Welcome to the Kolomon Moore website.
Kolomon Moore is the creator of a substantial body of drawings which has appeared in the market in recent years. Of this mysterious artist we know nothing for certain apart from what his drawings tell us, dating from the Thirties. In most of his representations Kolomon M. uses the same technique: crayon on heavy paper of bisque colour. He rarely draws on white paper using a pencil. Very interesting are the few drawings done with diluted India ink. The majority of the sheets measure about 25 x 34 cm, but the artist has also worked on sheets of double dimension, 35 x 50 cm.
Kolomon usually signs his drawings using printed capital letters with his first name and the initial of his last name: “KOLOMON M.”. Very rarely, on his ink drawings, he adds his full last name, signing “K. MOORE” or limits himself to “M. K.”. From a certain point in his production the artist uses a precise typology of a glass and a bottle drawn next to his name, almost a logo, as if it were a second signature or an identifying mark. In this case the bottle, probably of a liqueur, has an oval or rhomboidal label coloured red, as is often the cork as well.
Each of his works has near his signature the mark in blue ink of a stamp or a seal, perhaps of a collector from whose house the entire body of work arrives. The mark apparently represents an illegible crowned monogram (EEB?) with intertwined lines like the branches of a vine. In the case of the India ink drawings the stamp is different and represents an eagle against two crossed sheaves. This stamp imitates perfectly the insignia of the US National Guard. The signature also changes on the ink drawings: Kolomon signs with an incomprehensible cross with a dot in each of the four sectors followed by just the initials MK. It’s remarkable that the same model of a cross with dots appears often on the letters written by Gabriele d’Annunzio.
Kolomon’s genre is absolutely figurative: men and women in public or private places, on the street, in a bedroom, at a café, sitting or standing. Next to them is often found the drawing of a glass and/or a bottle. They are highly characterized figures, therefore portraits of individuals. Sometimes the drawings carry the name of the person portrayed. A characteristic of his portraiture is the drawing of long eyelashes only on the lower lids, both of men and women.
From the notes written on the drawings, we also know that in Paris Kolomon frequented the Folies Bergères, Montparnasse, St. Germaine des Près, several Café Chantant. Some works have titles of their own which sometimes appear to be ironic, or the carry parts of French poems.
Another side of his production, equally substantial, is the erotic one, openly pornographic. Here too, Kolomon portrays single individuals, naked women in obscene poses; when men appear, they are generally shown from the waist down, the penis; he seldom shows a naked man with his face.
Kolomon draws with a physiognomical capability that sometimes borders on caricature. Some works bring to mind posters or publicity of those years.
His ability is surprising: he draws directly, without preliminary sketching and without repentance, without double lines, corrections or erasures. The stroke shows stenographic certainty. Almost always he colours in bright red some details that have apparent sexual or fetishistic connotations: the lips, the nipples, the women’s shoes and, in the men, the necktie or knotted scarf. In the erotic drawings he uses red to outline the vagina or to colour the gland. Sometimes he uses green, and white for eyes, windowpanes and reflections. The repetitiveness and the very strong use of the colour red suggest an extreme sexuality with some maniacal traits.
If we stop with what we know, Kolomon appears to be a descendant of the twentieth century avant-garde. His drawings reflect the influence of the painting of the immediately preceding years, from Toulouse-Lautrec to the nudes of Egon Schiele; he has the bold strokes of Oskar Kokoschka and a clear debt to the German expressionism of the first twenty years of the century, of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel.
Kolomon’s subjects shows a strong consonance with the world of Brassaï and of André Kertész, the two Hungarian photographers who so magnificently portrayed the Paris between the end of the twenties and the early thirties. Especially with Brassaï, Kolomon shares the sensibility and an affinity for the same subjects, ambiguous situations, the same borderline environments, nocturnal, peopled by prostitutes, homosexuals, lesbians.
The most frequent rumor in circulation for some time about Kolomon suggests that he was a Jew, son of an engineer who worked in Trieste, and that he died in a concentration camp during the Second World War.
None of this information has yet found confirmation. Despite various researches, no trace of Kolomon is found. Above all, some designs exist, undoubtedly done after the war, which reproduce details inexistent before the fifties.
It has been verified recently that some drawings signed Kolomon reproduce exactly works by the Slovenian painter Veno Pilon (1896-1970). At least ten Kolomons are undoubtedly copied from works by Pilon which appeared in public for the first time in the year 2000 and were published in the catalogue of a large retrospective dedicated to the Slovenian artist.
The subjects which Kolomon has copied from Pilon, as we have verified, bear false dates, incompatible with the subjects themselves, and lead to the supposition that they are copies made in very recent years on old paper.
If you have sort of information about Kolomon Moore,
drawings, dates, supplementary notes, don’t hesitate to contact these
people responsible for the website, Andrea Perego and Flora Manzonetto, writing
to: info@kolomon.eu