In 1927 Hans Ankwicz-Kleehoven curated an exhibition in the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry that for the first time showed the variety in Kolo Moser’s output. Visitors were reminded at this show of the bound[1]less creative power that Moser, as co-founder of the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstatte as well as professor at the School of Arts and Crafts, had injected into the art scene around 1900 – an effect that reached far beyond Vienna into the lands of the Habsburg monarchy, as well as to the capitals of Europe. Moser was an uncompromising aest[1]hete who only engaged with an artistic material for as long as he saw a challenge in it, and who was able to grow personally through artistic activity and find satisfaction in it. […]

Berta Zuckerkandl, who remembered Kolo Moser in a 1927 essay in the Neues Wiener Journal, ended her article with the following sentences that illustrate wonderfully what Kolo Moser meant for his contemporaries: ‘In the autumn days when Austria blew away, Kolo Moser died. One of the great artists, so rare, of which it will be said, he refined Europe. He was an Austrian in the most beautiful sense of this word.’1



(Quote Gerd Pichler, taken from the exhibition catalogue Klimt, Schiele Moser, Galerie bei der Albertina- Zetter GmbH (ed.), 2018, p. 54ff.)

1 Berta Zuckerkandl-Szeps, Erinnerung an Kolo Moser, in: Neues Wiener Journal from 23 January 1927, no. 11914, p. 10