Standing Youth

At some point after Moser's death in 1918, someone tried to turn this canvas into a Hodler. The Belvedere records that the name of Ferdinand Hodler, the Swiss painter of large, rhythmic figure compositions, was added to it with intent to deceive, and that the stamp of Moser's estate was made harder to read at the same time. The name was hardly picked at random. Moser had visited Hodler in Geneva in April 1913, and afterwards his own painting turned toward allegorical figures like this one. A young man stands naked and frontal, head lowered, arms hanging, outlined in heavy blue and ringed by a pale yellow glow between two masses of blue-green. Moser prepared the picture with care. A figure study for it, squared up with a grid for transfer, appeared at a Sotheby's sale in London in 1993.