99% Invisible - 225- Photo Credit

Episode Date: August 17, 2016

Founded by architect Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus school in Germany would go on to shape modern architecture, art, and design for decades to come. The school sought to combine design and industrialization, creating functional things that could be … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. You can picture her there. Line on her stomach and the dirt. Arcing her camera up towards the building. Tilting the frame so that the stark rectilinear building transforms into a striking asymmetric composition. You can see her taking her time with this photo. Adjusting the focus and the exposure.

She releases the shutter, impressing the negative image onto a glass plate. 90 years later, this photograph by Lucia Maholi is one of the most famous images of the German art school known as the Bauhaus. Bau, meaning the word build in German, and house, meaning house. Mediocre German and house meaning house. Mediocre German speaker, Sam Greenspan. The Bauhaus was founded by architect Walter Gropius in 1919. The school sought to fuse art with industrialization, to use new ideals of modernism to create beautiful, functional things,

which could be mass produced for the betterment of society. In the beginning of the Bauhaus rose from the ashes of World War I, and there was a very hopeful, very utopian period of craftsmen and artists all creating together. This is Robin Schulten-Fry. I teach architectural design history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, but I'm American. The Bauhaus was a magnet for European designers, architects, and artists of all kinds in the early 20th century,

many of whom would go on to achieve international acclaim. The photographer, Lucia Maholi, did not become one of those famous artists. She joined the Bauhaus in 1923, but not as a teacher or as a student. Her husband, Lázló Maholi Na Naj, had been hired onto the faculty of the Bauhaus. in 1923, but not as a teacher or as a student. Her husband, Lázló Maholi Na and her husband, Lázló Maholi Na and her husband, Lázló Maholi Na and her husband, Lázló Maholi Na was expected of her, which was to do some kind of work that would help fulfill the mission of the school. Unpaid, of course.

Lucia had some training in photography. She had the darkroom skills and she had really excellent technical skills of the period. So Lucia became a kind of in-house documentarian for the Bauhaus. She made portraits of the people there, of the things that they made, and of the architecture of the school itself. Walter Gropius designed the school's campus in Desau, and those buildings became a major theme of Lucy's work. She photographed the workshops,

the dormitories, the master's houses. She said about showing the spaces where these new methods and philosophies of design were being made. You can see the way in which Lucy's photographs of Walter Gropius' architecture express the same ideas that he wanted to express in the architecture itself, and this is not by chance. Lucia's photography, like Gropius' architecture, is all about clarity and simplicity of form. It is utilitarian, documenting the world as it is, and it's also beautiful,

reveling in clean lines and stark contrast, and it's also beautiful, reveling in clean lines and stark contrast, and it's minimal showing only what's needed and nothing more. From the dark room in her and Las Los home on the Bauhaus campus, Lucia amassed a collection of five or six hundred photographs, and she couldn't have known then the impact that these images would have on the built world or on her own life. The Bauhaus aspired to lift society up out of the wreckage of World War I and into a new world of rationalism, beauty, good art and good design, to bring its brand of utopianism into the world at large. But for all their efforts, the world did not become more utopian.

The National Socialist government put the Baja's under increasing pressure. In 1933, it was closed down by the Nazis. Many members of the Baja's were forced to flee immediately because they were Jewish or because they were involved in very left radical politics and they had to go. Amidst all the turmoil of the Nazis raised a power, Lazlo and Lucia had separated. Lucia started dating a Communist Party member of Parliament. One day in 1933, he was arrested in Lucia's apartment while she was out.

So she was not able to return to her apartment because she had to fear that she was arrested immediately too. Somebody told her, don't get back to your apartment. This is Ralph Zaukze. He teaches at the University of Zarbrook in Germany and he knew Lucy him a holy. She had to emigrate immediately so what she did was flee to her Czech family. So she went to Prague first and then she went to Paris via Austria via Switzerland. Eventually landing in London in 1933, Lucia had left behind nearly everything she owned, including the glass negatives of the Bauhaus. As she fled the country for an uncertain fate abroad, Lucia left the legacy of the Bauhaus

to an uncertain fate at home. Lucia weathered out the war in London. She had arrived in the city with basically nothing, and at one point lost everything. Again, when her apartment was bombed by German warplanes. But even in all the chaos of war, Lucia found ways to work. She wrote a book about the history of photography.

100 years of photography, that was published by Penguin in 1939, and at the same time she was quite a successful portrait photographer for the high society in London. And for the most part, she put the Bauhaus behind her. She said to me that she didn't know that the Bauhaus was more than an episode in her life. She stopped thinking about it. At least until after the war. I suppose that in 1946 she received the MoMA catalogue of 1938. That must have been the first hint for her. Back in 1938, completely unbeknownst to Lucia, Walter Gropius had worked with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, MoMA, to put together an exhibition on the Bauhaus.

