bauhaus faces

This episode of "bauhaus faces“ is not about a typical Bauhäusler, not a student or a master. She nevertheless played crucial part in documenting the history of the Bauhaus between 1923 and 1928 in her diary. Of course she was also Walter Gropius’s closest confidant, advisor, and editor, his wife, Ise Gropius. Ilse Frank was raised in Hannover and worked as a Red Cross Nurse during World War I. She moved to Munich in 1922 to work at a publishing house. When her mother was dying Ilse returned to Hannover in 1923. Here she met Walter Gropius at one of his lectures about the Bauhaus. They started to write letters to each other and quickly became affectionate. She wrote to him „Up to now my whole life I felt as if I have been pushing a very heavy boat over a gravel path. And the minute I met you, my big boat suddenly glided into water.“ She had been waiting to meet a person like him, although at first she was more interested in his Bauhaus idea than in the man himself; that came with getting to know him better. So, she broke off the engagement to her cousin, moved to Weimar and only a few months after knowing Walter Gropius, they got married. From the very start, their relationship was a symbiotic one, also shown in their nicknames. While she Walter Gropius was known at the Bauhaus as “Pius”, Ise was often called “Pia”. Ise Gropius entered the service of the Bauhaus as a secretary, editor, organizer and ‘equal partner’ for Gropius. Soon, she became “Mrs. Bauhaus” and liked her role very much. „The Bauhaus infected me,“ she would later say. For this episode the architect and author Jana Revedin helps to tell the story of Ise Gropius. She wrote a biographical novel called "Jeder hier nennt mich Frau Bauhaus“. The novel is based on Ise Gropius as a main character and her diary that she kept during her stay at the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1928. __________________________________________________ www.bauhausfaces.com | @bauhausfaces JANA REVEDIN www.revedin.com ISE GROPIUS bauhauskooperation.de, gropius.house NOVEL "JEDER HIER NENNT MICH FRAU BAUHAUS" www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de FILM „Wie wohnen wir gesund und wirtschaftlich: Neues Wohnen“ https://vimeo.com/292714014?from=outro-embed TOUR OF THE GROPIUS HOUSE https://gropius.house/location/video-tour-by-ise-gropius/ THE FORGOTTEN STORY OF „MRS BAUHAUS“ by Katy Kelleher, 2018, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-forgotten-story-mrs-bauhaus

This episode of bauhaus faces is about the Bauhaus educated architect Pius Pahl. After being trained as carpenter and interior designer, he decided it was time to go to the Bauhaus and become an architect. He studied with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer, who would both become essential for his approach towards designing buildings. Pius Pahl is also one of the students who made the Bauhaus move from Dessau to Berlin. After successfully graduating with his Bauhaus diploma in 1933 he went on a journey to Switzerland, Italy and North Africa before starting to work in different architecture offices. In World War II he was drafted by the military and became a prisoner of war. Although he set up his own building office in 1946 in fear for his four sons to also become soldiers in a war – it was the time of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West – Pius Pahl decided it was time to emigrate. While he wasn’t allowed to go to the US to work with Mies van der Rohe in Chicago (this was his dream) the choice fell on South Africa, because his wife Jeanette was born there and could speak English fluently. Pius, however, struggled during the first years as his language skills were underwhelming. Once he and his family had relocated to Stellenbosch and he had started – once again – his own office Pius Pahl planned several public and private houses, adapted to the possibilities and materials there. Two of his four sons, Jan-Peter and Tyll Pahl invited me into their houses to talk to me about their father and his work.    ________________________________________ SHOW NOTES @bauhausfaces | bauhausfaces.com | YouTube https://www.vervemagazine.co.nz/african-bauhaus/ http://oharchitecture.blogspot.com/2011/07/oh6-pius-pahl-monograph.html https://www.stellenboschheritage.co.za/resource/pius-pahl-architectural-biography-part-1-pg-1-12 https://artefacts.co.za/main/Buildings/archframes.php?archid=2113 https://artefacts.co.za/main/Buildings/bldgframes_mob.php?bldgid=15093 COVER PHOTO: Pius Pahl, Detail of a self-portrait, Bauhaus Berlin, 1933, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

