Moissey Kogan (1879-1942)
Sculptor Moissey Kogan was born in 1879 in Orhei, Moldova. In 1903 he went to study at the Art Academy of Munich. After his art education he moved to Paris in 1908 where he was influenced by Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) and Auguste Rodin (1840-1917).
Available Moissey Kogan works:
Femme debout - 1937
Kniender frauenakt - 1937
Early years in Paris
Kogan's first exhibition in Paris was in 1908 at the at the Salon d'Automne. Kogan started his career producing medals, plaques, vases, embroidery and drawings and later started sculpting after his introduction to the sculptors Maillol and Rodin. Kogan became especially interested in the female form, Most of his work consists of small terra cotta and gypsum sculptures and reliefs in the neoclassical style. Due to the expense of the material he rarely worked in bronze. Besides being a sculptor he also was a master of woodcut, linocut, etching, and needlework.
In 1909 he was one of the founders of the Expressionist group Neue Künstlervereinigung in Munich, this group was formed around Wassily Kandinsky and prefigured Der Blaue Reiter.
Artistic career
During his life Kogan had a few teaching positions, first in Hagen, Germany at the Folkwang Museum which was the private museum of the collector and patron Karl Ernst Osthaus (1874-1921). Kogan also briefly taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Weimar.
Between 1924 and 1928 and from 1933 to 1936 Kogan lived in Holland where he became friends with doctor and artist Hendrik Wiegersma (1891-1969), his house in Deurne 'De Wieger' was a meeting place for many artists like Ossip Zadkine (1888-1967), Otto van Rees (1884-1957) and Jan Engelman.
Tragic fate
In 1933 he stopped travelling to Germany due to the increasingly anti-Semitic atmosphere, some of his works were exhibited at the Entartete Kunst exhibition in Berlin, 1938. In the late 1930s, Kogan began to withdraw from public life. On 11 February 1943, he was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp, where he would die only two weeks later. It wasn't until the 1960s that his tragic fate was discovered.
International recognition
Moissey Kogan exhibited in various Parisian galleries, as well as in Berlin, Germany, The Hague, Netherlands and other European cities. Moissey Kogan's works are represented in many museums, including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, the Kunsthalle Bremen and in the collection of MoMA, New York.