(Vienna 1861–1945)
St. Michael’s at Heiligenstadt with a floral still life, monogrammed CM, circa 1930, oil on canvas, 60 x 51 cm, framed, (K)

This work will be included in the catalogue raisonné being prepared by Dr Cornelia Cabuk, Belvedere Vienna.

Provenance:
Private Collection, Vienna - formerly temporary loan to Österreichische Galerie Belvedere (label verso)

Description from the Belvedere card file index:
In this motif dating from his mature period, Moll combined a floral still life with a view out over a landscape. This was the view from a window at his villa on the Hohe Warte with the Church of St Michael at Heiligenstadt and the Nussberg vineyards in the background. The pink blooms make an effective contrast with the green table cloth, which together with the spring-like landscape, lend the image a bright, amiable atmosphere.

Although retrospectively self-critical about his ‘Secessionist phase’, these years taught Moll his skills in abstraction which he then used to transport his naturalism into a new visual language. The square format of his works is one feature of his Secessionist period. His technique of detailed sections, the masterly distribution and balance of light and dark, of compactness and areas of void, also partly date from this ‘phase’. However, what is completely new is the depth, and the creation of this depth with almost exclusively painterly methods.
After years of extremely subtle stippling and the careful execution of spaces and surfaces, Moll moved on to the direct and powerful creation of mass. The natural basis of his features remained distinctive, but their transposition approached a zone of elementary concepts: he no longer painted his trees with trunks, branches, twigs, leaves, interstitial spaces and scattered light reflexes – instead they formed a compact mass, an intense form, the light appearing as if having been ‘poured over’.
The colours become more intense and deeper. Now Moll worked with a palette knife, applying the paint thickly over wide areas, using the brush to divide up and loosen the mass. The individual strokes, ‘edged with a mild sharpness’ are drawn with an inner rhythm, yet with each stroke of colour retaining its full intensity. Spatial depth arises as the result of ‘levels of colour, strongly delineated, but mysteriously harmonising. His palette now possesses all imaginable nuances of colour…’
Astrid Gmeiner, from:
Carl Moll, Seine Freunde/Sein Leben/Sein Werk, published by Galerie Welz, 1985