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Lot Essay
Dr Mario-Andreas von Lüttichau and Dr Tanja Pirsig will include this painting in their forthcoming Mueller catalogue raisonné under number 125.
Muller was already thirty six years old by the time he joined the Brücke movement in 1910, repectively six years and nine years older than Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel, the two artists with whom he found most in common. Even before this time the nude had been central to Mueller's aesthetic, so it was natural that he would find affinity with the subject matter of Kirchner and Heckel, who would spend their summers paintings together on the Baltic coast or in the countryside outside Berlin and Dresden. For Mueller, as for all the Brücke artists, painting nudes in a natural setting represented a return to a deliberately simpler and more primitive life, an escape from the world and its social conventions to a less corrupted state where man exists in harmony with the natural world. Living and working together in Nature outside of the confines of their studios and the city led for the first time to the emergence of a group style, based on their shared subject matter and free approach to their work with its insistence on the use of raw colour, simple forms, spontaneity and immediacy of observation. Mueller, however, largely avoided the harsh angularity of his colleagues' expressionistic figures; both the women and their surrounding landscape in Sitzende und Badende mit zwei Bäumen display softer, more rounded forms which accentuate the ideal of a harmonious return to nature.
The foremost characteristic of this shared style, developed at Moritzburg around 1910, is a vitality and pervasive sense of immediacy in the surface of these works that appears to reflect the adventurous and uninhibited nature of the group's plein air activities. In this way, both the style and the ideal of die Brücke's aesthetics seem to become one. Figures, radiant and colourful in the sunlight, are integrated with the 'natural' forms of the landscape in a way that suggests the supposedly symbiotic relationship between man and nature - an idea that underpinned many of the Brücke group's atavistic ideals and their dream of mankind forging a 'bridge' to a 'new age' of the spirit.
The directness and immediacy of the Moritzburg paintings reflected their belief that man's true response to nature and his environment could only accurately be conveyed through his instincts and intuition. Such a raw and direct response to their environment, like that of so-called 'primitive' man would, they believed, encourage each artist to perform and create without recourse to the cultural conditioning of modern life. The success of their experiences at Moritzburg only encouraged this belief and forged a sense of togetherness and of group identity that had hitherto been lacking in their art.
Unlike his Brücke colleagues who returned to the city and took the movement in new directions with their expressive depictions of the dynamism of city life, Mueller remained true to his ideal and to this early aspect of Brücke art. Barry Herbert writes that Mueller's art is a 'poetic vision of a fantasy dream world incorporating influences that ranged from ancient Egypt to Ludwig von Hofmann... from Lucas Cranach's ambiguously erotic female nudes (Mueller kept a reproduction of Cranach's Venus on his studio wall) to the work of Wilhelm Lehmbruck whose "limb" architecture was generally considered to be the best Contemporary Expressionist Sculpture... Mueller himself stated "the ultimate goal of my struggle is to express my feelings for landscapes and for man with the greatest possible simplicity"' (B. Herbert, German Expressionism, 'Die Brücke' and 'Der Blaue Reiter', London, 1983, p. 64).
Mueller greatly admired the flat forms and chalky surfaces of ancient Egyptian wall painting. The Brücke artists generally tried to avoid a glossy finish to their paintings by mixing their paints with oil diluted with turpentine, but Mueller went one stage further and mixed his paints with glue-emulsion, creating an even flatter and fresco-like surface. The primitive texture of his paint surface is further heightened by Mueller's use of burlap as a support, applying the paint directly to the rough surface and creating a unique and distinctive style to his paintings.
Muller was already thirty six years old by the time he joined the Brücke movement in 1910, repectively six years and nine years older than Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel, the two artists with whom he found most in common. Even before this time the nude had been central to Mueller's aesthetic, so it was natural that he would find affinity with the subject matter of Kirchner and Heckel, who would spend their summers paintings together on the Baltic coast or in the countryside outside Berlin and Dresden. For Mueller, as for all the Brücke artists, painting nudes in a natural setting represented a return to a deliberately simpler and more primitive life, an escape from the world and its social conventions to a less corrupted state where man exists in harmony with the natural world. Living and working together in Nature outside of the confines of their studios and the city led for the first time to the emergence of a group style, based on their shared subject matter and free approach to their work with its insistence on the use of raw colour, simple forms, spontaneity and immediacy of observation. Mueller, however, largely avoided the harsh angularity of his colleagues' expressionistic figures; both the women and their surrounding landscape in Sitzende und Badende mit zwei Bäumen display softer, more rounded forms which accentuate the ideal of a harmonious return to nature.
The foremost characteristic of this shared style, developed at Moritzburg around 1910, is a vitality and pervasive sense of immediacy in the surface of these works that appears to reflect the adventurous and uninhibited nature of the group's plein air activities. In this way, both the style and the ideal of die Brücke's aesthetics seem to become one. Figures, radiant and colourful in the sunlight, are integrated with the 'natural' forms of the landscape in a way that suggests the supposedly symbiotic relationship between man and nature - an idea that underpinned many of the Brücke group's atavistic ideals and their dream of mankind forging a 'bridge' to a 'new age' of the spirit.
The directness and immediacy of the Moritzburg paintings reflected their belief that man's true response to nature and his environment could only accurately be conveyed through his instincts and intuition. Such a raw and direct response to their environment, like that of so-called 'primitive' man would, they believed, encourage each artist to perform and create without recourse to the cultural conditioning of modern life. The success of their experiences at Moritzburg only encouraged this belief and forged a sense of togetherness and of group identity that had hitherto been lacking in their art.
Unlike his Brücke colleagues who returned to the city and took the movement in new directions with their expressive depictions of the dynamism of city life, Mueller remained true to his ideal and to this early aspect of Brücke art. Barry Herbert writes that Mueller's art is a 'poetic vision of a fantasy dream world incorporating influences that ranged from ancient Egypt to Ludwig von Hofmann... from Lucas Cranach's ambiguously erotic female nudes (Mueller kept a reproduction of Cranach's Venus on his studio wall) to the work of Wilhelm Lehmbruck whose "limb" architecture was generally considered to be the best Contemporary Expressionist Sculpture... Mueller himself stated "the ultimate goal of my struggle is to express my feelings for landscapes and for man with the greatest possible simplicity"' (B. Herbert, German Expressionism, 'Die Brücke' and 'Der Blaue Reiter', London, 1983, p. 64).
Mueller greatly admired the flat forms and chalky surfaces of ancient Egyptian wall painting. The Brücke artists generally tried to avoid a glossy finish to their paintings by mixing their paints with oil diluted with turpentine, but Mueller went one stage further and mixed his paints with glue-emulsion, creating an even flatter and fresco-like surface. The primitive texture of his paint surface is further heightened by Mueller's use of burlap as a support, applying the paint directly to the rough surface and creating a unique and distinctive style to his paintings.