moholy-Nagy was
aware) and how these meanings mapped onto shifting conceptions of the artist, see Maria Gough,
“Faktura: The Making of the Russian Avant-Garde,” RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 36
(1999), pp. 32–59.

This would be theoretically challenged by Walter Benjamin a decade later. On a discussion
90.
of reproducibility in relation to Benjamin and Moholy-Nagy, see Michael Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and
Thomas Levin, “Production, Reproduction, and Reception of the Work of Art,” in The Work of Art in the
Age of Its Technological Reproduction, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008), pp. 11–12.

91.
p. 66.

Stephanie D’Alessandro, “Through the Eye and the Hand,” in Moholy-Nagy: Future Present,

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engineer, as in El Lissitzky’s self-portrait The Constructor, and as central motifs in John
Heartfield’s agitprop photomontage, but also marshaled for consumption, as in a
photomontage of Marcel Breuer’s hands that Moholy-Nagy adapted to advertise the
Schocken department store in Nuremberg. The hand as metonym for the
autonomous subject was even extended to the collective subject in Walter Gropius’s
vision of Handwerk, or craft-based production, as the basis for shifting artistic produc-
tion away from “meaningless salon painting” and toward the generation of work in
direct dialogue with social needs, above all housing.92 But even as Gropius resuscitat-
ed references to medieval guild labor as a counter-model to the panel painter, nei-
ther he nor the coterie of painters that he hired could actually disavow the nine-
teenth-century conception of the artist as genius—even at times parodying their own
veiled traditionalism, as in a series of handprints made by Bauhaus members of their
own hands (signed and dated), one of which by Moholy-Nagy reads, inscribed to
Gropius, “my right hand at your service.”93 While everywhere claims were being made

92.
This was a common refrain in Gropius’s founding texts of the Bauhaus, and the figure of the
hand as a metonym for artistic labor also concludes his 1919 manifesto: “Together let us desire, con-
ceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and
painting as one unity and, one day, rise, like the crystal symbol of a new faith, toward heaven from the
hands of a million workers.”

93.
On these works, see Jan Tichy and Robin Schuldenfrei, eds., Ascendants: Bauhaus Handprints
(Chicago: Institute of Design, 2019). Stein corroborates this position when she points to how “the hand
acts as a symbolic trace of authorship in the form of the artist’s imprint as indicative of his or her pres-
ence” (Stein, “László Moholy-Nagy and Chicago’s War Industry,” p. 403).

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100

OCTOBER

to move away from “traditional forms of representation,” assumptions underlying
those representational forms, regarding aesthetic labor as fundamentally different
from manual labor, proved as stable as ever.94 Moholy-Nagy may have quibbled with
the “fetishization of Handwerk,” but he himself resuscitated the legitimacy of the
artist’s touch as a guarantee of the value of that (intellectual) labor, perversely rein-
scribing the very authenticity that he claimed to contest.

Lucia Moholy, by contrast, was able to mount a more powerful critique of tra-
ditional forms of artistic authorship, precisely because she was working from a
position of marginality. As a female practitioner excluded from those photogra-
phers generating what Moholy-Nagy would identify, in his championing of
Florence Henri and others as generating “productive,” New Vision images, Moholy
made seemingly “artless” photographs, refusing those photographic attributes that
would be read as “innovative”—oblique angles, abstract composition, X-ray tech-
nologies, and the like. In fact, it was only because these photographs erased her
agency as author that she was given space and resources at the Bauhaus at all: Her
approach complemented Gropius’s understanding of photography as handmaid-
en to the architect, as “entirely subordinated to the object” depicted.95 This aspect

94.

Moholy-Nagy, “Unprecedented Photography,” in Photography in the Modern Era, p. 84.

95.
Jeannine Fiedler, cited in Olivar Botar, “Lucia Moholy’s Fotografische Arbeit der 20er Jahre:
Eine Nicht-Künstlerin Erschafft Kunst,” in Lucia Moholy: Material und Architektur: Fotos der Bauhauszeit
(Berlin: Derda Galerie, 2016), p. 8.

