Carl Moll : secessio plebis in montem sacrum

In 1900 Carl Moll (1861 - 1945) asked the architect and designer Josef Hoffman to build him a house on the Hohe Warte in Vienna. In fact, it was called a doppelhaus, not exactly what the British describe as semi-detached, but there was an adjoining house for the designer Koloman Moser (1868 - 1918). Moll was approaching forty, a successful painter, who had helped lead many talented artists out of the Kunstlerhaus, which was more or less the only place artists could exhibit, to form the Vienna Secession in 1897. It was curious name, radical and yet conservative. It had been adopted by the first secession at Munich in 1893 and based on the Latin tag secessio plebis in montem sacrum, recalling the way the common people had left the city of Rome to build their own homes away from the dominance of the patricians. You can see some leading members of the Secession in the well-known photograph taken at the 1902 Beethoven exhibition. Let's face it, none of them look especially plebian, not even Gustav Klimt, sitting on a throne in his dress-reform robe. (Moll is reclining far right with Emil Orlik next to him and Moser is sitting in front of Klimt).



It was only a year later that the Wiener Werkstaette was formed by Hoffman and Moser. In a similar style, Moll took up colour woodcuts, still only five years old as a medium for modern artists. The print showing the Hohe Warte in 1903 (at the top) was one of the earliest. I'm not sure whether this snow scene, below, comes from that first 1903 batch, possibly not, but it also shows the Hohe Warte where Moll lived. It's a fine print, expressive of a way of life where design counted down to the last detail.

You can see the terrace of his house above the trees in this painting. (He also made a print looking up at the house with its clipped bay trees but it was unavailable for use here). The combination of warm and cool tones, of growing things and a severity of design is something we would still accept even today as contemporary.

The photograph below was taken just round the corner - you can see the same chairs and the same rendering and brickwork on the house. Moll himself is seated at the centre, the teacher and stage-designer, Alfred Roller, is on his left and of course that is Gustav Mahler, his son-in-law, behind him. Hoffman was also present that day and it was around this time that the Secession split (in 1905, to be exact). If Moll had produced his first woodcuts in response to the founding of the Wiener Werkstaette, his second series was certainly published by them. His 'Ten woodcuts' portfolio of 1908 didn't contain the kind of prints that were numbered and marked handdruck but I assume they were produced in time for the great Kunstschau organised by the Secession in the same year (as I think LH Jungnickel's first animal prints were). They may have been tired of the unexciting marketplace the Kunstlerhaus had become but opportunities to exhibit and sell their work in a city with very few galleries were important. (You won't be surprised to learn that Moll was also a director of the Gallery Mietkhe for a time).

He also travelled, to Italy, of course, where I think the subject for this woodcut must come from. In some ways, it's another version of the Hohe Warte. On their own, they don't have alot of appeal to a modern audience used to woodcuts in the Japanese manner. He knew Orlik as we've seen but he didn't follow him. He appeared to take up woodcut with something specific in mind because he stopped making them after 1908.

The next house he built was never the subject for a print, so far as I know. But many of the prints are strong on architectural subject matter and this is one of their features that make them so typical of what they were all attempting at the time - to inter-relate the disciplines. Fine art, design, architecture, even music, as in the Beethoven exhibition. In Moll's case, it may have produced woodcuts that might strike us as arid today but they are worth looking at more closely, particularly the very first one.

Their use of light, shadow, perspective, linearity and particularly overprinting, are are quite novel and well-thought out. Moll wasn't a young man trying a medium that had just been rediscovered; he was an established artist, doing something new and, in many ways, relevant: presenting a view of urban life as well-ordered, interconnected and liveable, not a bad aim, after all, and one we still respond to.

O was for Orlik: the search for a master

First Emil Orlik (1870 - 1932) failed to get into the Munich Academy of Fine Art then in 1893 he left without completing his course. Three years later he was back in the city, making woodcuts with fellow student Bernhard Pankok (1872 - 1943 - that's Orlik's 1903 portrait of him below the anarchist). The revolutionary was his first published woodcut, the ostler standing in, I would say, as Orlik's model.

