3 - Otto Mueller

Otto Mueller Paar Circa 1913 Colour chalk drawing on hammered, light brown paper. 42.5 x 34.5 cm (53.1 x 35.4 cm). Framed under glass. Signed 'Otto Mueller' in black India ink lower right. - Very good condition with fresh colours. Slightly darkened in mat opening, slight crease traces at the side upper right. Provenance Private collection, Bavaria Outlined with masterfully drawn black contours, a naked young couple stand in the midst of a suggested landscape. This work in a vertical format features charming colours and limits itself to the two figures who fill the entire picture plane: each is characterised through either a rounded or more angular lineation, based on the bodily forms of a woman or man. A tree trunk in the middle and two to each side frame the tall figures and provide the composition with stability. Mueller’s use of colour remains largely naturalistic: the beige and yellow bodies harmoniously integrate themselves into the light-green landscape beneath a blue sky. The couple seem to be focused on one another. While the young man looks at his partner, the woman has wrapped her hand around his arm as a sign of her affection. Although the image is reversed, the drawing is surprisingly similar to the 1913 painting “Adam und Eva” (Städel Museum), and the figures here could also represent the first human couple. In 1910 Mueller became the final member to join the “Brücke” artists association founded five years earlier in Dresden. During the period when they worked together, Mueller and his fellow artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Max Pechstein searched for the paradisiacal primal state of a humanity in harmony with nature in their works. While Kirchner switched to urban themes when he moved to Berlin, Mueller remained focused on the composition of nude figures in nature throughout his oeuvre. The “Paar”, with its muted colours, is thus also one of his many variations on this theme. A phenomenon that is rather rarely to be seen in Mueller’s work is the individualised depiction of the woman, who captures our gaze through her heart-shaped face, narrow eyes and black hair.