Carl Moll

Carl Moll was born in Vienna on April 23, 1861. From 1879 to 1881, he studied at the Vienna Academy under Christian Griepenkerl. From 1881 onwards, he was a private pupil and later a close friend of Emil Jakob Schindler and his family. Numerous joint trips took him to Yugoslavia, Greece, and Germany. In 1890, Moll exhibited for the first time at the annual exhibition of the Vienna Künstlerhaus, of which he became a member in 1894. In the following years, his studio became a regular meeting place for renowned Viennese artists such as Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Koloman Moser, and Max Kurzweil. With them, he co-founded the Vienna Secession in 1897 after seceding from the Künstlerhaus. In 1905, he left the Vienna Secession together with the "Klimt group" and became the artistic director of the Galerie Miethke. Carl Moll died in Vienna in 1945. The accompanying painting shows one of Moll's rare still lifes, a genre he mastered alongside landscape painting and interior scenes. Moll moves towards a powerful, direct style, in which the natural basis remains unmistakably present. Accents are created primarily through the use of light and shadow. During Carl Moll's "Secessionist phase," he developed his ability to abstract, transforming naturalism into a new visual language.