Lony Neumann

Lony Neumann was born as Leoni Cohn in Bytom (then German Silesia, now Poland) on 15 April 1902. In 1919 she began an apprenticeship as a tailor and passed the final examination. Parallel to this, she attended courses at the Wrocław State Academy of Arts and Crafts, where she met and then married the student Theodor Neumann. After the couple moved to Leipzig, their son was born in 1926. In 1928 Neumann became a student at the Bauhaus Dessau. She attended Walter Peterhans’s photography class and the advertising workshop. Her role as a parent meant she was largely forced to carry out the assignments from her classes at the Bauhaus in Leipzig, where she continued to live. Neumann was already politically active at this point. She photographed workers and participated in left-wing demonstrations. In 1931 she separated from her husband. Together with her new partner, the architect and Bauhaus graduate Philipp Tolziner, she joined a group immigrating to Russia. She left her son with his father. From 1931 to 1938, she worked as an art journalist and designer in Moscow and continued to create photographs, particularly of women and children. She married the Russian painter Aleksandr Labas during this period. Neumann was presumably able to escape the Soviet state’s persecution of German immigrants under Stalin by withdrawing from the cultural public sphere: she began providing foreign-language lessons. After the Second World War, she worked as a translator. Lony Neumann died in Moscow on 27 February 1996.