Koloman Moser
The all-round artist of the Vienna Secession.
Koloman Moser designed furniture, posters, stamps, glass and textiles and founded the Wiener Werkstätte together with Hoffmann.
Koloman Moser was born in Vienna in 1868. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and then at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna. During his studies he supported himself as an illustrator for magazines, which gave him a sure hand as a graphic artist.
In 1897 he was one of the founders of the Vienna Secession, together with Gustav Klimt and Josef Hoffmann among others. He designed posters, exhibition catalogues and pages for the group's magazine Ver Sacrum. From 1899 he taught at the School of Applied Arts. In 1903 he founded the Wiener Werkstätte together with Hoffmann and the financier Fritz Waerndorfer, and there he designed furniture, silver, glass, jewellery, bookbindings and textiles.
Moser developed an austere, geometric ornament of repeated squares and shapes, often in black and white. He designed the stained-glass windows of Otto Wagner's Church of St Leopold am Steinhof in Vienna, consecrated in 1907. He also designed Austrian postage stamps, including a jubilee series for Emperor Franz Joseph in 1908, and banknotes.
In 1905 he married Editha Mautner von Markhof, from a wealthy industrial family. After disputes over the Wiener Werkstätte's finances he left the workshop in 1907 and thereafter devoted himself mainly to painting, influenced by the Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler. He died of cancer in 1918, the same year as Klimt, Egon Schiele and Otto Wagner. His works are in the MAK and the Leopold Museum in Vienna, among other places, and he is counted among the most versatile designers of Viennese modernism.