Works by Otto Mueller

For much of his career Otto Mueller painted bathers and other nudes in woodland and other outdoor settings, and he preferred distemper on coarse canvas, which gives a matt surface.

He learned lithography in Görlitz and Breslau, then studied at the Dresden academy and in Munich, which he left after Franz von Stuck judged him untalented. His style grew more expressionist once he settled in Berlin in 1908, and in 1911, a year after joining Die Brücke, he worked and travelled with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein and Erich Heckel.

In Bathers of 1913, yellow bodies outlined in black wade in and sit beside blue water. Nicknamed 'Gypsy Mueller', perhaps with a Romani mother, he also painted Romani women and children, as in Standing Gypsy Children of about 1926–1928, where a girl in a red dress holds a small child beside a taller girl in pink. About half the works below are paintings, and most of the rest are prints; there are several self-portraits, among them one with a pentagram on his jacket and a pipe in his hand.

Sources: Wikipedia, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Von der Heydt Museum, Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History.