And because the war was still going on at the time, MoMA hadn't been able to get many of the Bauhaus' objects out of Germany. And so, the exhibition was comprised mostly of photographs, images of the products they designed, the people who made them, and the buildings where they worked and lived. Images of the dormitories, the master's houses, the workshops. Photos that use interesting angles to transform stark, rectilinear structures into striking asymmetric compositions. Those photographs were published in the museum catalog,

the book that accompanied the exhibition. She would have seen her own photographs, but not her name. The 1938 Momma catalog and other catalogs and books coming out from the US do not credit her. Again, historian Robin Schultan-Fry. She also begins to see new articles that mention the Bauhaus that are illustrious good reproductions of her photographs. Following World War II, there was a surge of interest in the Bauhaus.

All of their ideas about rationalism and modernism had caught on among post-war architects and designers. More and more books and articles about the Bauhaus were getting published, and Lucia's photographs kept getting circulated. And the qualities seem to be better than you'd expect from duplications of old prints. Lucia begins to think that, just maybe, her collection of five by seven-inch glass negatives might have made it through the war after all. And she begins to think, or to sense, that her negative might have somehow survived, so she starts to try to get her negatives back.

Lucia's first move is to write to her ex-husband, Lazlo, who had since emigrated to America with his second wife, Sebel. Lucia asks if he had any clues about where the negatives she had left behind might have ended up. Sebel tells her that they in fact left these cumbersome negatives in Gropius' house, in Gropius' basement. Gropius, completely unbeknownst Lu Lucia, had actually taken her negatives with him to the U.S. when he had emigrated more than a decade earlier.

Likely because he had friends who were higher-ups in the Nazi party, and so when Gropius left Germany, he didn't have to flee in a hurry. He was able to carefully pack up his belongings. Lucia's heavy, fragile glass negatives among them and bring them with him to Harvard, where he recently got a job. Lucy erites to Gropius. These negatives are irreplaceable documents, which could be extremely useful, now more than ever.

Walter Gropius writes back. Long years ago in Berlin, you gave all these negatives to me. You will imagine that these photographs are extremely useful to me and that I have continuously made use of them. So I hope you will not deprive me of them." Lucia responds to Gropius, saying, basically, I never gave you my negative. Surely you did not expect me to delay my departure in order to draw up a formal contract, stipulating date and conditions of return?

No formal agreement could have carried more weight than our friendship. It is this friendship I have always relied on, and which also I am now invoking. But when invoking friendship didn't work, Lucia hired a lawyer, who wrote to Gropius, that his holding on to Lucia's negatives was like a firefighter saving a house and then claiming ownership of all the stuff inside.

But still, Gropius was not giving them back. Gropius did never anything for anybody, except for himself. He didn't help her. He wrote very kind letters, said yes, yes. We have to think about it. We have to think about it. We have to think about it, and he did nothing. We have to think about it, we have to think about it, we have to think about it, and he did nothing.

This whole argument raises the question of who owns the image of a building. Intellectual property law on photography has evolved over the years, and it still varies by country. But generally, if you take a picture of a two-dimensional thing, like a painting, it doesn't show any artistry on your part, and therefore you have no claim to the ownership of that image. But if you take a picture of a three-dimensional thing, like a building, you're making decisions about position, angle, lighting, framing, you're not just reproducing what's quote-unquote really there, you're making something entirely new. And so generally, copyright on those images, that is not just the negatives, but also the prints that Gropius would have been making from them. Legally, that all belonged to Lucia. In any case, Gropius kept making prints, kept publishing them, kept circulating her representations,

kept telling the story of the Bauhaus through Lucia's photography. Architecture is, in many ways, understood and consumed through photography. We don't get to see most of the world's iconic buildings. We see pictures of those buildings. And this turned out to be especially true of the Bauhaus buildings. Because after the start of the Cold War, the West's access to the Bauhaus campus was cut off by the iron curtain. Even in East Germany, it was incredibly difficult to photograph these buildings.

Yes, because there was no possibility of visiting them properly, and there was absolutely no chance of taking a photograph of them. I've been there for the first time in my life in the 1970s. I went to Dessau, And whenever I took off my camera, somebody came up and said, no, you can't photograph here because the Bauhaus buildings at that time were surrounded by Soviet military buildings. Photography was banned at the Bauhaus campus in Dessau from 1950 until 1980. And then later, after reunification, the buildings were altered slightly. And so, to this day, scholars like Robin Schultenfrei say that Lucia's photographs are the best representation we have of the Bauhaus.

In a way, it's like those photographs are the Bauhaus. And so even the slides that I myself was taught about the Bauhaus in the 1990s, many of them were still these black and white images because they are such good quality. was taught about the Bauhaus in the 1990s. Many of them were still these black and white images because they are such good quality. After years of legal disputes, Lucien Maholi finally succeeded in getting nearly 300 of her negatives back.

