Lot 238 Dα

The academy in Breslau headed by Oskar Moll was closed in 1932; his subsequent professorship at Düsseldorf's academy of art was soon revoked. In 1936 Oskar and Marg Moll returned to Berlin. He was denounced by the Nazis and, although he was not prohibited from painting, he was forbidden from exhibiting his work. The artist experienced a crisis in the 1930s and sought new possibilities for expressing himself in painting.
In spite of the adverse and oppressive conditions faced by Moll, he created boldly colourful and luminous works in this period. In this context, the colour scheme is generally based on one primary hue, as is strikingly illustrated by the “Wasserfall mit roten Felsen” presented here, with its diverse variations of intense shades of red.
“In this period the artist occupied himself with laying mosaics. Some of the hardness and stiffness of this new material seems to have become transferred to his pictures. While Moll still used geometric figurations to develop the watercolour [sic!] 'Wasserfall mit roten Felsen' (WV 389), he nevertheless ceased to apply them in a strictly logical sense. On the contrary, his aim was to generate a playfully resonating interweaving of all the elements, although individual forms - whether of a drawn or chromatic-planar structure - become disconnectedly isolated. The curtain motif of the waterfall suggests an imaginary centre. The picture plane itself becomes transparent in a manner resembling a glass engraving. It is filled with an improvisational lightness in which the laws of gravity are suspended.” (Salzmann, 1975, op. cit., p. 27).