Getty Museum

Huhn bleibt Huhn

Date

1925

Medium

Gelatin silver print with applied color

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> The montage *Once a Chicken, Always a Chicken* seems to be a comment on the changing role of women in Germany’s post war society. Pictorially, László Moholy-Nagy’s makes the association between women and fertility and women as “chicks” with images of eggs and chickens. The title of the piece suggests that a chick cannot aspire to anything more, perhaps a reference to growing negative reaction to the increasing visibility of working women and to their voting privileges. The strings connecting the female athlete with the X-rayed chicken seem to inextricably bind them. However, two athletes in the background have no such constraints; one raises her club as if to free the chicks from their eggs, the other springs forward as if just hatched. Inscribed by the artist at the bottom of this print are the words “Metamorphosis or the Easter Egg,” contradicting the immutability of the sentence suggested by the original title. > > “Once a Chicken, Always a Chicken” is also the title of a surrealistic “optical film manuscript” written by Moholy-Nagy between 1925 and 1930 in which many dreamlike transformations take place. > > Katherine Ware, *László Moholy-Nagy*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 44. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.

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