Carl Julius Rudolf Moll (23 April 1861 – 13 April 1945) was a prominent
art nouveau
Art Nouveau (; ) is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. The style is known by different names in different languages: in German, in Italian, in Catalan, and also known as the Modern ...
painter active in
Vienna at the start of the 20th century. He was one of the artists of the
Vienna Secession
The Vienna Secession (german: Wiener Secession; also known as ''the Union of Austrian Artists'', or ''Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs'') is an art movement, closely related to Art Nouveau, that was formed in 1897 by a group of Austri ...
who took inspiration from the
pointillist techniques of French
Impressionists.
[Edwin Lachnit. "Moll, Carl." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 25 Feb. 2016] He was an early supporter of the Nazis and committed suicide as Soviet forces approached Vienna at the end of World War II.
Life and career
Moll was born in Vienna, Austria. He studied art at the
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (german: link=no, Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien) is a public art school in Vienna, Austria.
History
The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna was founded in 1692 as a private academy modelled on the Accademia di Sa ...
. He was a student of
Christian Griepenkerl
Christian Griepenkerl (17 March 1839 – 22 March 1916) was a German painter and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Biography
Griepenkerl was born to one of Oldenburg's leading families. As a young man, he heeded the advice of his ...
and of
Emil Jakob Schindler
Emil Jakob Schindler (27 April 1842 – 9 August 1892) was an Austrian landscape painter. His eldest daughter was the author and composer, Alma Mahler.
Life
He was born to a family of cotton spinning-mill operators that had been established in ...
(the father of
Alma Mahler-Werfel
Alma Maria Mahler Gropius Werfel (born Alma Margaretha Maria Schindler; 31 August 1879 – 11 December 1964) was an Austrian composer, author, editor, and socialite. At 15, she was mentored by Max Burckhard. Musically active from her early yea ...
''née'' Schindler). After his teacher's 1892 death, Moll married Schindler's widow, Anna (''née'' von Bergen); they had been lovers for some time.
Moll was a founder-member of the
Vienna Secession
The Vienna Secession (german: Wiener Secession; also known as ''the Union of Austrian Artists'', or ''Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs'') is an art movement, closely related to Art Nouveau, that was formed in 1897 by a group of Austri ...
in 1897 and, in 1903 encouraged the use of the
Belvedere Gallery Belvedere (from Italian, meaning "beautiful sight") may refer to:
Places
Australia
*Belvedere, Queensland, a locality in the Cassowary Coast Region
Africa
*Belvedere (Casablanca), a neighborhood in Casablanca, Morocco
* Belvedere, Harare, Zi ...
to show exhibitions of modern Austrian art. In 1905 he, along with
Gustav Klimt, left the Secession, although Moll continued to be involved with the exhibition of art in Vienna including the first exhibition in Vienna of the work of
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh (; 30 March 185329 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, inclu ...
(the second painting above the
sideboard
A sideboard, also called a buffet, is an item of furniture traditionally used in the dining room for serving food, for displaying serving dishes, and for storage. It usually consists of a set of cabinets, or cupboards, and one or more drawers ...
in his 1906 self-portrait is Van Gogh's ''
Portrait of the Artist's Mother''). His paintings are characterized by the use of pointillist techniques within a strict organization of the surface of the painting.
[
He committed suicide by poison at the end of World War II, in Vienna, along with his daughter Maria and son-in-law Richard Eberstaller, a Viennese lawyer. All three had been early Nazi Party supporters.]
Auction records
On 21 June 2013, the online auction house Auctionata
Auctionata was an online auction house and eCommerce company specializing in luxury goods, art, antiques and collectibles based in Berlin with offices in New York. Auctionata had a team of 250 art experts who worked on commission and were not di ...
in Berlin sold Moll's ''Villa in Vienna'' for 240,000 Euros. Previously a smaller painting, a still-life
A still life (plural: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or man-made (drinking glasses, boo ...
entitled ''Speisezimmer I'', from the Rau collection fetched 286,700 Euros at Lempertz
Lempertz is an art auction house in Cologne, Germany.
Early years
Lempertz's roots go back to 1802 when Johann Matthias Heberle (1775–1840) opened a printing company in Cologne in 1802, which was later expanded to include an “antiquarian a ...
, a world-record price for the artist.
The Viennese auction house
An auction is usually a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bids, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder or buying the item from the lowest bidder. Some exceptions to this definition ex ...
Dorotheum sold his painting "Blick auf Nussdorf und Heiligenstadt in der Dämmerung" for 228,839 Euros on 27 November 2007.
In 2018, the National Gallery of Canada acquired the 1901 work ''At the Lunch Table'', previously thought to have been lost in the 1930s. It had been owned by Siegmund Isaias Zollschan of Vienna, who was murdered in the Holocaust; he had sent it to a relative in Canada for safekeeping before the war, where it remained in family hands until acquired by the gallery.
In 2021, Freeman's Auctioneers & Appraisers in Philadelphia, USA sold Moll's "Weißes Interieur (White Interior)" for $4,756,000. This rediscovered masterpiece was Freeman's highest selling lot to date, surpassing the house's 2011 record of $3.1m achieved by an important Imperial white jade seal from the Qianlong period.
References
Bibliography
*
* Edwin Lachnit.
Moll, Carl.
In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, (accessed January 9, 2012; subscription required).
* Tobias G. Natter
Tobias G. Natter (born 26 May 1961 in Dornbirn, Vorarlberg) is an Austrian art historian and internationally renowned art expert with a particular expertise in "Vienna 1900".
Career
Natter studied art history and history at the universities ...
, Gerbert Frodl (eds.): "Carl Moll. 1861-1945. Maler und Organisator", Vienna 1998, .
External links
*
Entry for Carl Moll
on the Union List of Artist Names
The Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) is a free online database of the Getty Research Institute using a controlled vocabulary, which by 2018 contained over 300,000 artists and over 720,000 names for them, as well as other information about artist ...
Biography, Literature and Works by Carl Moll
''Carl Moll: Catalogue Raisonné and Monograph
{{DEFAULTSORT:Moll, Carl
19th-century Austrian painters
19th-century Austrian male artists
Austrian male painters
20th-century Austrian painters
Artists who committed suicide
Members of the Vienna Secession
Artists from Vienna
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna alumni
1861 births
1945 deaths
Nazis who committed suicide in Austria
1945 suicides
20th-century Austrian male artists