Carl Moll (1861-1945)

Carl Moll was born in 1861 in Vienna, his father Julius Johann Franz Moll was a wholesaler, fabricant and councilman and his mother was Maria Magdalena Rosina Schmid. When Moll was a young boy his uncle, the landscape painter Karl Schmid, aroused his interest in art. In 1880 he began to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in the Class of Christian Griepenkerl. He became a student and assistant of the landscape painter Emil Jakob Schindler. In 1895 he married the widow of Schindler, an actress and singer from Hamburg named Anna Sofie Bergen. Therefore Moll was the stepfather of the famous Alma Mahler-Werfel.

Carl Moll was the cofounder of the Viennese Secession and organizer of many important exhibitions of contemporary art. After some differences Moll, Klimt and a group of artists left the Secession in 1905. Then Moll was the artistic leader of the Gallery Miethke and still a very influential personality in the Viennese art life. He was involved in die foundation of the Modern Gallery in the Lower Belvedere, which is nowadays the biggest collection of Austrian Art based in the Upper and the Lower Belvedere. Carl Moll lived in a house designed by the Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann at the Hohe Warte in the 19th district of Vienna, which was the first of a set of very exclusive Jugendstil houses.

In the 1930s Carl Moll became a member of the National Socialist Party, when the Red Army came to Vienna in 1945 he committed suicide.