Otto Mueller
Painted thin nudes in reed beds in distemper on rough hessian, and nothing else much.
Otto Mueller was born in Silesia in 1874, trained in Dresden, and joined Die Brucke in 1910, staying with it to the end. His subject barely varied: slender, angular nudes standing in water, among reeds or under trees, and in the 1920s the Roma and Sinti communities he travelled among in the Balkans. The technique is unusual and immediately recognisable — matt distemper on coarse hessian or burlap, absorbent, chalky and completely without gloss. He taught at Breslau from 1919 and died of lung disease in 1930; the Nazis subsequently confiscated more than three hundred of his works.
The distemper technique is the central condition problem in this market. The paint is water-soluble, powdery and extremely vulnerable: it cannot be cleaned, it flakes, and it is damaged permanently by moisture, so surface condition is decisive and heavily restored examples are common. Provenance between 1933 and 1945 is unavoidable given the scale of confiscation. The lithographs, particularly the Zigeunermappe portfolio of 1927, are the most significant graphic work. The market is principally German, and forgeries of the reed-bed nudes exist in quantity.
If you own a work by Otto Mueller
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