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Lucia Moholy’s Idle Hands

101

also rendered her illegible as a Neue Sachlichkeit photographer, whereby New
Vision tactics of disorientation were also avoided. But even here the resulting
images remained recognizable within the category of artistic production, as in the
example of Albert Renger-Patzsch, who figured hands as expressive entities that
had the capacity to “speak” and thereby deposit authorial intention as the horizon
of the work’s meaning.96 Moholy’s “objectivity,” by contrast, was dismissed as the
uninspired realism of a bygone era, and, moreover, collapsed with her person-
hood, the unfortunate consequence of her “all-too-large Sachlichkeit,” under which
Gropius “suffers,” as she “never allows for a warm, heartfelt note.”97

Reflecting on the pervasive use of the hand as a physiognomic feature in por-
traiture in the work of Juliet Margaret Cameron and David Octavius Hill, Moholy
introduced her own conception of portraiture as a de-psychologized study of
detail. Speaking in the third person, though with reference to one of her own
images, she writes: “For the first time in the history of photography it was not only
the shape, delineation and expression of the human face, but the sculptural
details of the head and the texture of skin, hair, nails and dress, which became
attractive subjects to the photographer.”98 Tracing its emergence to “object pho-
tography” as well as Soviet film, Moholy admits that “to the general public in
Western Europe, this style appears strange and exotic. They find it interesting and
worth discussing, but few of them wish to have their portraits taken in the same
way.” This was a fact that Moholy knew well, having run a struggling portrait studio
in London, where she photographed English artists, writers, and pacifists in ways
that amplified the close-cropped, shallow focus that she frequently employed in
the 1920s. This emphasis on disciplining the body to the point of mimicking
means of social control was the aspect that most distinguished Moholy’s photogra-
phy from that of her husband, who fetishized non-perspectival representation.
Moholy-Nagy hardly veiled his contempt for an approach that he dismissed as a
kind of reconstructed realism, and Moholy recalls on at least one occasion how he
publicly embarrassed her for espousing legibility as a photographic value.99

96.
See, for example, Adolf Koelsch, Hände und was sie sagen: 64 Bilder (Zurich: Füssli, 1929),
which includes photographs by Renger-Patzsch, who also wrote that “the hands, in addition to the
head, belong to any good portrait.” Renger-Patzsch, “Einiges über Hände und Händeaufnahmen,” in
Photographie für alle (Berlin, 1927); reprinted in Renger-Patzsch, Die Freude am Gegenstand: Gesammelte
Aufsätze zur Photographie, ed. Bernd Stiegler and Ann and Jürgen Wilde (Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
2010), p. 95.

97.
Arbeitsgemeinschaft,’” p. 78.

Ise Gropius, diary, July 2, 1925, cited in Valdivieso, “Eine ‘symbiotische

98.
p. 165.

Lucia Moholy, A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939),

In 1927, she noted in her diary a conversation with Moholy-Nagy and a printer in his studio.
99.
He “asked (whistled) for me, to weigh in on a design. when I expressed that one can’t recognize what
the title picture represents, he laughed at me, ‘one doesn’t need to recognize it, it should just look
good.’ he could have said the same thing seriously, especially since we were with someone we didn’t
even know.” Moholy, “notiz über ein gespräch December 16, 1927,” diary, Lucia Moholy Papers,
Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.

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102

OCTOBER

The series of hand portraits that Moholy took at Schwarzerden forwarded
this radical de-subjectivization of the individual and in doing so challenged
avant-garde discourses of “production” that left in place—despite rhetoric to the
contrary—the autonomy of the author-artist. Moholy fragmented the body, iden-
tifying it with its parts and then again with its various forms of domestic (i.e.,
reproductive) labor—labor that was, like her own act of taking the image,
maligned as artistically unmeaningful, “merely” reproductive. These are rightly
her images—taken neither for publicity (at either school) nor as “documenta-
tion” nor on the instruction of others, like her husband, who, in one “self-por-
trait,” with his right arm outstretched toward the camera, claimed that the pho-
tograph was his “idea” and Moholy simply carried it out.100 This subordination
of techne to concept, embodied in Moholy and her husband, respectively, is not
an isolated case, but, as I have argued, characterized the discourse of the
German avant-garde. It is against that ideology of authorial autonomy that we
should see the radically de-subjectivized hand portraits of Moholy—radical not
only in their embrace of photography as first and foremost a reproductive medi-
um but radical, too, in her willingness to put her own authorship on the line in
making self-consciously “nonproductive” imagery.

