Little escap(ad)e: Searching for Marg Moll, continued

While I was sitting in the Museum Kunst der Westküste’s café in Föhr two weeks ago, waiting for Ms Heims to return and show me around I idly leafed through some of the free art newspapers that were lying around. On the first round I did not really notice it, but on my second thoughtless turning of the pages this brief article struck my eye, stopped my breath and – apart from all that was going on while I was still trying to get to see the Föhr Reef – made my mind churn.

The sculptures which had been located in a dig in Berlin were on display in the Hamburg „Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe” (Museum for Arts and Crafts) ! My search for Marg Moll, creator of the sculpture „Dancer“, which had caught my eye upon its first appearance on the front page of our newspaper one and a half years ago, had been slightly less intensive recently, but it had not left me entirely. For one thing I was planning to go to Berlin next year to meet a friend there, hoping that I would also be able to hit the museum where the sculptures were first presented after their restoration. Only as I am writing this post have I found out that a symposium was held on these sculptures in Berlin in March of this year.

  . And now this – the discovery that these sculptures were basically waiting for me right beside the path we were supposed to be following on our way home the next day. Now I felt as if I had already stretched my husband’s patience with my interest for the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef – could I bring up another exhibition now? On the other hand – could I really ride past this museum and not see this particular exhibit? Certainly I would not find a chance to return to Hamburg before October, if I wanted to see it, I had to see it now. In the end I figured I would have to live without having seen this exhibit.

But that’s not how it all came to be.

Even before I had discovered that this exhibit was waiting for me, my husband and I had begun to talk about how we would spend our last day on the island/travel day. We were booked on the overnight train from Hamburg in the evening and had to vacate our apartment in the morning – should we procede to Hamburg early on and take a tour of the harbour, or visit the zoo? Add to this that the weather forecast was not exactly calling for lots of sunshine. On the day of our departure, at the breakfast table, my husband suggested that we take the opportunity and pay a brief visit to the Stiftung Ada und Emil Nolde   in Seebüll. Which turned out not easily feasible, as we soon found out. But now that my husband had made the mistake of introducing the option of another museum visit, I gathered all my courage and told him about this fantastic discovery I had made the day before. In the end, we decided that we would proceed to Hamburg directly, my husband and son would then search for an appropriate bar where they could watch the European Soccer Championship game of the day, while I would be going to the Museum.

The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe is located directly across the street from the Hamburg main station, and they kindly do take small pieces of luggage which did not fit into lockers at the station...

It turned out to be one of the most moving art exhibits I have ever seen.

Five of the eleven sculptures that were retrieved from the excavation site in Berlin had belonged to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, before the Nazis declared them “entarted” (degenerate) and removed? them from the museum and subsequently showed them in the huge propagandistic exhibition „Entartete Kunst“ (Degenerate Art) before World War II.  Several other artists who were represented in the museum fell victim to this infamous policy of the Nazis as well, and the Hamburg exhibit is built around this topic, in addition to showing the sculptures from Berlin. The names and fates of these artists are presented in addition to several of their works. A documentation shows how the sculptures were found in Berlin.

The eleven artists whose works have been unquestionable identified are presented individually.

And then, finally, the core element of the exhibition: the sculptures. All of them are indeed impressive, and their current condition, more or less badly damaged or even fragmented transforms them into monuments of a special kind.

My personal concentration on the „Dancer“ by Marg Moll is a rather subjective preference and perhaps not understandable for someone else. But when I stood in front of thise sculpture which I had first seen on the newspaper front page more than one and a half years ago, I was close to tears.

Photo documentation of the original condition of the sculpture made it possible to compare the current condition with the original. A small part is missing – the dancer’s band – and for me the current condition seemed much more impressive. Partly, of course, because of the visible damages and scars that the bronze has acquired in sixty years in soil. But also because the missing part forces the viewer to concentrate on the dancer’s position and movement, thus entering into a more intensive communication with the sculpture than had the band still been there, I thought.

A small catalogue is available which documents the Berlin section of the exhibition, Hamburg’s historic addition is unfortunately missing.

When I left the museum I was completely shaken. It hurts to think about the cultural losses that were caused by the Nazis’ infamous policy, e.g. the severy disruption of the Bauhaus style in Germany, or the restrictions of artistic development by prohibiting artists to continue working. Not to mention the lives and fates of all the people who were afflicted.

