Koloman Moser
Who
Viennese painter and designer, born on 30 March 1868, one of the leading artists of the Vienna Secession and of its magazine Ver Sacrum, and in 1903 a co-founder, with Josef Hoffmann and the patron Fritz Waerndorfer, of the Wiener Werkstatte. He designed posters, books, furniture, textiles, jewellery, metalwork, glass, ceramics, stamps and banknotes, left the Werkstatte in 1907, and died of throat cancer in Vienna on 18 October 1918.
Why they matter
More than anyone except Hoffmann he made the Vienna 1900 look: flat, black-and-white, gridded, with ornament turning from plant tendrils into squares. He took the Secession's claim that art should reach every part of life literally, down to the stamps in a letter box.
What to buy
Originals: Moser is unusually reachable because so much of his work was printed. The cheapest genuine Moser is a stamp: the 1908 Austrian Jubilee issue and the 1906 Bosnian pictorials were ordinary postage, and stamp dealers still sell them. The serious print is Flachenschmuck, his 1901 volume of Martin Gerlach's Die Quelle: 30 colour plates of surface patterns for wallpaper and textiles, each with a grey pattern printed on the back. A sheet without that verso pattern is not a plate from the book. Complete portfolios and the original Secession posters are auction material; Swann's design and poster sales are where to compare. Wiener Werkstatte furniture and silver are a different, far higher tier. Prints: his posters reproduce well because they were flat colour lithographs to begin with; choose a reproduction that names the museum copy it was made from. Books: Koloman Moser: Designing Modern Vienna 1897-1907, edited by Christian Witt-Dorring (Prestel, 2013), the catalogue of the first American museum show devoted to him, at the Neue Galerie New York, covering the graphics, furniture, textiles and ceramics.
Notes
In 1905 he left the Secession with the Klimt group, and married Editha Mautner von Markhof, an artist and heiress. He designed the apse mosaic and glass windows of the Kirche am Steinhof in Vienna. The Leopold Museum holds his stamp designs, MoMA the 1902 Secession poster and the Met a copy of Flachenschmuck. Public domain: museum images and Wikimedia Commons are free to use.
Story
Moser made his name with the Vienna Secession, the avant-garde of 1890s Vienna. Within a decade he was designing the empire's postage.
In 1906 he and the engraver Ferdinand Schirnbock produced a 16-value set for Bosnia and Herzegovina, with scenic views at a time when scenery on stamps was still a novelty. The set won admiration worldwide, and it earned the pair Austria's first commemorative issue: 18 stamps, seven of them engraved, for the sixtieth year of Emperor Franz Joseph's reign in 1908. They show emperors from Charles VI to Franz Joseph himself, at various ages, and the palaces of Schonbrunn and the Hofburg, and Moser drew a different ornamental frame for every stamp. His working drawings, in ink and gouache on squared paper, are now in the Leopold Museum.
The designs outlived the occasion. In 1910 they were reissued with the years 1830 and 1910 added top and bottom, for the emperor's eightieth birthday. A Secession designer ended up putting his ornament on letters posted across the Habsburg monarchy - which, the Leopold Museum notes, brought him especially close to his aim of permeating all areas of life with art.
Key works
- Die Quelle: Flachenschmuck (portfolio of 30 colour plates) (1901) - Martin Gerlach, Vienna; The Met
- Ver Sacrum, poster for the Thirteenth Secession exhibition (1902) - MoMA
- Stamps for Bosnia and Herzegovina (16 values, engraved by Ferdinand Schirnbock) (1906)
- Austrian Jubilee stamps (designs in the Leopold Museum, Vienna) (1908)
In museum collections
- Blühendes Bäumchen (1913)
Belvedere ↗ · Find a print ↗ - Rudolf Steindl, Schwager des Künstlers (1895)
Belvedere ↗ · Find a print ↗ - Aktstudie (gelb und blau) (1915)
Belvedere ↗ · Find a print ↗ - Berghänge (1913)
Belvedere ↗ · Find a print ↗ - Cabinet (1903)
The Met ↗ · Find a print ↗ - Charlotte Moser, Schwester des Künstlers (1910)
Belvedere ↗ · Find a print ↗ - Cloud study (1913)
Belvedere ↗ · Find a print ↗ - Elisabeth Steindl, Nichte des Künstlers (1910)
Belvedere ↗ · Find a print ↗ - Franz Dangl in Uniform (1891)
Belvedere ↗ · Find a print ↗ - Föhrenwald im Winter (1908)
Belvedere ↗ · Find a print ↗ - Gardasee (Westufer) (1912)
Belvedere ↗ · Find a print ↗ - Landhaus am Wasser (1908)
Belvedere ↗ · Find a print ↗
See the work
Prints
Books
Originals
See also
Browse all 2,101 artists · Open in the directory · Where the work hangs: 16 museums on a map