Although Moholy was extremely busy at the Bauhaus, responding to the
high demand for her photographs, she complained of a depression that impact-
ed her well-being.101 A draft of a letter to her husband expresses a strong desire
to leave Dessau:

“Hausfotografin”

I reluctantly came along to Weimar at that point, and then reluctantly
to Dessau—after these four years I simply can’t stand it anymore. . . . I
need something that I’m not finding here . . . other people, as well, and
another kind of energy around me, and it doesn’t help that each week
twenty friends come to visit. They are our captives and bring nothing
more than organs that must be filled. I have to go where others exhibit
strength and where I, too, now and again, can unwind.102

100.
László Moholy-Nagy, “Scharf oder unscharf?,” i 10 2, no. 20 (April 1929), pp. 163–67. See
the caption to the photo in Oliver Botar, Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, die Medien und die Künste
(Zurich: Lars Müller, 2014), p. 17. Moholy-Nagy’s statement has since led to a confusion over the
authorship of this image, whether it should be attributed to her alone, to both parties, or to him alone
(as evidenced by the photograph’s varying attribution across the collections of the Met Museum, the
MoMA, and the Bauhaus-Archiv). This confusion—stemming from his claim versus the fact of who was
actually behind the camera—points to how resilient this notion of “production” continues to be and
how its legitimacy relies on invalidating “reproduction.”

101.

Moholy, diary entry, April 13, 1927, Lucia Moholy Papers, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.

102.
Archiv, Berlin (emphasis in original).

Moholy, diary entry that begins “an laci,” May 27, 1927, Lucia Moholy Papers, Bauhaus-

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104

OCTOBER

Whether she found that respite at Schwarzerden is not known. Certainly, the cir-
cumstances of her marriage were on her mind, as suggested by a book review pub-
lished in i 10 entitled “the perfect marriage.”103 Shortly thereafter, in April 1928,
she and Moholy-Nagy moved to Berlin; they separated a year later. Moholy found-
ed her own photography class at Johannes Itten’s school. She kept doing dark-
room work and taking photographs for Moholy-Nagy, particularly his stage sets at
the Kroll Opera. Hands continued to feature prominently in her work, including
in a series of Clara Zetkin in conversation with the German Communist represen-
tative Theodor Neubauer, as well as a portrait of Yella Curjel, wife of the Kroll
director Hans Curjel, with her hands obscuring her face.

In an autobiographical text entitled “Woman of the Twentieth Century,”
Moholy described her role in the 1920s with the term “Hausfotografin [house
photographer].”104 I do not believe that she meant this contemptuously, but as
an objective description of her labor, in the sense of “in house,” for hire, and
thus work that she did not see as “creative.”105 But the term, for our purposes,
means much more; it encapsulates the ambiguous reception of both her labor
and her photographs in relation to her avant-garde peers, but also her interest
in marginal practices of photography engendering new ways of seeing, as when
she appeals to an amateur photography “of the house and kitchen”: “Think for
instance of the housewife, who daily interacts with her kitchen appliances.
Among those thousands of housewives hardly one has probably thought to pay
attention to the play of form, light, and shadow, which emerges from her work with
sieves, plates, eggs, meals, leftovers, liquids, and other minor things
[Kleinigkeiten] of all kinds.”106 While other scholars have traced her work’s mar-
ginalization to biography—to her gender and, in one case, to her assimilated
Jewish background as playing a role in that “negation of self”—I have argued
here for the significance of her images and their reception.107 Hands Peeling
Potatoes, for one, was the initial spark for this planned book on domestic photog-
raphy.108 Those images lay bare photography as a replicative medium with pro-
found consequences for conventional conceptions of creation and, in doing so,

103.
pp. 459–60.

Lucia Moholy, “die vollkommene ehe, boekbespreking,” i 10 1, no. 12 (December 1927),

104.
Arbeitsgemeinschaft,’” p. 78 n. 45.

Moholy, “Frau des 20. Jahrhunderts,” p. 35; cited in Valdivieso, “Eine ‘symbiotische

Moholy would often deny her identity as an artist, construing her and Moholy-Nagy’s collabo-
105.
ration as “the symbiotic alliance of two diverging temperaments. Innate boldness and passionate fervor
on the one hand, restraint of approach on the other, had each, it appears, a part to play in the out-
come, initiative and implementation remaining the artist’s [i.e., Moholy-Nagy’s] birthright”; see
Moholy, Marginal Notes, p. 55.

