Carl Julius Rudolf Moll (23 April 1861 – 12 April 1945) was an Austrian

Art Nouveau Art Nouveau ( ; ; ), Jugendstil and Sezessionstil in German, is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. It was often inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and ...

painter active in

Vienna Vienna ( ; ; ) is the capital city, capital, List of largest cities in Austria, most populous city, and one of Federal states of Austria, nine federal states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. ...

at the start of the 20th century. He was one of the artists of the

Vienna Secession The Vienna Secession (; also known as the Union of Austrian Artists or ) is an art movement, closely related to Art Nouveau, that was formed in 1897 by a group of Austrian painters, graphic artists, sculptors and architects, including Josef Ho ...

who took inspiration from the pointillist techniques of French

Impressionists Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subjec ...

.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. He was a student of

Christian Griepenkerl Christian Griepenkerl (17 March 1839 – 22 March 1916) was a German painter and professor, best known for rejecting Adolf Hitler's application to train at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Biography Griepenkerl was born to one of Oldenburg (cit ...

and of Emil Jakob Schindler (the father of Alma Mahler-Werfel ''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

in 1897 and, in 1903 encouraged the use of the Belvedere Gallery to show exhibitions of modern Austrian art. In 1905 he, along with

Gustav Klimt Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement. His work helped define the Art Nouveau style in Europe. Klimt is known for his paintings, murals, sket ...

, 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 is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade, he created approximately 2,100 artworks ...

(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 in

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

sold Moll's ''Villa in Vienna'' for 240,000 Euros. Previously a smaller painting, a

still-life A still life (: 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 human-made (drinking glasses, books, ...

entitled ''Speisezimmer I'', from the Rau collection fetched 286,700 Euros at

Lempertz Lempertz (officially Kunsthaus Lempertz KG) is a German auction house which emerged from a bookstore and art gallery founded 1845 in Bonn, Germany. It is entirely owned and controlled by the Lempertz family and headquartered in Cologne, Germany. ...

, a world-record price for the artist. The Viennese

auction house An auction house is a business establishment that facilitates the buying and selling of assets, such as works of art and collectibles. Overview The auction house is the physical facility where the objects are catalogued, displayed, and presented ...

Dorotheum sold his

painting Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...

"Blick auf Nussdorf und Heiligenstadt in der Dämmerung" for 228,839 Euros on 27 November 2007. In 2018, the

National Gallery of Canada The National Gallery of Canada (), located in the capital city of Ottawa, Ontario, is Canada's National museums of Canada, national art museum. The museum's building takes up , with of space used for exhibiting art. It is one of the List of large ...

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, 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 1861 births 1945 suicides 1945 deaths 19th-century Austrian painters 19th-century Austrian male artists Austrian male painters Austrian Nazis 20th-century Austrian painters Artists who died by suicide Members of the Vienna Secession Painters from Vienna Academy of Fine Arts Vienna alumni Nazis who died by suicide in Austria 20th-century Austrian male artists Painters from Austria-Hungary