(Vienna 1861–1945)
Full moon over Vienna (view of Heiligenstadt), 1906/10, signed Carl Moll, oil on panel, 34.5 x 35.8 cm, framed, (K)

This work will be included in the catalogue raisonné of works held at the Belvedere by Dr Cornelia Cabuk.

Provenance:
Family Ownership, Vienna

... Jugendstil was tired, the Gesamtkunstwerk had lost its integrative power. Whereas architecture and the applied arts in part represented a perspective on the modern, and in part consisted of a recourse to tradition, the ‘breakdown of values’ was at one and the same time, both a challenge to, and opportunity for, autonomous art.

In terms of his choice of subject matter and artistic positioning, Moll again chose to investigate the great Austrian tradition of landscape painting, not least the oeuvre of Schindler. He produced a multi-faceted, homogeneous painterly oeuvre over the ensuing years and decades. The asynchronous range of his work, in which he created a kind of timelessness in autonomous, idiosyncratic images, may be seen as a form of ‘modern naturalism’.
In his homages to Schindler, and in the book he wrote on the artist, Moll conveyed a snapshot of this developmental process. When he again sought out element of natures, as he followed the traces of his own and Austria’s history, which Schindler had once painted, he was struck by his own altered perception. “I see the same field of view, the same poems, in numerous variations, and yet I hear a symphony, the sounds of an orchestra…”
excerpt from: Carl Moll, Seine Freunde - Sein Leben - Sein Werk, Verlag Galerie Welz, Salzburg 1985.