Moissej Kogan

Alfred Flechtheim and Moissej Kogan

The Jewish sculptor and draughtsman Moissej Kogan is an important representative of neo-Classicist sculpture. He lived and worked in Germany, France, Switzerland and Holland. Paris became his second 'heimat' from 1905 onwards. Here he met August Rodin, Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Aristide Maillol and became a member of the Paris Salon d’Automne. He initially concentrated on medals, plaques, vases, embroidered works and drawings but shifted his attention increasingly to pure sculpture and created small works and reliefs in terracotta. He took a close interest in non-European and especially Asian art. As a consequence his drawings and also his sculptures are characterised by lines that highlight the finely executed idealised and archaic form of his nude figures. After the Nazis’ seizure of power his works were removed from German museums. On 7 February 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp and murdered.

Kogan was friends with many artists, joined the ‘Neue Künstlervereinigung München’ and was backed by a number of art collectors and patrons. Karl Ernst Osthaus invited him to the Folkwang-Museum in Hagen in 1910 for several months and found a place for him at Henry van de Velde’s School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar. He also received the support of Max Sauerlandt, the director of the museums of applied arts in Halle and Hamburg, and of the Swiss art collector Georg Reinhart.

Alfred Flechtheim was also one of the art dealers who supported Kogan after the end of World War I. He included illustrations of Kogan’s works in his magazine ‘Der Querschnitt’ and published the bibliographic edition of 'JIZO' with poems by Karl With and a total of 12 woodcuts by Kogan in 1922. More importantly, Flechtheim organised the artist’s first solo exhibition after the war, in 1922, in Berlin.