As uncompromising as he was stylish, this ostler came from An Alphabet by the British artist William Nicholson (1872 - 1949). This was published in 1898, the same year that Orlik made his woodcut and also the year that he visited Nicholson in London. Nicholson was two years his junior, in fact, already married and with a failed project behind him. In 1894, he had set up the Beggarstaff Brothers with his brother-in-law James Pride (1866 - 1941), aiming to produce commercial posters in the way Toulouse Lautrec had done. Flop it was, but it was the first recognisably modern work in British printed art. The stark simple images were the result of necessary technical restraints because they needed to be produced cheaply but the effect on Orlik was just as graphic. (Despite eventual success with his book of woodcuts, Nicholson just put them behind him. You wonder what he made of his visitor from Prague.)

I'm not certain when he made his greyhound below but here he out-Nicholsons his mentor. He dispenses with colour altogether and concentrates on line, the vocabulary is more Nicholson's than the obvious loan in the anarchist print. Now Orlik is fluent.

He also had a model for the co-operation between artists that had come about in the 1890s. Co-operation and craftsmanship had as much a part to play in his father's tailoring business in Prague as it did amongst bohemian artists knocking together periodicals in Munich. The men below all look as though they are stitching shadows; one man reads, the others sew and listen; quietly this really is a wonderful piece. (Compare the use of areas of black with the Nicholson woodcut).

The tailors stand in absolute contrast to the bench of unemployed in a London park. The London types might be Nicholson but the ad hoc descriptiveness is not. Orlik is attempting the naturalism of the times. Social comment is more Nicholson; Orlik is strong on milieu but we still note the smoking chimney in the background. His observation is also acute. You still find Londoners in snazzy trousers striding down The Strand today.

Orlik had been far from idle. He was gaining some succes. His work was going into print rooms and being collected but he saw the kind of mastery he was after half-way around the world and March, 1901, saw him in Genoa, setting sail for Japan, and not just any old woodcut pilgrim but the very first. Once there he achieved a kind of self-translation that very few artists would attempt: he learned the conventions of woodcut production in a printmaker's workshop where three people were involved in the process. The people, heads down, occupied in their work, the words on the wall, are familar. Even the madder he might have seen in a Beggarstaff poster. What is new is this: subtlety, refinement.

Gone is the sparing use of colour and the awkward line. These Mount Fuji pilgrims in the straw capes and hats surge forward across planes of oriental red.

In the same way, he breaks with one convention to work on another. His Temple Garden of 1901 is as littered with symbolism as a Gaugin glimpse of Tahiti. You understand that his stay in Japan was not only about learning a craft from a master because this print is quite unlike the previous two in feel.

Even more enigmatic is the gravel garden below, the break with realistic colour complete. He has moved from Hiroshige to Erte, articulate in everything. So, somehow it shouldn't be

surprising that two years after his return he could turn out this quite masterly etching of the painter Leopold, graf von Kalckreuth (1855 - 1928). Calm, distinguished, the subtle modulation hardly monochrome at all. It is almost photographic in its confidence and a million miles away from the humble preoccupations of his Prague tailors.

Hardly surprising as well that the year after he made this print, he was offered the position of head of graphic art at the Museum of Applied Art in Berlin. His portarit of Kolo Moser (1868 - 1918) also dates from 1903, telling in the way he chooses woodcut for the stylish designer and possibly about the nearest he gets to Lautrec. One minute he speaks German, the next it's Japanese.

And finally in 1904, in this portrait of the broad-backed, bull-necked Ferdinand Hodler (1853 - 1918), we also see him gradually turning away from it all. Creased neck, receding temple, tangled ear, this is the artist no longer young, turning leftwards and away from us, to all the images that lie behind him - masterful images indeed.