A new beginning in the art metropolis of Berlin: Otto Mueller and the edgy “Brücke” style
Otto Mueller was the most romantic of the expressionists while at the same time astonishingly modern for the raw style his paintings boasted. What was so unique about them was the way he applied matt glue paints on coarse canvas, a technique combined with his elongated figures inspired by Cranach, Lehmbruck, and Egyptian art, that yielded an incredibly avant-garde yet utterly timeless aesthetic. Mueller, who left a small town in the Giant Mountains for Berlin in 1907 at the age of 33, where he rented a studio in the attic of a house on Mommsenstraße 60, is considered one of the leading figures of the “Brücke” group today. Founded in Dresden by four architecture students, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl, in 1905, Mueller only joined the collective somewhat later. In 1910, after the Berlin Secession had rejected his progressive works, the young artist took part in the exhibition of the splinter group 'Neue Berliner Secession' (New Berlin Secession) at the Kunstsalon Maximilian Macht, where he met the artists of the “Brücke” for the first time. This encounter marked the beginning of a close friendship with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel. “My first encounter with Otto Mueller's paintings was in Berlin, in the exhibition of artists rejected by the Berlin Secession [...]. I met him in person that same day in his studio on Mommsenstraße. It was a significant and fruitful moment for all of us, and there was no question that he would become part of the Brücke.” Max Pechstein recalls these art-historically significant but economically dire beginnings in Berlin: “A new member joined us, Otto Mueller. He sat with his brave wife, Maschka, in an attic studio and was just as poor as we were. (Max Pechstein, Erinnerungen, Wiesbaden 1960, p. 41)

In the following years, they showcased their work together in the first major exhibitions dedicated to the still young Expressionist movement. They traveled to the Moritzburg Lake District and the island of Fehmarn, where they drew and painted, pushing the now internationally celebrated, edgy “Brücke” style to new extremes during these pivotal years. Around the beginning of World War I, Kirchner painted his famous street scenes at Potsdamer Platz, works characterized by his distinctive, highly expressive figures with pointed features. These are works that are celebrated as his masterpieces today. At around the same time, Mueller developed his signature repertoire of sharp-edged figures partly inspired by Cranach, Lehmbruck, and Egyptian art. He created his best Arcadian landscapes during and after World War I, like our "Badende am Waldsee“ (Bathers at the Forest Lake). Contrary to Kirchner, however, Mueller had no interest in the hustle and bustle of the big city. From then on, Mueller seemed to take refuge in detached expressionist parallel worlds. Especially after his service in the First World War, to which he was drafted in 1916, he produced captivating works of outstanding quality and density, which made for a small but highly distinguished oeuvre towards the end of the decade.

The big city / war / hardships: Mueller's “Badende am Waldsee” as a paradisiacal place of longing
While the fear of war drove Ernst Ludwig Kirchner into lifelong suffering from morphine addiction, from which he would never recover, not even in the seclusion of the Swiss Alps, other important Expressionists like Franz Marc and August Macke lost their lives far too early in World War I, and Otto Dix, more intensely than almost any other German artist, artistically processed the horrors of war and the depths of humanity with a directness disturbing to this day, Mueller, whom his contemporaries described as introverted and melancholic, created a perfect parallel world in his paradisiacal landscape visions. A world in which people, liberated from all civilizational constraints, live in absolute harmony with each other and the unspoiled nature. The dream of Arcadia, an untouched pastoral idyll in which humans and nature live in perfect symbiosis, goes back to ancient mythology and has been taken up many times in painting and poetry since the Renaissance and Baroque times. Goethe even began his famous “Italian Journey” with the words “I too am in Arcadia!” With the painting “Badende am Waldsee,” Mueller perfectly succeeded in coping with the horrors and hardships of World War I, escaping reality and dreaming of a distant place of longing in ancient traditions. Shortly before he was drafted into the army, a deployment that eventually took Mueller to the front lines in France and Russia, he moved into a simple residential studio in Berlin-Friedenau together with Maschka, leaving his first Berlin studio on Mommsenstraße 60 to Erich Heckel. Paul Westheim, art critic and neighbor of Otto Mueller, described the new studio on Wilhelmshöherstraße 18, which the artist had decorated with wall hangings, as follows: "The walls of the small, modest attic apartment in Friedenau had been transformed into a kind of paradise where his 'bathers' frolicked." Our outstanding and intriguingly otherworldly composition was created during this intensely emotional period following Mueller's return from the war. At the end of 1917, the artist was granted leave to go home, and in 1918, he was transferred to Berlin as a technical draftsman, allowing him to devote more time to painting.

From Berlin to Wrocław: “Brücke” era and artistic heyday united in the double-sided painting "Badende am Waldsee"
As early as 1919, the renowned Galerie Paul Cassirer mounted an extensive solo exhibition featuring 37 of his works. Mueller had reached the peak of his career and was appointed to teach at the Academy of Arts and Applied Arts in Breslau (today Wrocław), one of the most progressive and important art academies in Europe at the time, that same year. Due to material shortages of the time, Mueller used the back of early work, a painting of three crouching nudes that had been part of the “Brücke” exhibition at Galerie Fritz Gurlitt in 1912, for our “Badende am Waldsee,” thus making it the reverse side of the painting. These two paintings provide a fascinating insight into Mueller's transition from pure nude representation to a visual fusion of man and nature, compressing dreamy nude figures into boldly reduced symbols of humanity in perfect harmony with the landscape. In addition to the warm natural tones and timeless modern aesthetic that Muller achieved through matte glue paints on coarse burlap, the highly abstract, pyramid-shaped, white mountain set against the sky is particularly fascinating. Its radiance makes for a striking contrast to the dynamic lines and natural colors of vegetation and figures. There are very few paintings of comparable quality and density from this period. One of them is the "Landscape with Yellow Nudes" (circa 1919, Museum of Modern Art, New York), mentioned in the 2020 catalogue raisonné, in which three nudes with elongated bodies rise above the blue water like the yellow tree trunks on either side. In 1931, a year after Mueller's death, the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed his paintings alongside works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, and Max Beckmann in the exhibition "German Painting and Sculpture." Given its outstanding quality and art-historical significance, it is hardly surprising that our painting "Badende am Waldsee" was selected for the major Otto Mueller retrospective at the Kunsthalle Munich and the Museum Folkwang in Essen in 2003, as well as for the major Otto Mueller exhibition "Einfach. Eigen. Einzig" (Simple. Unique. One of a Kind). [JS]