Carl Moll's Weißes Interieur Breaks Records
A major work by Viennese artist Carl Moll resurfaced in 2021 after being unseen for over a hundred years.
In February of 2021, Freeman’s set a new house record when Carl Moll’s Weißes Interieur (White Interior) sold for $4.75 million—over eight times the pre-sale high estimate. This sale shattered the previous world auction record of $385,653 for a Moll piece. Beforehand, the Freeman’s house record had stood at $3.1 million, set by the 2011 sale of an important Imperial white jade seal from the Qianlong period.
Carl Moll was one of the cofounders of the Vienna Secession movement, a progressive group that pushed against the conservatism of the day. Mostly known for his landscapes, Moll is also revered for his serene and elegant interior scenes. Inspired by Johannes Vermeer, Weißes Interieur is a canvas marked by a sense of domestic tranquility, via its careful balance of color and diffuse light.
Executed in 1905, the work depicts a solitary female figure in the center of a highly decorated living room: Berta Zuckerkandl (née Szeps)—an important art critic and one of the most influential Jewish figures in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. She was a fervent supporter of modern Austrian art, which she defended in the many articles she wrote as a journalist—as well as in her Salon, where she hosted many celebrities of the time, such as fellow Secessionist Gustav Klimt and Stefan Zweig.
The living room in which Zuckerkandl is depicted is the one from her very first apartment in an affluent neighborhood of Vienna. It was decorated by Vienna's then–leading architect and designer, Josef Hoffmann, and was considered by many the epitome of modern design. This is exemplified by the symphony of sleek, straight, and pure lines, and shapes visible in the canvas. In the living room, Zuckerkandl and her husband housed an important collection of East Asian art, an “exotic” taste shared by many collectors and artists of the time.
In early 1905, Weißes Interieur was exhibited in Berlin, and again at the Folkwang Museum in Essen in 1906. Its last public appearance—before its sale at Freeman’s—was at Vienna’s celebrated Kunstschau in 1908, where it was featured alongside Klimt’s iconic The Kiss. After this exhibition, the work remained within the same family, who moved from Germany to the United States in the mid-1970s. To mark its reappearance on the market, the painting was offered at a pre-sale estimate of $300,000–500,000—one of the highest figures ever attached to a work by Moll at auction.