Otto Mueller

From 1890 to 1894, at the request of his father, Mueller first studied lithography before he began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. In 1898 he continued his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, which, however, he could not complete due to the withdrawal of the permit. After moving to Berlin in 1908, he met the sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck and was inspired by his sculptures to create his slender girl shapes and the use of glue colors. After the Berlin Secessionists denied him admission to their group of artists, he founded the group "Neue Secession" together with other rejected artists in 1910. Mueller is simultaneously active in the "Brücke-Gruppe". While Mueller has a similar style as the Brücke artists, he prefers a more subdued color palette in his paintings and drawings. In 1915 he had to go to war and caught a life-threatening pneumonia in 1917. From 1919 he became a professor at the State Academy of Arts and Crafts in Breslau. In rejection of bourgeois adaptation, Mueller became an active in the artist group "Breslauer Künstlerbohème". After traveling to Spalato and Sarajevo and visiting gypsy groups, Mueller achieved the climax of his artistic career with the creation of nine-color lithographs, the so-called “Gypsy-Portfolio”. After his death in 1930, his artworks were posthumously shown at the documenta I (1955) in Kassel.