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Lot Essay
This painting is included in the Otto Mueller catalogue raisonné prepared by Dr Mario-Andreas von Lüttichau and Dr Tanja Pirsig under no. 392.
We would like to thank the Forschungsprojekt 'Entartete Kunst' at the department of art history at the Freie Universität Berlin for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.
Drei Hütten, eine mit rotem Dach, belongs to the series of Zigeunerdarstellungen, or 'gypsy pictures', of the late 1920s, which along with the nudes of his Brücke period are Otto Mueller's greatest subject. In addition to the Zigeunermappe, a portfolio devoted to the artist's idealised vision of European gypsy culture completed in 1927, the artist executed around 80 paintings and works on paper on the subject, including depictions of gypsy houses and townscapes, figures and pastoral scenes. Gypsies exercised a life-long fascination for Mueller, and whilst he would neither confirm nor deny (the most unlikely) rumours that he might be of gypsy ancestry, no doubt the culture of freedom and travel unfettered by possessions appealed to the artist who rarely had a home address and whose possessions at the time of his death fitted into two boxes (T. Pirsig, Otto Mueller, Mythos und Wahrheit, p. 125).
Painted in 1928, Drei Hütten, eine mit rotem Dach, with its characteristically Bulgarian red roofs, most likely depicts the village Lom in Bulgaria where Mueller travelled that summer. He had first visited the gypsy villages of South-Eastern Europe in 1924, and would return every summer until his death in 1930, revisiting the subject of these simple one room and one window houses, painting both on-site and in his studio from the numerous sketches and photographs he took on his journeys.
The majority of the works were only executed as works on paper, whilst a small number, including the present work, were completed in distemper, by which his mixing of glue into the pigment created an ancient, fresco-like effect of solidity and timelessness. Closely related to the chalk and watercolour Häuser mit Ofen und Schwein, circa 1928 (Brücke Museum, Berlin, WVZ401), the present work excludes the oven and pig in the drawing in favour of a reduction of form and a more spare and meditative composition, and is thus typical of Mueller's translation of these more academic and referential works on paper and sketches into oil.
We would like to thank the Forschungsprojekt 'Entartete Kunst' at the department of art history at the Freie Universität Berlin for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.
Drei Hütten, eine mit rotem Dach, belongs to the series of Zigeunerdarstellungen, or 'gypsy pictures', of the late 1920s, which along with the nudes of his Brücke period are Otto Mueller's greatest subject. In addition to the Zigeunermappe, a portfolio devoted to the artist's idealised vision of European gypsy culture completed in 1927, the artist executed around 80 paintings and works on paper on the subject, including depictions of gypsy houses and townscapes, figures and pastoral scenes. Gypsies exercised a life-long fascination for Mueller, and whilst he would neither confirm nor deny (the most unlikely) rumours that he might be of gypsy ancestry, no doubt the culture of freedom and travel unfettered by possessions appealed to the artist who rarely had a home address and whose possessions at the time of his death fitted into two boxes (T. Pirsig, Otto Mueller, Mythos und Wahrheit, p. 125).
Painted in 1928, Drei Hütten, eine mit rotem Dach, with its characteristically Bulgarian red roofs, most likely depicts the village Lom in Bulgaria where Mueller travelled that summer. He had first visited the gypsy villages of South-Eastern Europe in 1924, and would return every summer until his death in 1930, revisiting the subject of these simple one room and one window houses, painting both on-site and in his studio from the numerous sketches and photographs he took on his journeys.
The majority of the works were only executed as works on paper, whilst a small number, including the present work, were completed in distemper, by which his mixing of glue into the pigment created an ancient, fresco-like effect of solidity and timelessness. Closely related to the chalk and watercolour Häuser mit Ofen und Schwein, circa 1928 (Brücke Museum, Berlin, WVZ401), the present work excludes the oven and pig in the drawing in favour of a reduction of form and a more spare and meditative composition, and is thus typical of Mueller's translation of these more academic and referential works on paper and sketches into oil.