106.
der Fotografie, p. 209 (emphasis in original).

Lucia Moholy, “Der Amateur bei sich zuhause,” reprinted in Manifeste! Eine andere Geschichte

107.
Hidden Jew,” Women’s Art Journal 35, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2014), p. 45.

Rose-Carol Washton Long, “Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Photography and the Issue of the

108.

Conversation with Rolf Sachsse, March 8, 2020.

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105

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fundamentally challenge a discourse of New Vision photography that had subli-
mated replication under the sign of authorial intention. As such, they “question
the transcendence of the New Vision’s ‘one of form,’” as Carol Armstrong has
argued in relation to Tina Modotti’s photographs, drawing on Luce Irigaray’s
critique of essentialism.109 While those (primarily male) practitioners—Moholy-
Nagy above all—essentially repressed the full threat of photography to those

109.
Carol Armstrong, “This Photography Which Is Not One: In the Gray Zone with Tina Modotti,”
October 101 (Summer 2002), p. 52 (emphasis in original). This needs to be done not only within this field
but even within Moholy’s oeuvre, part of which has been recruited for what Armstrong calls “modernism’s
monotheistic monopoly of the self-definition of photography as an avant-garde optics.”

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106

OCTOBER

models of mastery, Moholy embraced this aspect of the medium, with all the
consequences that it entailed for her own self-effacement.110

And those consequences were extreme. In August 1933, Neubauer, with
whom Moholy was having a relationship, was arrested by the Gestapo in her Berlin
apartment, prompting Moholy to emigrate quickly. In the haste of this departure,
she was compelled to leave her glass negatives behind, with the intention, as she
later wrote, of retrieving them at some point in the future.111 That recovery was
delayed by the outbreak of World War II, and Moholy believed that the negatives
had been destroyed, until she began to see them reproduced in publications. With
the help of a lawyer, she gradually pieced together that they were in Walter
Gropius’s possession: When Moholy-Nagy left for England, he had moved them
into Gropius’s basement, and Gropius had them shipped, along with all of his
other possessions, upon his emigration in 1937. As Robin Schuldenfrei has
argued, in recovering this remarkable episode, Gropius retained the images
because he believed that, given that the photographs were of his school and his
buildings, he had a right to their usage; that his authorship (of the referent) there-
fore outweighed hers (of the image).112

Many of the photographs in the Schwarzerden archive bear the numbering
system that Moholy devised in the 1950s in her effort to regain possession of her
negatives and thus her authorship.113 This numbering system is written in pencil
and in Moholy’s handwriting from that period (as opposed to the 1920s). Some
prints also bear her Berlin-era stamp (1929–1933), gesturing to the complex tem-
porality of this body of work, which indexes two very different periods in the self-
consciousness of a female artist, one producing and one reassembling her oeuvre
(and, moreover, one that she never would have described with that lofty term).
The inscriptions further attest to Moholy’s renewed contact with Vogler and
Buchhold after World War II: Judging from correspondence and statements, she
very likely sent them additional prints that they then pasted into albums. On the
occasion of Vogler’s death in 1975, Buchhold solicited recollections from close
friends, to which Moholy enthusiastically responded. The end of Moholy’s contri-
bution suggests the high regard in which she held the women of Schwarzerden
and particularly Vogler: “It was only after many years of painful separation that the

110.
Anja Guttenberger explores this aspect of Moholy’s “serial self-portraits,” which she, further-
more, excluded from her own photographic oeuvre; see Guttenberger, “Mit eigenen Augen: Serielle
Autoporträts von Lucia Moholy und Florence Henri,” in Gespiegeltes Ich: Fotografisches Selbstbildnisse von
Frauen in den 1920er Jahren, ed. Gerda Breuer and Elina Knorpp (Berlin: Nicolai, 2014), p. 101.

111.

112.

Moholy, “The Missing Negatives,” p. 7.

Schuldenfrei, “Images in Exile,” p. 201.

This system consists of her initials in lowercase, a roman numeral I or II, a slash, and a num-
113.
ber. It corresponds to a card catalogue that Moholy created for her photos, which is now in the
Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin. It is only because of this inscription on the verso of several prints in the AddF
that I was able to identify these photographs as Moholy’s at all, given that many are not among her
papers at the Bauhaus-Archiv.

