Seated woman with angled right leg and tilted head

Moissey Kogan is represented in the collection of the Clemens Sels Museum Neuss not only with print graphics and early reliefs, but with his late sculptures in the round. Throughout his life Kogan was interested in the female nude, which he made the subject of his art in the form of kneeling, sitting and standing female torsos. The fragmentary nature, the archaic simplification and statuesque calm of his works became part of Kogan’s formal language early on, one that he rarely varied and that thus resulted in an unusually homogeneous and consistent body of work. Although this is one of the few figures in which Kogan breaks open the closed contour, it mirrors the formal reduction, the timeless expression and the feminine grace of his nudes in exemplary fashion. Although the head seems too small compared to the massiveness of the upper body and the length of the lower body, the figure exhibits a farreaching harmony in its proportions. The head tilted forward underscores the expression of calm and introspection. The delicate features of the face reflect the characteristic typecasting that gives the expression its universal validity. In their classical reduction and tectonic severity Moissy Kogan’s figures resemble those of Aristide Maillol who once foretold the younger artist a great future as a sculptor.