This episode of bauhaus faces is about a photographer that most Bauhaus fans today know: Lucia Moholy. She was the photographer who delivered the photos of the Bauhaus in Dessau and its masters’ houses that made the art school so iconic. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that art historians became alert to her when her photos and negatives made their way into the Bauhaus-Archive in Berlin. Until then they had taken a long reroute from Germany via the US, while Lucia Moholy had thought they were lost, when in fact Bauhaus founder and first director Walter Gropius had taken them with him, denied their possession for decades and made use of them to promote the Bauhaus as the ultimate epitome of the avantgarde without ever mentioning their creator: Lucia Moholy. But her life and work were so much more! When she was in danger of being arrested by the Nazis, Lucia left Germany and emigrated to London. Here, she worked as a portrait photographer and – as director – set up the microfilm archive ASLIB. She never succeeded in emigrating to the US like so many other Bauhauslers although she had an offer from her ex-husband László Moholy-Nagy to come and teach photography at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Most of her adult life, Lucia Moholy struggled to make ends meet and gain recognition for her achievements. When she – once more – emigrated to Switzerland in 1959 (she would live and die in Zollikon near Zurich) Lucia started writing about her collaborative work with László Moholy-Nagy and her own share in it.For this episode the US art historian Robin Schuldenfrei helped to tell the story of Lucia Moholy. She has been researching Moholy for many years now.__________________________________SHOW NOTES⁠www.bauhausfaces.com⁠ | ⁠@bauhausfaces⁠EXHIBITION „Lucia Moholy: Exposures“ at Kunsthalle Praha from 30th May until 28th October 2024 https://www.kunsthallepraha.org/en/events/lucia-moholy-exposures AND at Fotostiftung Winterthur in Spring 2025 https://fotostiftung.ch/en/BOOKS BY LUCIA MOHOLY „A Hundred Years of Photography“ (Lucia Moholy, 1939) https://www.amazon.de/Photography-1839-1939-Fotografie-Bauhäusler-Bauhaus-Archiv/dp/3922613586„Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy/Moholy-Nagy, Marginal Notes“ (Lucia Moholy, 1972)ABOUT LUCIA MOHOLY Lucia Moholy Bauhaus Fotografin (Rolf Sachsse, 1995) „‚What I Could Lose‘: The Fate of Lucia“ (Meghan Forbes) Moholyhttps://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0055.102;view=text;rgn=main;xc=1;g=mqrgLucia Moholy. Im Schatten des Bauhaus (Jochen Stöckmann, 2022) https://www.weltkunst.de/ausstellungen/2022/09/lucia-moholy-fotografie-bauhaus?pagination=1&fullviewABOUT LUCIA MOHOLY’S BOOKS AND NEGATIVES„Multiple Frames for Lucia Moholy“ (Sabine Hartmann) https://youtu.be/aB5ioylqVuM?si=1ggYQUgMXe6FWHic„Images in Exile: Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Negatives and the Construction of the Bauhaus Legacy“ (Robin Schuldenfrei) https://courtauld.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Schuldenfrei_2013_Images_in_Exile_Lucia_Moholys_Bauhaus.pdf„A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939“ (Burcu Dogramaci) https://archive.metromod.net/viewer.p/69/1470/object/5140-11251867PHOTOS BY LUCIA MOHOLY IN ARCHIVESBauhaus photos Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin https://open-archive.bauhaus.de/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=direct/1/ResultDetailView/result.inline.moduleBottomContextFunctionBar1.bottomNavigator.back&sp=13&sp=Sartist&sp=SfilterDefinition&sp=0&sp=1&sp=1&sp=SdetailView&sp=93&sp=Sdetail&sp=0&sp=T&sp=0&sp=SdetailList&sp=6&sp=0Harvard Art Museums https://harvardartmuseums.org/collectionsNational Portrait Gallery https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp07323/lucia-moholyFotostiftung Winterthur, Switzerland https://fotostiftung.ch.zetcom.net/de/artists/artist/1395/MoMA, New York https://www.moma.org/artists/6922COVER PHOTO: László Moholy-Nagy, Portrait of Lucia Moholy, 1927, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin