Philadelphia-based auction house Freeman’s sold Viennese artist Carl Moll’s White Interior (1905). The painting was sold at a record breaking amount of $4.75 million during its European art and Old Masters sale. The exhibition collectively fetched $6.4 million.
Moll’s White Interior broke the record of the auction house of the highest bid for a single lot surpassing the the $3.1 million paid for a Chinese vase in 2011. This was the biggest sale which was ever held in Freeman’s. White Interior also bested Moll’s previous record of $385,700, paid for a landscape by the artist at Austrian auction house Dorotheum in 2007.
The painting, White Interior, depicts art critic Berta Zuckerkandl-Szeps in her Döbling apartment in an all-white palette. The painting has now resurfaced after a century of being privately held. It came from a German family collection, having passed through inheritance to the California-based heir of the original owners, where it has been since the 1970s, and it is the only figurative Moll painting ever sold at auction.
“Everyone thought it was lost, because it was only known through a black and white photograph from a show in 1905,” said Freeman’s European art and Old Masters specialist Raphaël Chatroux. “But in fact, we believe the work was bought directly by the family of our consignor. We don’t know if it was bought directly from the artist by them, but we think that it is highly possible it was bought right after it was shown in Vienna in 1908, because otherwise the artist would have continued to exhibit it.”
The painting was first exhibited in Berlin in 1905 and later at the Museum Folkwang in Essen the following year. It had last been shown publicly at Vienna’s Kunstschau in 1908, alongside Gustav Klimt’s iconic The Kiss. Moll was known for his idyllic domestic scenes. He was also among the founding members of the Vienna Secession movement.
After a bidding period that lasted just under 10 minutes and involved a dozen parties, an American collector won the work. Following the sale, the auction house reported that the anonymous buyer was planning to exhibit the work at New York’s Neue Galerie, which houses the formidable German and Viennese art collection of New York investor Ronald Lauder.