Moses Kottler
His father was a trader of agricultural goods and their home – opposite a synagogue – seems to have been prosperous by the standards of Jews in Czarist Russia.
He took a photograph of a snowman Moses had created, and showed it to a sculptor Ilya Ginzburg [ru] while at a Zionist congress in Vilnius.
[4] Munich, in the years preceding the First World War, was the city of the Blaue Reiter, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, Paul Klee and Alexej von Jawlensky.
Later he would move to the Passage de Dantzig near La Ruche (the Beehive) where artists like Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Chaïm Soutine and Ossip Zadkine stayed.
[4][6] The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 forced Kottler back to South Africa, settling in Oudtshoorn, where his extensive family now had farms and businesses.
The most influential figures in painting were J. S. Morland, Crosland Robinson, Constance Penstone, Gwelo Goodman and Edward Roworth.
The membership count in 1917 was 121, including Hendrik Pierneef, Anton van Wouw, Nita Spilhaus, Ruth Prowse, Florence Zerffi and Moses Kottler, who had joined that year.
[1]: 380–381 In January 1917, Kottler looked up D. C. Boonzaier, the cartoonist and art collector, on the advice of Nita Spilhaus, but was unable to show him anything more than photographs.
On 7 February 1917, Boonzaier, Pieter Wenning, Florence Zerffi and Nita Spilhaus attended the opening of the South African Society of Artists exhibition in the Minor City Hall, Cape Town.
Circumstances improved slightly when Kottler was commissioned to illustrate a Nationale Pers children's book Wonderstories, for which he received £20.
Z. Berman and others, still lives and townscapes of Cape Town and the Malay Quarter, one of which was reproduced in Die Huisgenoot, an Afrikaans weekly magazine, in April 1918.
[5] Art critic Bernard Lewis procured a commission for Kottler to paint the portrait of Jakob Elisa de Villiers (Oom Japie Helpmekaar), a wealthy farmer of Paarl, which was completed by 25 December 1917.
On 13 April 1919, while visiting Bernard Lewis and his wife at the Vineyard Hotel, Newlands, he met Anton van Wouw for the first time.
On 26 April 1919, Lewis procured a commission for portrait paintings of J. I. Marais, first chancellor of the newly established Stellenbosch University, and Reverend J. H. Neethling, for which he was to be paid £180.
[4] Between 14 December 1920 and 4 January 1921, Kottler staged his first Exhibition of Sculpture, held at Cape Town City Hall and opened by Sir Carruthers Beattie.
The undertaking, with the General in ill health, had consumed twelve days but left a lasting impression on Kottler of the character of the guerrilla leader.
In early 1924, he turned up the unusual commission for a death mask and bust of John Charles Molteno Jr., the member of parliament.
[4] More important commission were to follow: in 1928, busts of the Earl of Athlone, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri, General Louis Botha and Sir George Edward Cory; in 1929, mayor of Cape Town, Hyman Liberman.