But it was in a sense too late for her. And so I think that part of the story is unfortunate. Lucien Maholi died in 1989. Her negatives went to the Bauhaus archive in Berlin. And it's from Lucie's photos that architects and designers drew inspiration to rebuild the post-war world. People who rebuilt Europe drew on the ideas of the Bauhaus. They looked to its modern, rectilinear, asymmetric architecture as

a counter to the buildings that the Nazis had made. Fascism had used this kind of neoclassical aesthetic. Court houses that were built in the post-war period in America, post offices. These buildings were all built in the modern style. And this is where the modern style does finally take off. Our modern world owes a debt to the Bauhaus, and the Bauhaus owes a debt to Lucien Maholi, whether anyone knows her name or not. But we should know it. Today, about 90 prints of Lucien Maholi's Bauhaus photography are housed at the Bush Rising

Museum at Harvard. They were donated by Walter Gropius and are considered part of his archive. But the museum has, over time time actually been going through this archive, and crediting Lucia on photos known to be hers. Like the photo that Lucia took lying on the ground, pointing her camera up towards the Bauhaus building in Dessa. So we're looking at a photo from around 1926, a gelatin silver print.

It's a kind of worms-eye view, so we're looking up at this glass curtain wall, and we're looking into the workshops of the Bauhaus. Rob Weasonberger is a fellow at Harvard who works on their Bauhaus collection. The backside of the photo says in German in purple ink, photo, Lucia Moroli, desao, Ona e laubnis, reputusion verboten. Without permission, reproduction is for voting, it's not allowed, not permitted. This was the intellectual property of Lucille Moholi.

Yeah. 99% invisible was produced by the Swiss government. The government has been able to produce a lot of things that are not allowed to be allowed to be allowed. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Sam Greenspan, which reviewed self-catering angle Kurt Colstead, Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Sarah Borey at the University of Edinburgh, whose research on Lucium Holy got us started on this story.

Thanks also to Jeffries Hatinik, Gloria Ferris, Sririba Quadrivi, Yantigi, and Mike Wolf. Anne Wouten was the voice of Luci Mahaoli and Sherefusev played Walter Grobius. We are a project of 91.7 K-A-LW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Um, Roman Mars says that if there's a revolving door and you use the one next to it that isn't revolving then you're a monster Because they're so efficient and great. Can I can I ask you a question Justin? I've been meaning to ask you this for a while

Uh-huh. Why don't you just go do a podcast with Roman Mars? If you would have me, I would love to to get over there I have a lot of good ideas for not like this show, but like this show like smart stuff. You know what I mean? Like real thinkers, not like, I can't just, it's not like this show, but like smart, like area-dite podcasting,

that's I feel like my true calling and where I really feel like my lights under a bush was kind of. Justin, do you want to do like a weird backdoor pilot for smart stuff with Justin and Robin right now and just like give us a topic You might discuss on smart stuff. Yeah, like that's a yeah, I'll give you an example And this would be like co-hosted by me and Roman, okay? So I'll kind of leave blank for his part No, I can do I can do Roman. No, I'm just gonna leave blanks for his parts Okay, you don't even want to hear my Roman. No, you can try later, but I'm just gonna leave blanks for his parts. Okay. You don't even want to hear my Roman You could try later, but I'm just gonna leave blanks for like

Guys, it's me Roman Mars. I'm gonna steal your brother. Got him. Okay. Let's call a Grub revive so it'll go so like it's cut remember it's like an airy-dike kind of smart podcast that yeah Yeah, like a podcast where you know the host knows the word air you die. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that got Thanks so here's here's kind of what we'll go like. Okay, please Hello everybody welcome to smart stuff. I am your host Justin McRoy. I'm joined as always today by Roman Mars Hey, Justin Roman. What's smart thing are we discussing today? Well, this week I was excited to learn why there are so many tie races in swimming.

So in the Rio Games last week, there were three second place finishers with the exact same time in the men's 100 meter butterfly. Wanna know why? So most of the limit of events are measured in the thousands of a second. That's three units past the decimal point. But swimming is only measured in the hundreds of a second. And's three units past the decimal point. But swimming is only measured in the hundreds of a second.

And the reason is because of the pool itself. It's virtually impossible to construct a swimming pool with lanes that are exactly equal. So international swimming regulations allow for a variability of up to three centimeters in length for each lane. Huh. Now this is enough of a difference that you can't guarantee that a swimmer is thousands of a second faster or that the lane is just like a centimeter shorter.

So they drop that third digit to the right of the decimal point and only measure in the hundreds of a second. What? So when you only measure in hundreds of a second, you get a lot more Thai races. Oh. I learned that I've done spent. Well folks, that's all we have time for. I'm smart stuff today.

If someone can get Roman Mars to cut out this bit of the podcast and actually try and fill in the blanks there, that would be freestyle there. My brother and my brother and me between the McRoy brothers can be heard on the Maximum Fund Network. Great job You can find this show and like the show on Facebook all of us are on Twitter, Instagram and Spotify But to find out more about this story including cool pictures and links and listen to all the episodes of 99% invisible

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