These are the names of the artists whose works were retrieved in the Berlin construction site - not all of them have an entry in Wikipedia in English, and if they do these tend to be on the brief side, therefore I give all the German links, and an English link where possible:

Otto Baum (1900-1977) 

Karl Ehlers (1904-1973) - no separate entry, only mentioned in another entry 

Otto Freundlich (1878-1943), English entry 

Richard Haizmann (1895-1963) 

Karl Knappe (1884-1970) 

Will Lammert (1892-1957), English entry

Marg Moll (1884-1977), English entry 

KarelNiestrath (1896-1971) 

Emy Roeder(1890-1971), English entry 

Edwin Scharff (1887-1955), English entry 

MillySteger (1881-1948), mentioned in English entry on Karl E. Osthaus 

Gustav Heinrich Wolff (1886-1934) 

Fritz Wrampe (1893-1934)  no separate entry, only mentioned in another entry 

According to a museum guide the five sculptures which had been removed from the Hamburg museum will be reconstituted after this exhibit. I assume that means that this exhibition will not travel any further, or at least not in its complete form. The guide was not certain whether this applied to all the other pieces as well. For the “Dancer”, that would mean restitution to Breslau. Who knows when I will ever get a chance to go and visit the museum there – what a lucky coincidence that I caught notice of this exhibit on our way home!

Searching for Marg Moll

I wrote a post about the artist Marg Moll recently, whose scuplture The Dancer was rediscovered together with several other sculptures by artists who had been included in the infamous Nazi-exhibition „Degenerate Art“ when they were dug up during construction work in Berlin.

In my reading which I did in preparation for that post I had found a statement that one of her sculptures was supposed to be located in the senior residence „Augustinum“ in Munich. Yesterday I happened to drive by that residence, which is located right next to the Autobahn from Munich to Lindau on a delivery drive I had to take, and on my way back I decided to stop, take a little break and try to find that sculpture.

At first it was a bit of an orientation problem, because the residence is right next to a clinic with the same name, but I did find the right entrance eventually. At the front desk I was welcomed by a very friendly young lady (one out of three staffing the desk – it is a huge residence indeed!), who had never heard of a statue or sculpture by a person of that name. At first she thought I was talking about a current exhibition, but when I said it had to be a sculpture that must have been here for a while, she was at a loss. Her colleague suggested I look in ‚house 4’, there was a sculpture. Easy to find, but not the right artist:

Bernd Thomas Zimmermann,
Fire and Water (2008)

I did think twice about going back to the front desk or rather calling it quits right away. But it had been a good and succesful day so far and I thought that lucky streak might be strong enough to continue for a little while yet. At the desk they started trying to figure out whom they could ask, who would be likely to know about this issue. Three phone-calls later I was asked to sit down and wait for a few minutes,  the staff member responsible for art in the building would check into the matter.

While I was waiting I was amazed at the amount of things happening at the desk – employees checking in and out, residents asking whether their taxi had been ordered as they had requested, a repair worker waiting for something, at least three or four emergency bell calls which had to be referred to immediate attention of the care personnel, approximately five phone calls coming in for various reasons... I was beginning to feel increasingly embarrassed that I had come with this awkward desire to see a little (? – I don’t know how big it is...) statue which probably had not received much attention lately due to the fact that it had been standing there for quite a while already. But now that kind Ms. Wurm had initiated the inquiry with the staff I couldn’t well leave either. After not more than five minutes of waiting she called back the lady who was supposed to find out and pressed for the information of the whereabouts of the statue.

Just a few more minutes later she was able to tell me that unfortunately most of their statues were traveling through the other dependencies of the residence throughout Germany and that nobody knew when they would be back.

So my streak of luck had broken and I had to leave without having seen a real Marg Moll, not even knowing when would be a possible time to check back for another attempt. I did apologize to her for having added to her stress at the front desk with such a petty request, but she was graciously kind about it.

I think I’ll have to go to Berlin to see Marg Moll – or find another museum somewhere closer where one of her statues is on display. The search continues...

