1901-1902 House Carl Moll I Vienna - Steinfeldgasse No. 8

Entrances in Geweygasse 13 and in Steinfeldgasse 8.
At the corner of these streets.
Hohe Warte district.
Architect Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956).
Semi-detached villa with House Koloman Moser Vienna – Steinfeldgasse No. 6.
Built 1902-1903.

Owner 1902-1907 Carl Julius Rudolf Moll (1861-1945).
He moved to 1909-1911 House Carl Moll II Vienna – Wollergasse No. 10.
Residents: Carl Julius Rudolf Moll (1861-1945), Anna Sofie Moll-Schindler-Bergen (1857-1938) and Alma Mahler (1879-1964).

Gustav Mahler and House Carl Moll I Vienna – Steinfeldgasse No. 8:

Alma Mahler (1879-1964) lived here.
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) did not live here.
Year 1902. Visit.
Year 1903. Visit.
Year 1904. Visit.
Year 1905. Visit. Photo.
Year 1906. Visit.
Year 1907. Visit.

In 1901, the first house that Josef Hoffmann built in Hohe Warte, a new suburb of Vienna, was a duplex for his friends and fellow artists, Carl Julius Rudolf Moll (1861-1945) and Koloman Moser (1868-1918). In retrospect, Hohe Warte has taken on the aura of a Viennese Acropolis: home of monumental artists, situated on a hill overlooking a great city. No exaggeration this, because history happened here.

At the time Moll moved to his new house on Steinfeldgasse he was President of the Secession (association). Moll was also married to Anna Sofie Moll-Schindler-Bergen (1857-1938), widow of the respected painter Jacob Emil Schindler (1842-1892), making Moll the stepfather of the beautiful and flirtatious Alma Mahler (1879-1964). It was at Hohe Warte that Alma Schindler and Gustav Mahler met, fell in love and married in 1902.

We know quite a bit about Moll’s half of the house from his paintings. That the artist found an apparently inexhaustible source of images there, painting several interiors. That he painted the sparkling geomtry of the terrace the same year that Moll was photographed relaxing with his friends Max Reinhardt and Alfred Roller, his new son-in-law, the composer Gustav Mahler, and his doppelhaus neighbor, Koloman Moser. Moll also did a self-portrait in his third floor studio (1906) with a sculpture by the Belgian Symbolist Georges Minne and Hoffmann’s trademark black and white pattern on the floor. Moll created – or recreated, depending on your point of view – the effects Josef Hoffmann achieved architecturally, the striking use of blue and white, the diffusion of light, and harmony between interior and exterior spaces. In his paintings, Moll often combined stippling and small parallel strokes, displaying a debt to Divisionist techniques, another interest acquired through his contacts with Belgian artists.

In photographs and in the artist’s Self-Portrait (1906) we can see evidence of Moll’s work, first as the organizer of exhibitions for the Secession and then as the director of Galerie Miethke in the taste brought to bear on the decoration of his study, with the aforementioned Minne figure and with paintings and photographs. The photograph hanging to the left of the door in the Moll study is Twilight/Dammerung (1896), a bi-chromate photograph by Heinrich Kuehn, a friend and frequent house guest of Moll’s next door neighbor, Hugo Henneberg.

In a special issue of The Studio published in 1906 and devoted to The Art Revival In Austria, Ludwig Hevesi pointed to Moll as the one with the social connections. who collected the funds that financed the Vienna Secession. Moll “was the very leaven of the new movement, Minister of Fine Arts without portfolio,” Hevesi declared.

By then Moll, along with Koloman Moser and Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)had become discontented with the aims of the Vienna Secession, a group they had helped to found in 1897. They had moved on to establish the Wiener Werkstatte, dozens of whose members contributed to the design of the Palais Stoclet.

Today the house, part of a row of Josef Hoffmann villas, forms part of the Saudi Arabian embassy. The four homes (built for Carl Moll, Koloman Moser, Hugo Henneberg and another photographer, Friedrich Viktor Spitzer as an artists’ colony) are important works in Hoffmann’s output. The buildings shared features, including brick walls with white roughcast facing and impressive views away from the city back over to the Vienna Woods.

Year 1905. House Carl Moll I Vienna – Steinfeldgasse No. 8. Gustav Mahler in the garden. See Year 1905 for details.