After Lucia Moholy’s partner Theodor Neubauer was arrested in her absence in their shared flat in Berlin in 1933, she fled to Paris via Prague and Vienna without any of her belongings. There she tried in vain to use press pressure to get Neubauer out of prison. In March 1934, she continued her escape – with Great Britain as her destination. However, she had to leave her “most valuable possession” of around 600 negatives behind in her flat in Berlin during her hasty escape.

At that time, she asked her ex-husband, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, to handle them responsibly. Lucia Moholy had no idea that they had ended up in the hands of Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, who fled via England to the US. Gropius organised an exhibition entitled ‘Bauhaus 1919-1928’ at the MoMA in New York in 1938. The negatives of Moholy were the major component of the exhibition, which, however, were not or incorrectly labelled. Lucia Moholy discovered the accompanying exhibition catalogue by chance a few years later in London. It featured her negatives, which she had thought to entrusted to her ex-husband.

Lucia Moholy immediately contacted Lászlo Moholy in America, who informed her that all the negatives were in the possession of Gropius. There followed a dispute began between friends, fuelled by Lucia Moholy’s bewilderment, which was a tedious process, because Gropius did not realise that he had made a mistake. She subsequently went public in 1954. After years of litigation, she received a third of her negatives back in 1957, but the loss of the negatives was probably less dramatic than the breach of trust and the disappointment of a former very good friend.