Oscar Moll

Abstract still lifes and landscapes in intensive colours characterise the work of Oskar Moll who came from Brzeg, near Wrocław in Silesia, now Poland. Moll went to Paris for the first time in 1907 with his wife, the sculptress Margarethe (Marg) Haeffner (1884–1977) where both later became part of the Café du Dôme circle of artists. Meeting Henri Matisse was to be of decisive importance to the two artists. Around the turn of the century, he founded the Académie Matisse together with Hans Purrmann and others. Their close circle of friends included architects and artists such as Lovis Corinth, Johannes and Ilse Molzahn, Hans Scharoun, Oskar and Tut Schlemmer, Josef and Li Vinetzký, Paul Klee, Jankel Adler and Otto Mueller. Oskar and Marg Moll had two daughters, Melita (*1908) und Brigitte (*1918).

In 1918 Moll first became professor at the art academy in Breslau (now Wrocław) and, from 1926, director. In 1932 he received an appointment in Düsseldorf where he was in charge of a master class. He was dismissed from this post in 1933 for being ‘politically untrustworthy’ following the seizure of power by the National Socialists. An exhibition of his work at the Kunstverein Düsseldorf in 1935 was forced to close and, in 1937, 33 works by Oskar Moll – who was labelled a ‘cultural Bolshevist’ – were confiscated from German museums. In 1936 the family moved to Berlin where Hans Scharoun had designed an impressive house and studio in Halensee. In 1944 the house, its contents and the art collection were destroyed in an air raid. The Moll family however had already returned to Silesia in 1943 but Brzeg was evacuated in 1945 and they had to flee to Magdeburg. After the war was over, Moll published his Professions of an Ostracised Artist and held exhibitions in the following two years in Chemnitz, Berlin, Halle and Leipzig. Oskar Moll died in August 1947 at the age of 72 in Berlin.

Oskar Moll loanded works by Corinth, Matisse, Rousseau, Leger and Lurcat for exhibitions organised by Alfred Flechtheim and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. His own works were shown in the former Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin and the Kunstverein in Magdeburg in 1925. The Berlin gallery owners Cassirer, Gurlitt, Flechtheim and Möller, as well as the Galerie Hans Goltz in Munich, repeatedly held exhibitions of his work. Moll’s daughter, Brigitte, recalled meeting Alfred Flechtheim in Düsseldorf whom she described as a very charismatic and especially humourous person.