Venus in the Grotto

Koloman Moser was an Austrian artist who exerted considerable influence on 20th-century graphic art.  He was one of the foremost artists of the Vienna Secession movement and a co-founder of Wiener Werkstätte. Moser designed a wide array of art works, including books and graphic works from postage stamps to magazine vignettes, fashion, stained glass windows, porcelains and ceramics, blown glass, tableware, silver, jewelry, and furniture.

With his departure from the Wiener Werkstätte in 1907, Kolo Moser returned to the medium of his early years—painting. A visit to the Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler in Geneva in 1913, whom Moser first met in 1903 at the Vienna Secession, heralded a stylistic change in his oeuvre toward more austere, two-dimensional compositions and a reduced, artificial palette, as well as an increasingly symbolic pathos of the pictorial content. This radiant goddess of love is framed by an oval, symbolizing a grotto. Her depiction is reminiscent of personifications of the wind and sea that were typically engraved onto ancient Roman sarcophagi.

We present today's work thanks to Leopold Museum in Vienna. Recently it has opened a newly conceived presentation of the collection, Vienna 1900,  which affords uniquely rich and complex insights into the fascination of Vienna around 1900 and the atmosphere of this vibrant time.

P.S. See the beautiful modern brooches of the Wiener Werkstätte designers here.