357 of his works are confiscated from German museums as part of the ‘Degenerate Art’ campaign
1930
Otto Mueller dies in Breslau
Self-portrait by Otto Mueller,
Otto Mueller (born 16 October 1874 in Liebau, Silesia; died 24 September 1930 in Obernigk near Breslau) was a German Expressionist painter and lithographer. Today, he is considered one of the most important Expressionists.
Life and work
Otto Mueller was born in Liebau in 1874, the son of a lieutenant and later tax advisor in what was then Prussian Silesia. He spent his youth in Görlitz. He had to leave secondary school without a degree.
From 1890 to 1894, at his father’s request, he completed an apprenticeship as a lithographer, followed by studies at the Dresden Art Academy until 1896, for which he had received special permission. However, he soon came into conflict with his professor, Georg Hermann Freye, because he refused to accept his corrections.
From 1898, he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, but was unable to continue in 1899 because the director of the academy, Franz von Stuck, refused to grant him permission.
In 1905, he married Maschka Meyerhofer, who often modelled for him and remained his confidante even after their separation and two further marriages by Mueller.
His role model was the sculptures of Wilhelm Lehmbruck; from 1908 onwards, he painted the slender female figures that are characteristic of his work, as well as the distemper paints he preferred to use for his works.
In 1908, he moved to Berlin and was a member of the artists’ group Die Brücke from 1910 to 1913. Mueller, whose style was very similar to that of the other Brücke artists, preferred muted colours with a lyrical, decorative effect.
He volunteered for service in the First World War and contracted pneumonia in 1917, which nearly cost him his life.
From 1919, he was a professor at the State Academy of Art and Design in Breslau.
He rejected any bourgeois conformity and moved in the circle of the ‘Wrocław bohemian artists’. His wife Maschka divorced him in 1921 and returned to Berlin.
His Gypsy portfolio with nine colour lithographs from 1927 was the high point of his career. He had visited Spalato and Sarajevo, as his sister Emmy reported, where he was taken in by gypsies and lived among them as one of their own. The pictures created during the last three years of Mueller’s life, from 1927 to 1930, also testify to Mueller’s most artistically distinctive phase.
Mueller died on 24 September 1930 in Breslau.
In 1937, the National Socialists confiscated 357 of his works from German museums because his paintings were considered degenerate art. Some of them were exhibited in the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition.
The central theme in Mueller’s works is the unity of man and nature, which he attempts to express in numerous nude depictions in landscapes. In these paintings, Mueller repeatedly depicts scenes from gypsy life.
Some of his works were shown posthumously at documenta 1 in Kassel in 1955.
In his landscape paintings, Otto Mueller depicted only very simple scenes: tree trunks by a pool of water, a dune slope, garden fences by a stream and trees with a path. Otto Mueller, The Forest Path, c. 1928.
He never perceived the landscape as heroic scenery, never as ‘dramatic’, not even as ‘picturesque’. He depicted the landscape soberly, yet with strong emotion.
His landscape paintings are like an invocation of the absolute tranquillity of nature. You hear no rustling of treetops, no rumbling of thunder, no lapping of waves. Nothing stirs – a deep, breathless silence reigns.
Otto Mueller denied himself the joy of experimentation in front of the stretched canvas, but he gladly indulged in it with a fat chalk in his hand, bent over the limestone slate. He worked boldly and extravagantly on the stone, inspired by the grainy surface that held the chalk well, and even allowed himself to make quick handwritten formulations. Indeed, he enjoyed the thrill of risk and gladly accepted the unforeseen result when it seemed suitable to him. No wonder that the graphic sheets all appear less ‘final’, mostly fresher and more spiritual. Otto Mueller succeeded in creating graphic treasures of high quality with oil pastels, which the eye follows with pleasure. The weight of the hand was transferred to the plate precisely as a thinning or thickening of the line. One can perceive it as an adventure.
Otto Mueller’s work is an example of great self-discipline. He must have despised the quick-witted style of prolific painters who still know how to amaze their community by selecting the reasonably successful works from their hectic production.
Otto Mueller’s art is not the result of empirical debates and theoretical musings. He was neither an experimenter nor a force of nature who – even at the risk of failure – dared to go all in.
By foregoing interesting effects, however, he has given his paintings a solidity that transcends time and fashion, sensual qualities of craftsmanship, subtle charms of surface, good ‘peinture’.
The dross of temporality, which today makes so many paintings from the expressionist heritage appear merely as historical documents, does not cling to Otto Mueller’s work.
It remains astonishing how he managed to escape the agitational fervour and fierce artistic turmoil of the post-war period, how he refrained from interfering in the Babylonian confusion of languages and withdrew to the four walls of his studio in Breslau, trusting only in his own sure sense of quality and quietly building on his work without concerning himself with art theories. All the names contained in the catalogues of inflated expressionism have been forgotten or are hardly known anymore. Otto Mueller’s paintings, on the other hand, have endured because they are perfect artistic realisations, perfect in both conception and craftsmanship. They have retained their magical appeal, the aura of genuine works of art, an inexplicable magic over the years. Perhaps the secret of his art is the happy combination of dream, life and artistic esprit. Until the end, the beauty and exquisiteness of his painting did not diminish. How few painters are there of whom one could say that! His painting reveals his character better than any of his contemporaries.