Moll, Oskar

After discontinuing his studies of biology, Oskar Moll spent three years assisting his friend Lovis Corinth in his studio. In 1906 he married the artist Margarethe Haeffner. The couple went to Paris in 1907 where they were introduced to the city's art circles by Feininger. In Paris Moll became a co-founder of the Académie Matisse. Thanks to several trips to southern Europe, the artist's colour scale changed towards more lightness and vitality. His main subjects were landscapes and still lifes. In his still lifes he arranged ornamental materials alongside a wide range of decorative and ethnographic objects. In 1918 Moll was given a professorship at the Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in Breslau, which he later headed from 1926. Between 1925 and 1932 Moll's works were dominated by geometrical elements. This influence of Cubism came from his wife, Marg, who had been one of Legér's students in 1924 and who also belonged to the “Groupe 1940”. In 1932 the Breslau Academy closed, and Moll changed to the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf until he was branded "degenerate" by the Nazis. In 1936 the Molls moved to Berlin, into a residential and studio house designed by Hans Scharoun. However the building and its entire art collection were destroyed in an air raid in 1944.