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Lot Essay
'I was born in Vienna in 1868. I grew up near the Theresianum, a famous academy for the sons of Austrian aristocrats and the families of functionaries. My father worked there as a financial advisor, a kind of administrator, and I could come and go as I pleased. The Theresianum was a little world in itself. It had spacious parks, pools, and laboratories... Later, many would marvel at my technical versatility in many trades, and at my extensive knowledge of carpentry, bookbinding, and metalworking. I owed it all to my youth and to the appointees of the Theresianum. Everybody knows that a child gets into everything. When he sees something, he learns it immediately. In just this way I learned from the most diverse masters: I bound books, built rabbit hutches, sewed clothes, learned how to cut wood on a lathe and, from the gardener, I learned how to create the most wonderful flower arrangements. Then it was an entertaining and charming game which later became a decisively important element and which made me feel at home in the field of the applied arts' ('Mein Werdegang', published by Kolomon Moser in Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte, n. 10, 1916, p. 9, translated by J. Van de Grift).
Koloman Moser's vivid recollections of his childhood at the Theresianum are the most appropriate key to access the eclectic personality of an extraordinary artist and craftsman, whose innate talent and unique versatility were greatly praised by his contemporaries, and earned him the epithets of 'decorative Kleinkunstgenie' (F. Servaes) and 'Tausendknstler' (Bahr). Together with Hoffmann, Moser embodied the very principles of the Secessionist artistic renewal: inspired by the ideal of the total fusion of life and art - a panaestheticism which was at the core of the Secessionist artistic credo - the two artists were among the founders (1898) of Ver Sacrum, the official organ of the Secession, and opened the Wiener Werkstätte, the cradle of the creative theories of the Wienerstile, in 1903.
Through his multifarious activities - painter, furniture and fashion designer, jewellery creator, interior decorator, and teacher at the Werkstätte from 1903 to 1907 - Moser became the leader of a cosmopolitan movement, which completely changed the cultural panorama of fin de siècle Vienna. A refined connoisseur of the Japanese masters of the ukiyo-e, and a fervent admirer of Katagami prints, Moser was in contact with Samuel Bing, the famous art dealer and greatest collector in Paris of Japanese prints. Like Klimt's sumptuous canvases, Moser's works betray the influence of the Oriental masters: in their compositions, they both made use conspicuously of Japanese styles, themes, and modes of representation. As D. Baroni observes, '... like Klimt, Moser added to the recurrent symbolic motifs of oriental art (flowers, plants, fish, birds, or geometric emblems) and imbued them with sensuality and an exalted feminine beauty' ('Koloman Moser. Graphic and Figural Works', in Kolo Moser. Graphic Artist and Designer, New York, 1986, p. 14).
Painted circa 1912-1913, Durchblick durch Payerbach is a testimony to the two Secessionists painters' close relationship (see fig. 1). Moser's exquisite landscape is incredibly similar to Klimt's celebrated series of the Schloss Kammer on the Attersee, executed during the summers of 1908 to 1912 (see fig. 2). The formal and iconographical parallels between Klimt's depictions of the palace and Moser's interpretations of Payerbach, subtly framed by the hills of the Rax, is striking. In keeping with the geometric ideals at the very basis of Ver Sacrum - the cover of which measured 29 x 29 cm - Moser and Klimt contained their landscapes in a perfect square, harmoniously controlling the luxurious booming of summer in an ordered, symmetrical pagination. Inspired by their quest for stylistic order and formal purity, the two Secessionists fought to reduce the triumphant depiction of nature to a distilled composition of linear and chromatic simplicity. The geometric motif was at the core of Moser's aesthetic, and, as Bahr witnessed, 'For the Viennese, Moser was the man of squares; many thought he had invented the checkerboard' (Sezession, Vienna, 1900, p. 161). Indeed, the sophisticated pattern of golden and brown rectangles - inspired by the abstract decoration of Ancient Greek friezes and Oriental rugs - is the most exquisite virtuosismo of Moser's canvas. At the basis of such a a rare stylistic proximity between Klimt and Moser was their common fascination with Nietzsche's 'eternal return' - a symbolic vision of the world, entirely permeated by Dyonisiac sensuality, which the painter should struggle to contain within the purest Apollonian frame of art.
