Back to Calendar

Art Talk Live: Picturing the Modern Home—Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Living Room

This black and white photograph shows a living room filled with sleek, modernist furniture.
Lucia Moholy, British, Bauhaus Masters’ Housing, Dessau [Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy’s Living Room], 1927–28. Gelatin silver print with gouache retouchings. Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Ise Gropius, BRGA.21.55.A. © Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Gallery Talk

This event was recorded. Please view the talk here.

In 1920s Germany, the progressive Bauhaus school of art, architecture, and design sought to create art, objects, and environments that would revolutionize everyday life. This talk will focus on Lucia Moholy’s carefully constructed photograph of her own living room in one of the newly built Bauhaus faculty residences. In addition to providing housing, the home served as an important publicity tool, showcasing Walter Gropius’s architecture as well as the Bauhaus products with which it was meticulously furnished.

This talk is offered in conjunction with the publication of Object Lessons: The Bauhaus and Harvard, which takes a fresh look at the influential pedagogy and practice pioneered by the Bauhaus. The book is now available for preorder through Yale University Press.

Led by:
Laura Muir, Associate Director of Academic and Public Programs and Louis Miller Thayer Research Curator, Division of Academic and Public Programs

This talk will take place online via Zoom. Free admission, but registration is required. To register, please complete this online form.

For instructions on how to join a meeting in Zoom, please click here. If you have any questions, please contact am_register@harvard.edu.

Art Talks Live are presented via Zoom every other Tuesday and offer an up-close look at works from our collections with our team of curators, conservators, fellows, and graduate students.