Austria’s leading figures met every week at her salon on Nusswaldgasse, the main street in Vienna’s Döbling neighborhood.

Zuckerkandl would pick up her acid-tipped pen at the drop of a hat to defend avant-garde artists embroiled in controversy or threatened with censorship. She is memoirist, art critic and journalist Berta Zuckerkandl, who ranked among turn-of-the-century Vienna’s most influential figures: Karl Kraus called her “the puppeteer of Vienna’s cultural scene”. Wrapped in this ivory atmosphere, a mysterious woman seen from behind is busy arranging tulips in a vase. Here, the square format contributing to the work’s immediacy, the vibrant light bathing the room in a meditative mood and the precious shades of white make this intimate scene a symbolist masterpiece. Formed in 1897, its radical period was brief yet its impact on the cultural life of Vienna and beyond was immense and enduring. Moll is little known outside his native Austria, yet he co-founded the Vienna Secession with his close friend Gustav Klimt. The Vienna Secession was the name given to the group of artists, architects and designers that broke away from the main establishment of Viennese artists to form their own group. The current record, €260,300, was set in 2007 by Dorotheum. Up to this point, the Association of Austrian Artists was the primary voice in the country, and the Vienna Secession movement was seen as a reaction to the dated philosophies of the. Now added to the artist’s catalogue raisonné edited by Cornelia Cabuk, on February 23 it could fetch the highest price ever paid for a work by Moll. The Vienna Secession movement that sprung in the late 1890s was a pivotal moment in the history of art, architecture, graphic design, and other allied fine arts. It may have been bought at the end of the exhibition and has remained in the same private Frankfurt collection, which moved to California in the 1970s. The recently rediscovered work has never been on the market: the only record until now was a photograph taken at the 1908 Vienna Kunstschau alongside Gustav Klimt’s iconic The Kiss (Belvedere Museum).

Vienna secession light