Max Moos

Art dealer Max Moos founded the Galerie Moos in Zurich in 1913, which was one of the first galleries in Switzerland to specialize in figurative French and Swiss art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by François Emile Barraud, Ferdinand Hodler, and Otto Vautier, among others. During World War I and in the interwar period, Moos became a pivotal player in the flourishing Swiss art market.

Born in the German village of Randegg (currently in the municipal area of Gottmadingen, Baden-Württemberg), Moos initially worked in his father’s postcard workshop in Karlsruhe. In 1906 he settled in Geneva and opened a small offshoot of the family business, Maison Moos, with his sister at 29 rue du Rhône, which sold postcards and engravings. He slowly expanded the store, making picture frames and displaying modern paintings. In order to integrate more effectively within the Genevan bourgeoisie and ensure the success of his gallery, he began to deal works by the two best-selling artists in Switzerland at the time, Hodler and Vautier. Moos organized a large exhibition of Hodler’s work at the Kunsthalle Basel in March 1912 and shortly after a second one at his own gallery in August 1912.

The following summer Moos rented a new, larger space on the place du Port, Grand-Quai in Geneva. This marked the official opening of the Galerie Moos, though Moos maintained his framing and reproduction business at his first address. The first three exhibitions at the new gallery signaled its pan-European program: L’Espagne, ses peintres (August 1913), Paris, ses peintres (September 1913), and Max Buri, Ferdinand Hodler, Otto Vautier (October 1913). He promoted the works of Swiss artists such as Alice Bailly, Marius Borgeaud, and Jacques Elie Abraham Hermanjat through solo and group exhibitions, and gained attention in the press thanks to the support of art critic Lucienne Florentin.

During the First World War, as French expatriates fled to neutral Switzerland, Galerie Moos began promoting French Impressionism, reflecting a similar shift by the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, which had a branch in Lausanne. In summer 1917 Moos expanded his flourishing business, partnering with three of his clients (Paul A. Renaud, François Naly, and Ernest Ponti) to purchase a luxurious building on rue du Marché in Geneva, becoming the largest gallery in Switzerland. The new Galerie Moos opened in January 1918 with an exhibition of more than five hundred works by Swiss artists. In May 1918 the sudden death of Hodler just days after his major exhibition opened at the Galerie Moos generated enormous demand for the artist’s work, which reached staggering prices. Galerie Moos held the monopoly on Hodler’s work, with nearly 1,300 objects in its stock. After a series of retrospective exhibitions around Switzerland, the market for Hodler’s work was flooded, and prices plunged by 1921. Moos was heavily hit by the collapse in value of his main asset, which occurred concurrently with an economic crisis that affected all of Europe. Even though he tried to diversify his activities—for example, hosting the exhibition La jeune peinture française. Les Cubistes, organized with the dealer Léonce Rosenberg in February 1920—he no longer had the means to maintain his gallery. Galerie Moos hosted a final exhibition of its entire stock in January 1922 before holding a liquidation sale that spring.

After a yearlong hiatus, during which Moos operated a temporary gallery space in Paris, he reopened the Galerie Moos in Geneva with two branches: one at 31 quai du Mont-Blanc—a small space that dealt in ancient art, art objects, and antique furniture—and a separate venue dedicated to modern art at 3 rue du Léman, where Moos also hosted auctions of private collections. Between 1927 and 1939, Galerie Moos held at least thirty-one such auctions of mostly Swiss collections, such as those of François Naly, Frédéric Raisin, and Johannes Widmer. In the 1920s, the center of the Swiss art market shifted to Zurich, and Moos became the main gallery in Geneva. Similar to his previous investment in Hodler, Moos began to represent the Swiss artist François Emile Barraud in the 1930s, promoting his work through exhibitions and the press, and building a significant stock of his art. Moos remained a key figure in the circulation of Hodler’s work, lending important examples from his personal collection to exhibitions. Because of the economic crisis following the 1929 stock market crash in the United States, Moos decided to once again sell a significant portion of his collection at an auction, which took place at his gallery on March 23, 1935. After traveling from Geneva to New York in 1939, Moos and his wife decided to stay, fearing increased danger to the Jewish population in Switzerland. Their son Georges continued to run the gallery in Geneva as well as his own eponymous gallery business and sold additional objects from Moos’s collection (mostly furniture and art objects) at auction to support his parents. After Moos returned to Switzerland in 1946, he largely retired, only occasionally trading artworks as a private dealer. Galerie Moos officially closed upon his death in 1976.