7169 - Moll, Gerhard

Moll, Gerhard On the Baltic Sea Beach Gouache on handmade paper. Circa 1950. 63.2 x 49 cm. Stamped on the reverse with the estate stamp. Moll studied at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1939 to 1945. As a pacifist, he feigned schizophrenia to avoid being drafted into the Kriegsmarine and was admitted to the Stralsund psychiatric hospital in 1942. Miraculously, he escaped both summary execution as a deserter and the threat of euthanasia, and was discharged after a few months as unfit for military service. The experiences he had there shaped him and his art for the rest of his life, and upon returning to Berlin, he joined the circle around Eugen Neutert and was actively involved in the resistance against the Nazis. After the war, he was part of the artists’ circle at the Berlin Gerd Rosen Gallery and the artists’ cabaret “Die Badewanne.” In 1948, Gerd Rosen exhibited Moll’s works in his gallery for the first time. His artist friends included Wolfgang Frankenstein, Waldemar Grzimek, Gustav Seitz, Heinz Trökes, Fritz Cremer, and Gerhard Marcks. After a brief marriage to Ruth von Carnap, he was a master student under Heinrich Ehmsen from 1952 to 1955. After initial successes in the 1950s and 1960s, Moll came under fire from both sides in the increasingly ideologically charged artistic and political debates and withdrew more and more into his studio. It was not until 1972 that he began exhibiting more frequently again, but he nevertheless died in 1986, almost forgotten, in his studio in Berlin-Friedenau. It was only after his death that his multifaceted body of work was rediscovered and widely exhibited, thanks in large part to the director of the Berlinische Galerie, Jörn Merkert. In the catalog for the 1993 Berlin exhibition, Merkert writes: “A peculiar body of work! It is all very private, very personal, very cryptic, and at the same time very direct, unguarded, and vulnerable.” (cf. Gerhard Moll, Paintings and Watercolors, Galerie Inselstrasse 13, in collaboration with the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin 1993). Provenance: The artist’s estate (bearing the estate stamp of his partner Jutta Zimmer, who died in 2020, on the reverse) Private collection, Southern Germany - Please request condition reports for the lots, as the condition is usually not listed in the catalog. - Please ask for condition reports for individual lots, as the condition is usually not mentioned in the catalog.