Mossa was born in Nice, France, on January 28, 1883. He was the son of Marguerite Alfieri and Alexis Mossa, an artist, founding curator of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice (Nice Museum of Fine Arts). His father was also known to be an organiser of the Nice Carnival from 1873.
Gustav Adolf Mossa received his first artistic training from his father. Then he attended the School of Decorative Arts in Nice, from which he graduated in 1900. During his studies, he became acquainted with Art Nouveau and was later introduced to the Symbolist movement after visiting the Exposition Universelle the same year.
In the creation of his paintings, Mossa was greatly inspired by the art of Gustave Moreau, a Symbolist painter, and Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly and Joris-Karl Huysmans, all of whom were Symbolist writers.
To a greater extent, Mossa created his artworks with watercolours and strong ink lines. His main subjects included caricatures, Carnival or medieval scenes, portraits and landscapes. The artist also executed wooden reliefs, designed theatre scenery, wrote literary essays and produced illustrations for books, including his large series of drawings for the work by Robert Schumann. In the year 1902, Gustav Adolf Mossa began his collaboration with his father on the Nice Carnival project, designing posters and floats.
Gustav Adolf Mossa's decade-long Symbolist period, which lasted from 1900 to 1911, was the most prolific in his career. It started as a reaction to the recent boom of socialite leisure activity on the French Rivera. Mossa's artworks comically satirised and condemned what was viewed as an increasingly materialistic society and the perceived danger of the forthcoming New Woman at the turn of the century, whom Mossa appears to consider crooked by nature.
The artist's most common subjects to depict were femme fatale figures, some of them were from Biblical sources, including his modernised versions of Judith, Delilah and Salome, mythological creatures like Harpies or more modern and urban figures. Mossa's 1905 artwork Elle, the logo for the 2017 Geschlechterkampf exhibit on representations of gender in art, was a vivid example of his interpretation of malicious female sexuality.
Other aspects of Mossa's paintings that he depicted in his artworks, with his references to Diabolism, were lesbianism (such as his two paintings of Sappho), or an emphasis on violent, sadistic or dreadful scenes. Although today these paintings are the subject of most modern exhibitions, articles and books on the artist, they were not publicly displayed until 1971. In 1911, Mossa detected Flemish Primitive and Gothic art during his stay in Brugge and abandoned Symbolism.
In addition to Mossa's career as an artist, he also wrote several operas and plays, and made a significant contribution to a revival of dialectal theater with his first piece Lou Nouvé o sia lou pantai de Barb' Anto (1922), written in the Niçard dialect. After the play's success, Gustav Adolf Mossa founded the Lou Teatre de Barba Martin group; it performed his comedies Phygaço (1924), La Tina (1926) and Lou Rei Carneval (1935).
After the death of his father, Gustav Adolf Mossa became a curator of the Nice Museum of Fine Arts in 1927. He kept this position until his death in 1971.
Gustav-Adolf Mossa was one of the most outstanding artists and playwrights of his time. Written almost a century ago, his plays are still popular and even today they are performed in Nice.
Mossa and his father are widely known as one of the organisers of the Nice Carnival, one of the world's major carnival events, alongside the Brazilian Carnival and Venetian Carnival. They are still celebrated for increasing the Carnival's prestige, and the event continues to be a major, large-scale tourism attraction in the city.
Circe
Mary The Magdala
Virgin
Gorgon
The Fates
Pierrot of The Minute
Salome
Self-Portrait
The Dead Woman
Christus
Salome
David and Batsheba
Helen's kiss
Dalilah Amuses Herself
Elle
Portrait de Schumann
L'Ephèbe à la Tarasque
Allégorie de la guerre. Crucifixion et Mater Dolorosa
La Blonde aux poissons
Le Coq et la Perle
Madame Butterfly
Couple au béret
Couple aux chapeaux
Le Baiser d'Hélène
Le jeune pâtre et le bouc
La Circé
La Jungfrau
Le vieux palais
Hérodias et Antipas
Hérodias
Saint Dalmas Valdeblore
Othello et Desdemone, Acte III
Gustav Adolf Mossa married Charlotte-Andrée Naudin in 1908. However, they divorced in 1918. Mossa married again in 1925 Lucrèce Roux. The marriage lasted until Lucrèce's death in 1955. In 1956 he got married for the last time to Marie-Marcelle Butteli.
