Featured Artist: Rediscovering Moldovan
He studied in Paris, knew Matisse and Chagall and showed across Europe and America. Sacha Moldovan distrusted the dealers and critics who could have helped him, and he died with barely a notice.
Sacha Moldovan, a gifted painter who slipped into obscurity
Some artists with enormous gifts slip into obscurity after their deaths, or even before. Sacha Moldovan (1901-82) was one of them. The Russian-born Expressionist emigrated to the United States, studied in Paris, befriended some of the best-known artists of his day and developed a powerful style that was his own. His work was shown all over Europe and later in the United States. He died in an institution, and his passing drew barely a notice.
The art critic Marla Berg once summed him up this way: “Had van Gogh painted Matisse’s pictures while dreaming of Chagall, the result would have been the works of Sacha Moldovan.”
Moldovan himself had little patience for remarks like that. He was famously mistrustful of critics, and of dealers too, and that cynical streak was part of his undoing. “Who cares to analyze this?” he asked with scorn. “Just paint pictures and enjoy it.”
Why Moldovan kept his best paintings from dealers
He once told a dealer, “Most of you buy paintings for either sentiment, status or greed. So it doesn’t really make a difference what I sell. I paint to fulfill myself, and to understand a little more about nature and life.”
He held on to his best works as if they were his children and refused to part with them. If a buyer pressed him, he named a price so high he knew it would never be met. Dealers usually got the table scraps, works he considered below his standard.
Why he distrusted the very people who could have helped him most will stay a mystery. The respected Parisian critic André Salmon wrote of him in 1930: “I would wish that Moldovan not read any criticism, that he retain only one piece of advice: never study van Gogh, nor frequent with the painters of his age, except at the cafe. He draws by instinct and already his palette is perfectly his own.”
Prices for Moldovan originals from the 1970s to 1991
His indifference did not stop prices from climbing. In the early 1970s the Allan Rich Galleries on Madison Avenue in New York sold Moldovans for $6,000 to $8,000. The gallery belonged to the actor and art dealer Allan Rich. In 1984 Judge Galleries sold an original for $18,000, and the same price was reached that year at a show in Durham, North Carolina, that set Moldovan’s work, favorably, beside Marc Chagall’s. The two men knew each other, and both were born in Russia.
By the late 1980s the Eisenberg Gallery in Los Angeles was selling Moldovan originals for $25,000 to $35,000. In 1991 Hammer Galleries in Manhattan went further, selling originals at a one-man show for more than $50,000.
After that the artist went into eclipse, with no one representing him in earnest. In early 2004 an online dealer offered half a dozen original paintings at $18,000 to $24,000, and giclée reproductions on canvas and paper were also sold. Among the titles of his paintings are An Evening Stroll, Park Bench, Portrait of a Lady, Floral Still Life With Fruit, Men Coming and Going and Veronique Reading.
Moldovan’s style: thick impasto, black outlines and arbitrary color
Moldovan believed the main purpose of painting was to make works that gave pleasure to people with visual literacy. He took the styles of artists he admired, among them Matisse, van Gogh and Soutine, as a point of departure, and built paintings bright in color and varied in texture.
He got better with age. He hit his stride in his 50s and 60s, when his paintings took on an Expressionist tone in the manner of Georges Rouault and Chaim Soutine. His artistic handwriting resembled Soutine’s: arbitrary color, thick impasto, black outlines, a rejection of naturalistic description, and a view of the world through instinct and emotion.
“Many artists influenced me,” he said. “As a young man I went to the museums. There, I found my fathers and grandfathers: Matisse, Soutine and Bonnard.” Still, he added, “I was influenced by van Gogh more than anyone else.” The difference lay in direction. Van Gogh turned inward for inspiration, while Moldovan seemed to react to the outside world and lash out at it. A brief liaison during World War II produced a daughter, Wendy, on whom he lavished much affection.
From Kishinev to New York: Moldovan’s early years
Sacha Moldovan was born Aloysha Schneider on November 4, 1901, in Kishinev, Russia, near the Black Sea. He was nicknamed Sacha. Years later, after his parents divorced, he legally took the surname Moldovan, his mother’s maiden name.
His mother was a painter herself and his first artistic inspiration. She encouraged her son and bought him materials to make pictures.
The family was Jewish and felt the pressure of persecution in Czarist Russia. They fled to America on the eve of the Russian Revolution, landed in New York and settled on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There young Sacha studied art, first at the Cooper Union School of Art and later at the National Academy of Design.
Paris, Matisse and the Fauve influence
In the early 1920s Moldovan moved to Paris to study painting, enrolling at the Académie Julian and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He met Henri Matisse, who, by some accounts, took him under his wing and tutored him. The same was said of Pierre Bonnard.
His early style was not the avant-garde or Surrealist work popular at the time. It leaned toward the Fauve painting of turn-of-the-century France, and his clear influences were Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, van Gogh and Soutine.
By the late 1920s he was painting landscapes, figures and still lifes that celebrated the pleasures of the senses. Brilliant color, boldly outlined forms and thickly applied paint marked the style he adopted then and refined for the rest of his life. For another painter whose market grew long after the work was made, see the Florida landscapes of the Highwaymen. Another painting with a story of its own is Paul Gauguin’s Fruits on a Table.
Questions and answers
Who was Sacha Moldovan?
Sacha Moldovan (1901-82) was a Russian-born Expressionist painter. Born Aloysha Schneider in Kishinev, he came to New York as a boy, studied at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, then trained in Paris in the 1920s. He exhibited in Europe and the United States but died in obscurity in an institution.
What did Sacha Moldovan paintings sell for?
In the early 1970s his paintings sold for $6,000 to $8,000 at the Allan Rich Galleries in New York. Judge Galleries sold one for $18,000 in 1984. The Eisenberg Gallery in Los Angeles asked $25,000 to $35,000 in the late 1980s, and in 1991 Hammer Galleries sold originals for more than $50,000.
Which artists influenced Moldovan?
Moldovan named Matisse, Soutine and Bonnard as his artistic fathers and grandfathers but said van Gogh influenced him more than anyone else. His early work leaned toward the Fauves, including Maurice de Vlaminck, and his later style shared Soutine’s thick impasto, black outlines and arbitrary color.
Did Sacha Moldovan know Chagall and Matisse?
Yes. Moldovan and Marc Chagall, both born in Russia, knew each other, and a 1984 show in Durham, North Carolina, compared their work. In Paris he met Henri Matisse, who by some accounts tutored him, and the same was said of Pierre Bonnard.