otto mueller // biography (1874–1930) / gallery / prints

Otto Mueller
Maschka mit Maske
Manipulated Image

// B I O G . //
O T T O M U E L L E R

Known as: German painter, printmaker

Date of birth: October 16, 1874 (Libau, German Silesia)

Date of death: September 24, 1930 (Breslau)

Otto Mueller was a member of the Brucke who experimented with techniques involving the use of distemper and beewax rather than oil paint. The flatness inherent in this medium, and his passion for Egyptian art, led to striking simplifications of form which influenced the other members of the group.

He studied lithography in Breslau (now Wroclaw) from 1890 to 1895 and was trained at the Dresden Academy before going to Berlin in 1908, where he met Heckel and subsequently joined the Brucke. He was much influenced by the sculptor Lehmbruck as well as by Gaughin, and his decorative paintings of gipsies and skinny nudes are less brutal than the works of most of his contemporaries.

There are examples in Berlin, Cologne and Harvard Univ.

Trivia:

He left Munich's academy after Franz von Stuck classified him as untalented.
During the First World War (1914-18) he fought as a German soldier in France and Russia.
In 1937 the Nazis seized 357 of his works from German museums, since the pictures were considered as degenerate art.