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Lucia Moholy’s Idle Hands

107

symbol of awakening life, sent by me from London via personal messengers
(Moholy-Nagy had died in Chicago in 1946), secured the continued existence of
the old friendship. This symbol was followed by a reunion, which confirmed our
loyalty and sparked a deep admiration for her successful work.”114

Abigail Solomon-Godeau wrote not long ago that photography is “a medium
which by virtue of its supposed transparency, truth, and naturalism has been an
especially potent purveyor of cultural ideology—particularly the ideology of gen-
der.”115 What the Schwarzerden photos show us is how that ideology unfolded on
multiple registers: It was not simply that Moholy’s photographic labor was femi-
nized because she was a woman (although that certainly played a role). It was
feminized because it did not conform to the hegemonic terms of originality then
underpinning the distinction between artistic and nonartistic labor. At the very
moment in which Moholy’s hands were busy laboring for her husband’s career,
her own were dismissed in the highly gendered language of “reproduction,” as
the “reiteration of already existing relations,” to borrow from the 1922 essay.
What is so extraordinary is to see just how resilient those terms were: Moholy her-
self played a large part in securing them, not only by participating in that system
as the Other against which her male colleagues defined their own “productive”
work, but by crafting its very discourse. To read the gendered dimension of her
Schwarzerden photographs is to read them against the intentions of their maker,
for although Moholy later asserted authorship of her images, she never pointed
to gender as playing a role in their devaluation. Nor was she involved in the
German feminist movement beyond her tenuous connection to Schwarzerden.
This is one of the conundrums of women photographers of the interwar period:
While they led independent lives, pursuing their careers in the face of rampant
sexism, none of them seemed to have embraced the feminist movements in their
respective countries.116

As the exception that proves the rule, Moholy’s photographs at
Schwarzerden reflect on that conundrum in ways that go beyond biography and
begin to dismantle the avant-garde’s own mythologies about visual reproduction.
Gropius—or Herbert Bayer or Sigfried Giedion or Moholy-Nagy, for that matter,
men who all protested Moholy’s requests in the 1950s to have her name credit-
ed—never actually contested her authorship; they knew perfectly well that she had
taken the photographs. The ground on which they protested was that her author-

114.

Moholy, in Elisabeth Vogler, p. 34.

115.
and Practices (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 257.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions,

Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “New Women and New Vision Photography in the Crucible of
116.
Modernity,” Jeu de Paume: Le magazine (October 21, 2015), http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/
2015/10/abigail-solomon-godeau-new-women-and-new-vision-photography-in-the-crucible-of-moder-
nity-en/.

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108

OCTOBER

ship was qualitatively different from theirs.117 That difference was predicated on
the false premise that there exist certain forms of visual representation that merely
transcribe the world as it already is. We now recognize that that is rarely, if ever,
the case; that every act of reproduction implicates decisions, interests, and priori-
ties, whether intended or not. But to have admitted this would have been to admit
that her authorship—her embrace of the medium’s realism, its replicative nature,
and its mechanical limitations—was on an equal footing with theirs and thus
would have profoundly destabilized the myth of nonmimetic representation as an
inherently progressive mode of artistic production, a myth on which they had built
entire careers and one that continues to underpin histories of the avant-garde and
its “originality.” It is a lesson we have heard before and one that is worth hearing
again.118 This time, though, with more attention paid to how discourses of origi-
nality unfold as much on the surface of the image as they do through the material
lives, economic conditions, and gendered bodies of their makers.

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This is an attempt to explain why, as Schuldenfrei points out, “the object photographed took
117.
precedence over the authored photograph as object,” an aspect that Moholy also observed when she
described how isolating the object through the photograph effectively lent it greater significance than
it previously possessed (Moholy, A Hundred Years of Photography, p. 164, cited in Schuldenfrei, “Images
in Exile,” p. 202).

The reference is to Rosalind Krauss’s The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist
118.
Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). I hope my own argument will not be read as a “return” to the
historicist model of art history that Krauss critiques, one in which the meaning of the work is grounded
in “the biographical matrix of its author” without ever questioning “the categories of such a discus-
sion—work of art, medium, author, oeuvre” (p. 4). Lucia Moholy. Hands Peeling Potatoes. C. 1930. image

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