On my way home I then happened to pass by another, definitely large sculpture, much discussed these days, at least in the smaller, and perhaps even the larger Munich area: the newly installed ‚Mae West’ on Effnerplatz, visible when you exit the recently completed Richard-Strauß-Tunnel, part of the Munich City Ring Highway:

Mae West, by Rita McBride,
at Effnerplatz in Munich

I haven’t been following the heated and controversial discussion about the sculpture, only saw that it has kept reappearing in the papers recently. However, the few things I caught about the discussion reminded me of a similar discussion I witnessed when I was living in the city of Augsburg several years ago, and the city was given a donation of a statue of 'Venus' by Markus Lüpertz, under the condition that it be installed at a central place.

The controversy which rocked the city back then way surpassed my understanding of what was going on in the minds of the people then. I admit that while I did not consider the statue particularly beautiful either (but Lüpertz' statues don't ever seem to be considered 'beautiful', from what I gathered looking on the internet), I certainly could not understand how furiously the people fought against it. They were successful in the end and the sculpture disappeared from Augsburg, but I believed then that that would be the only time I would ever be witness to such an uprising against a piece of modern art. However, from what I have gathered from the Munich discussion, it seems that the larger city can make an even larger fuss about a similar issue – with the one difference that this particular sculpture is aesthetically pleasing, despite its size, voluminosity, or whatever one wants to call it.

One point of dissent is the fact that it is called ‚Mae West’, for what does Mae West have to do with Munich? Or this sculpture with the real Mae West?

Well, I would like to suggest two different options for changing that: since the name was attached itself to the sculpture only after it had been created, to distract from the mounting discussion, and does not seem to have been the intention of its maker Rita McBride (sorry, no English article on her in Wikipedia yet!), professor for sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, one could just go ahead and rename it more appropriately. Why not call her/it ‚Mue East’, since it is placed east of the inner city? Or another possibility would be to simply call it ‚Effi’ in reference to Theodor Fontane’s realistic novel Effi Briest, since it can be found on Effnerplatz. That would give a German connection, though not a Munich one, true...

Marg Moll, re-excavated sculptor

Two months ago, on November 8, 2010, several German newspapers featured articles on sculptures newly on display at the Neues Museum Berlin, which had been found during the archeological preparations for construction work on the continuation of the Berlin subway a few months ago. Thanks to the attentiveness of the workers eleven different works of art were recovered which had been lost since the end of World War II.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung featured a large picture of one of the sculptures on page 1, which immediately caught my eye and attention: "Dancer" by Marg Moll. Had they  run only a smaller article in the feuilleton pages, the whole event might have completely escaped my notice, as I do not get to read all of the paper every day. Here is a photo of the front-page section which caught my attention:

Picture of the cut out article published
 in Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 8, 2010.

When I turned to the feuilleton pages and read the article there I was deeply moved by the whole scene as described through the three pictures of one of the sculptures found: 

the top left picture shows Edwin Scharff’s sculpture of Anni Mewes in its original condition before the war, the top right picture is of the condition it was in when re-excavated, and the lower picture shows the condition after restauration. 

I imagine none of the other sculptures looked much better. One certainly can be glad that the construction workers were so attentive to notice that something unusual was slipping from their excavator shovel!

What touched me most, though, was the last paragraph, which ran as follows:

Die für die Öffentlichkeit neugewonnenen Werke gehören wohl nicht in die erste Reieh der modernen Kunst. Es war, wie Ursel Berger, Direktorin des Kolbe-Museums sagt, keine „Sammlerkunst“, sie wurde nicht von den großen Galerien vertreten und den potenten Kennern gekauft. Ihre Geschichte aber sichert ihnen unseren Respekt.

(translation: The works newly recovered for the public probably do not belong amongst the first range of modern art. They were not, as Ursel Berger, director of the Kolbe-Museum puts it, „collector’s art“, and they were not represented by the known galleries or bought by insiders. Their history, however, makes us think of them with respect.)

I have to admit, I certainly had never heard about Marg Moll, whose recovered „Dancer“ was featured on the Süddeutsche front-page, but because I was so deeply touched by the sculpture in the picture, this last paragraph to me just seemed rather condescending.

So I set about doing a little research on Marg Moll.

I found a few links in the internet, of course.