Professor Frodl of the Österreichische Galerie, Belvedere, Vienna, has kindly dated Durchblick durch Payerbach, im Hintengrund die Rax at approximately 1912-1913.
Koloman Moser's vivid recollections of his childhood at the Theresianum are the most appropriate key to access the eclectic personality of an extraordinary artist and craftsman, whose innate talent and unique versatility were greatly praised by his contemporaries, and earned him the epithets of 'decorative Kleinkunstgenie' (F. Servaes) and 'Tausendknstler' (Bahr). Together with Hoffmann, Moser embodied the very principles of the Secessionist artistic renewal: inspired by the ideal of the total fusion of life and art - a panaestheticism which was at the core of the Secessionist artistic credo - the two artists were among the founders (1898) of Ver Sacrum, the official organ of the Secession, and opened the Wiener Werkstätte, the cradle of the creative theories of the Wienerstile, in 1903.
Through his multifarious activities - painter, furniture and fashion designer, jewellery creator, interior decorator, and teacher at the Werkstätte from 1903 to 1907 - Moser became the leader of a cosmopolitan movement, which completely changed the cultural panorama of fin de siècle Vienna. A refined connoisseur of the Japanese masters of the ukiyo-e, and a fervent admirer of Katagami prints, Moser was in contact with Samuel Bing, the famous art dealer and greatest collector in Paris of Japanese prints. Like Klimt's sumptuous canvases, Moser's works betray the influence of the Oriental masters: in their compositions, they both made use conspicuously of Japanese styles, themes, and modes of representation. As D. Baroni observes, '... like Klimt, Moser added to the recurrent symbolic motifs of oriental art (flowers, plants, fish, birds, or geometric emblems) and imbued them with sensuality and an exalted feminine beauty' ('Koloman Moser. Graphic and Figural Works', in Kolo Moser. Graphic Artist and Designer, New York, 1986, p. 14).
Painted circa 1912-1913, Durchblick durch Payerbach is a testimony to the two Secessionists painters' close relationship (see fig. 1). Moser's exquisite landscape is incredibly similar to Klimt's celebrated series of the Schloss Kammer on the Attersee, executed during the summers of 1908 to 1912 (see fig. 2). The formal and iconographical parallels between Klimt's depictions of the palace and Moser's interpretations of Payerbach, subtly framed by the hills of the Rax, is striking. In keeping with the geometric ideals at the very basis of Ver Sacrum - the cover of which measured 29 x 29 cm - Moser and Klimt contained their landscapes in a perfect square, harmoniously controlling the luxurious booming of summer in an ordered, symmetrical pagination. Inspired by their quest for stylistic order and formal purity, the two Secessionists fought to reduce the triumphant depiction of nature to a distilled composition of linear and chromatic simplicity. The geometric motif was at the core of Moser's aesthetic, and, as Bahr witnessed, 'For the Viennese, Moser was the man of squares; many thought he had invented the checkerboard' (Sezession, Vienna, 1900, p. 161). Indeed, the sophisticated pattern of golden and brown rectangles - inspired by the abstract decoration of Ancient Greek friezes and Oriental rugs - is the most exquisite virtuosismo of Moser's canvas. At the basis of such a a rare stylistic proximity between Klimt and Moser was their common fascination with Nietzsche's 'eternal return' - a symbolic vision of the world, entirely permeated by Dyonisiac sensuality, which the painter should struggle to contain within the purest Apollonian frame of art.
Professor Frodl of the Österreichische Galerie, Belvedere, Vienna, has kindly dated Durchblick durch Payerbach, im Hintengrund die Rax at approximately 1912-1913.