Otto Mueller: "Simple. Individual. Unique."

Until a few years ago, Mueller, a temporary member of the "Brücke", has been put carelessly into the pigeonhole of this artist group, which was founded in Dresden in 1905, because the uniqueness of his oeuvre has been misjudged - but thereby an appropriate reception has been thwarted indiscriminately. Founded in 2010, the "Otto-Mueller-Society" (located in Weimar), which realizes its first exhibition project with this retrospective, has straightened up such misjudgements and made public new scientific findings in its already published "yearbook" on the occasion of the artist's 80th birthday. Accordingly, Otto Mueller should be regarded less as a passive recipient of external influences but rather as an active generator and sender of his own impulses to other artists. In order to get an appropriate idea of Otto Mueller and his important contribution to art during the first half of the 20th century, one has to consider his hitherto unrecognised influence on the stylistic development of Wilhelm Lehmbruck's sculptural work, his independence from the so-called "Brücke"-style as well as the development of his personal style by means of formative work stays at the Moritzburg Lakes near Dresden. According to Mueller's manifest, which has been published in the catalogue accompanying his first solo exhibition at Paul Cassirer's gallery in Berlin in 1919, a simple artistic expression was his main objective - and this can be traced back to the art of the ancient Egyptians, "also regarding aspects of pure craftsmanship".

This "model" also corresponds to a "deceleration" in the creation of his works and in the representation of his impressions of man and nature - a stance which quite fundamentally distinguishes him from colleagues of the "Brücke", especially Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. His individual conception of art put him in a solitary position within the art of the early 20th century, closer to modernism than acknowledged by earlier interpreters who classified him as a "romanticist" or a "lyricist". He also substantially stood out against contemporary artists with respect to his image of women, which has been developed from numerous and repeatedly varying scenes. Mueller's self-confident girls and young women are one with nature and with themselves. But the artist has also designed dramatic themes: Only recently the painting "The Murder" has been rediscovered on the back of the protecting cardboard of the painting "Couple at the table". What can be considered a "trademark" of Otto Mueller is the "monumentality" of the representation of the nude body, both female and male, in an anonymous yet somehow personal nature with which his nudes seem to be in timeless harmony.

The singularity of Mueller's person and his works inspired portraits by colleagues of the "Brücke" (a selection of which is on display in the exhibition), whereas only a lithograph portrait of the "Painter Avenarius" by himself is known - because this loner was so self-engrossed that he only portrayed intimately familiar persons like his women, and himself. Otto Muller has left us with a timeless but still highly topical body of work (theme: harmony between man and nature) - in a distinct manner of representation and painting of the highest artistic quality, which should be discovered with an unprejudiced gaze, wholly and anew.