GERMANY | Rare porcelain death mask " L’inconnue de la Seine" Goebel (1933)

Up for sale is this vintage death mask, made of unglazed biscuit porcelane.   Its dimensions are app. 2,5  x 3,5  x 4,5 inches. Weight: 230 grams. Excellent condition. Property from a private art and design collection.

Around 1900, the body of an unknown woman was recovered from the river Seine in Paris, who had probably committed suicide by drowning. An employee at the Paris morgue is said to have been so taken with her beauty that he took a plaster cast of her face and had a death mask made. She quickly became famous and was compared to the Mona Lisa. The mask came into vogue among Parisian bohemians as a morbid furnishing accessory. The enigmatic peaceful facial expression of the dead woman was the cause of countless speculations about her life and the circumstances of her death. Her fate inspired numerous artists and intellectuals, including including Man Ray who owned such a mask, Maurice Blanchot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ernst Benkard, Reinhold Conrad Muschler, Hertha Pauli, Friedrich Ernst Peters, Claire Golls, Max Frisch, Arno Schmidt, Vladimir Nabokov, Jules Supervielle and Louis Aragon. The - smaller than life size - porcelane death mask crerated by the German artist Arthur Moeller is supposed to be the best that was ever created. During a stay in Paris, he probably had access to the original death mask and used an unknown technique to reduce it to scale.

Little is known about the mysterious life of Artuhr Moeller (1886-1972), who is considered the creator of this porcelain death mask. Between 1900 and 1907 he received training at the studio for ceramic models in Rudolstadt and then worked for various Thuringian porcelain factories. Still in 1907 he studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Dresden, which he continued from 1908-1910 at the Academy of Applied Arts in Munich as a student of Heinrich Waderé. In 1910 he showed his work at the special exhibition of Munich applied arts at the Petit Palais in Paris. It was then that he came into contact with the myth of the unknown woman from the Seine and perhaps made a cast of the death mask at that time. In 1910 or 1911, on the initiative of Max Louis Goebel, who had seen his sculptures at the Paris exhibition, he took a job as a modeller at the W. Goebel porcelain factory. Several figures based on his models were created, including sculptures based on the models of the legendary dancers of the Apollo theater in Berlin in the 1920s, such as Anita Berger and Molly Lake. The death mask, however,  came on the market around the year 1933.