• She can be found in English Wikipedia here, and a German entry here.
• A website features works by Marg Moll and her husband, Oskar Moll, who was the director of Breslau art academy for several years in the 1920s until the Nazis closed the academy down. When I looked through the sculptures presented on this website, I could not decide which one is my favorite, you’ll have to choose for yourself. But I certainly did like the „Black Torso“.
• You can find more pictures on google, of course.
• There is even an English link on the news of the excavation.
• Another very nice sculpture is called „Lovers“ and can beseen here.
• The New York Times had an essay by Michael Kimmelman on the opening of the exhibition of the recovered sculptures, too, as it was reprinted in the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s weekly excerpts of articles from the NYT a few weeks later. (The excerpt never indicates the original date of publication.)

On the Moll’s website I found the reference for a recently published biography of Marg Moll by Werner Filmer: Marg Moll. Eine deutsche Bildhauerin 1884 – 1977. Our local library is pretty good about interlibrary loans, so I ordered this biography and could start reading it a few days later.

Marg Moll was a member of the Munich Secession, the first female German student of sculpture at Henry Matisse’s art school in Paris, and had turned to bronze sculptures even before Käthe Kollwitz. When she married painter Oskar Moll she concentrated on working as a sculptor. Together they traveled a lot, repeatedly spent longer stretches of time in Paris and were friends with many renowned artists from different countries: Lovis Corinth, Henry Matisse, Gertrude Stein, August Endell, Marcel Duchamp, Ossip Zadkine, Man Ray, Robert and Sonia Delaunay…

Marg Moll’s artistic development was characterized by a constant process of abstraction. She was a productive and known artist throughout the 1920s and 1930s, with a 1932 exhibition in the Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, together with her husband. During their years in Breslau they were both influential in the development of modernism in Germay, and Marg Moll continuously worked on further abstractions.

Marg Moll had several sculptures in various German museums and repeated solo exhibitions in various locations, until the Nazis included her sculptures in the notorious „Entartete Kunst“-exhibition ("Degenerate Art") in 1937, around which time her works were removed from the museums as well. Together with their two children the Molls remained in Germany, however, trying to keep a low profile, living and working in their house in Berlin, where they had moved after the Breslau academy had been closed down. Other than e.g. Emil Nolde they had not been prohibited to work, but were not allowed to exhibit any of their works. In 1944, when they had left the city out of fear of  the frequent bomb raids, their house was destroyed by Allied bombs the night before Marg Moll returned in order to clear the valuables out. The Molls lost not only both their entire bodies of work, but an invaluable collection of art works by many of their modern artist friends such as Corinth, Matisse, Picasso, Léger, Braque, Kokoschka, and many others. Despite this strike of fate and Oskar Moll’s decreasing health, both Molls always continued their work. They returned to Berlin after the end of the war and had a first post-war exhibition in May 1946. Marg Moll had turned to wood-sculptures during the war, and continued in this line for a while.

Oskar Moll, whose health had been declining for years, passed away on July 19, 1947, while the couple was contemplating moving to England, where one of their daughters was married.

Marg Moll indeed did move to England in September 1947, but returned to Germany in 1952. She continued trying out new things and improving her techniques in different genres, working until the decline of her eye-sight forced her to end her work in the late sixties.

In 1969, she was awarded the German Bundesverdienstkreuz (order of the Federal Republic of Germany). Her last ten years were spent in Munich, where she died on March 15, 1977.

This brief overview of Marg Moll’s life is based mainly on the biography by Werner Filmer. The book includes a number of pictures of her sculptures from various periods, showing a continuous and convincing development in artistic expression. And it clearly shows that her career was on the upswing well into the thirties with a growing reputation and exhibitions in national and international galleries, until it was interrupted by the Nazis. WW II destroyed her entire body of earlier works. She did not give up, continued to work and produced another impressive body of works.

Marg Moll’s sculpture was on the front page of the paper and caught my attention, and I have concentrated my – admittedly limited – research on her. Definitely she deserves much more praise and attention than the condescending „makes us think of them with respect“, and I am almost certain this holds true for the other excavated pieces of work as well. These include works by Edwin Scharff (English entry here), Otto Baum (no English entry in Wikipedia), Otto Freundlich (English entry here), Karl Knappe (no English entry), Emy Roeder (no English entry), Gustav Heinrich Wolff (no English entry) and Naum Slutzky (English entry here). They are now on display at the Neues Museum Berlin. If you are planning a trip to Berlin any time soon, this definitely should be a worthy item on you list of  museums you want to see!