Otto Mueller

Otto Mueller ( born October 16, 1874 in Liebau, Silesia, † September 24, 1930 in Obernigk in Breslau) was a German painter and lithographer of Expressionism. He is now considered one of the most important expressionist.

Life and work

Otto Mueller was born the son of a lieutenant and later tax consultant in the Prussian Silesia. He spent his youth in Görlitz. The high school, he was forced to leave without a degree.

From 1890 to 1894 he studied at his father's request an in lithography, it joined up in 1896 to study at the Art Academy of Dresden, for which he had been given special permission, where it, however, soon came to differences with his teacher Georg Hermann Freye because he would not tolerate its corrections.

From 1898 he continued his studies at the Academy in Munich, but could not continue in 1899, as it the head of the Academy, Franz von Stuck denied the permit.

In 1905 he married Mary ( " Masha " ) Mayerhofer (or Meyerhofer ), the model often stood him and remained his confidant even after separation and two further concluded by Mueller marriages.

In 1908 he moved to Berlin. His model were sculptures of Wilhelm Lehmbruck, with whom he had a friendship; since 1908 he painted the slim girlish figures, which are characteristic of him as well as the distemper, which he used with preference for his works. He tried in vain to join the Berlin Secession, and in 1910 he founded with other artists rejected the group New Secession, in May, an exhibition presented under the motto " Rejected the Berlin Secession in 1910 ." Moreover, he came into contact with members of the bridge and worked from 1910 until its dissolution in May 1913 in this artistic community with. The in his style the other bridge - artists very similar Mueller preferred a muted color scheme of lyrical decorative effect.

In 1915 he was called up for military service in World War II and participated as a soldier in the infantry battles in France and Russia. In 1917 he retired to a pneumonia that would have cost him almost life.

Since 1919 he was a professor at the State Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in Wroclaw. He refused every bourgeois adaptation and frequented the circle of the " Breslauer Künstlerbohème ". His wife Masha had divorced him in 1921 and returned to Berlin.

His gypsy sheet with nine colored lithographs from 1927 was the culmination of his work. He had Spalato and Sarajevo visited his sister Emmy told where he was taken by gypsies and lived like one of their own among them. The images that emerged in Mueller's last three years of life, 1927-1930, are evidence of Mueller's artistically most pronounced phase.

In 1937 the Nazis seized 357 of his works from German museums, since his paintings were considered as degenerate art. 13 of them were "Degenerate Art" defamed in the exhibition.

The central topic in Mueller's works is the unity of man and nature, which he tried to express in many nudes in landscapes. In these images, Mueller is always scenes of gypsy life dar.

Some of his works have been exhibited posthumously at the documenta 1 in 1955 in Kassel.

His students included the members of the Bauhaus and Walter Emil Bartoschek Kalot.

Landscape with Bathers, 1915

Two girls in the countryside, around 1925

Two gypsy women, 1926/1927

Two girls in the reeds, about 1926

Works

(Selection)

Many works of artists of the Breslau Academy are held by the Silesian Museum in Görlitz. They were acquired from an important private collection.

Quotes

• " Do not trust the people ... not crude and heartless they all are. " (Quoted by Buchheim 1963, p 11)