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Lot Essay
The nude in the landscape is the central subject of Mueller's œuvre and derives from the summer of 1911 when he first visited the lakes at Moritzburg in the company of fellow Brücke artists Erich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. There, living and painting together in nature, these artists forged a group style founded on raw and spontaneously created images made in direct response to nature. While other Brücke artists applied the lessons they had learned in Moritzburg to develop their work into ever new and freer forms of expression of heightened colour and pure form, Mueller sought to refine what he had learned into a perfected vision of pure idealized form: 'My main aim,' he said, 'is to express my response to landscape and people with the utmost simplicity. My model was, and still is, the art of the ancient Egyptians, including its purely technical aspect' (Otto Mueller, quoted in Entartete Kunst Bildersturm vor 25 Jahren, exh. cat., Munich, 1926, n.p.).
Drawing on the reduced forms and simple, almost planar elements of so-called primitive sculpture and heightening the forms of nature into a jagged angular compositional rhythm that establishes echoes between the forms of the figure and those of the landscape, Mueller pursued a unique and integrated vision of Man and Nature in a state of formal harmony. His figures became increasingly refined and flattened so that they began to echo the flatness and linearity of ancient Egyptian figure painting—their near-two-dimensional pose establishing a compositional elegance often reiterated by the forms of the landscape into which they were set.
The present lot relates closely in subject and scale to another work titled Drei Akte, painted in 1914, under number G1914/10 (879) in Dr. Tanja Pirsig-Marshall and Dr. Mario-Andreas von Lüttichau's paintings catalogue raisonné (Cologne, 2020). That work is recorded as first owned by the collector Paul Westheim and exhibited in Wiesbaden as early as 1918.
Drawing on the reduced forms and simple, almost planar elements of so-called primitive sculpture and heightening the forms of nature into a jagged angular compositional rhythm that establishes echoes between the forms of the figure and those of the landscape, Mueller pursued a unique and integrated vision of Man and Nature in a state of formal harmony. His figures became increasingly refined and flattened so that they began to echo the flatness and linearity of ancient Egyptian figure painting—their near-two-dimensional pose establishing a compositional elegance often reiterated by the forms of the landscape into which they were set.
The present lot relates closely in subject and scale to another work titled Drei Akte, painted in 1914, under number G1914/10 (879) in Dr. Tanja Pirsig-Marshall and Dr. Mario-Andreas von Lüttichau's paintings catalogue raisonné (Cologne, 2020). That work is recorded as first owned by the collector Paul Westheim and exhibited in Wiesbaden as early as 1918.