Otto Mueller's landscapes convey a clear message: A quest for solitude and peace, a quest on which he matured. However, Otto Mueller does not depict pure nature, but the love of it. And so, the artist conceived an Arcadian vision in which his ideal of the unity of man and nature coexisted. With his longing for the pristine, Otto Mueller created nature the way he imagined it, nature untouched by civilization. At the banks of a body of water, we find oddly shaped, knobby trees with gentle curves, seemingly lined up in a row and yet untouched by human hands: an unspoiled, paradisiacal place in peaceful harmony, painted in strong red-brown tones, mixed with a soft ochre and a delicate green, enriched with accents of maritime blue and a hint of yellow sunlight. This piece of woodland, possibly a peaceful place on the brink of a secluded pond nestled among grasses and bushes, emanates a contemplative stillness. The artist places the curved trunks like the bodies of female nudes, using the composition to create an almost elegiac and mysterious atmosphere.
The artist, deeply connected to untouched nature throughout his entire life, immerses himself in a moment that is as close as possible to his inner closeness to nature. “The melody is as simple as its lyrics, without dramatic effort or artifice. It is like exhaling, like swaying in the wind. The paint settles loosely, like drops, a dull color that does not gleam anywhere”, said the art critic Willi Wolfradt about Otto Mueller's painting in 1922 (quoted from Das Kunstblatt, issue 6, Berlin 1922, pp. 142-152). There is a slight note of melancholy about these tree figures. Restrained, not a loud and flashy surface. “Being in its condition is overheard and, if it is a good day, a surface is defined which, in its calmness, like a water surface that is barely rippled by wind and current, spans all the motions of the depth”, is how the publicist, collector, and publisher Paul Westheim described it. (in: Otto Mueller, in: Die Gäste, issue 1, Katowice 1921, p. 10).
These are Arcadian landscapes without any real geographical reference, in which young girls, and occasionally also men, indulge in a carefree and naked lust for life as if on a stage, in an earthly paradise on untouched seashores fringed by dunes on the Baltic or North Sea, between trees and ponds, surrounded by the sand of the Mark Brandenburg not far from Berlin. This is how Otto Mueller evoked seclusion and tranquillity; the artist, meanwhile professor at the Wroclaw Academy, painted deeply romantic variations on an inexhaustible theme, which he described in the foreword to his first solo exhibition at Paul Cassirer in Berlin in 1919 as the aim of his endeavor "to express the feeling of landscape and man with the greatest possible simplicity".
Compared to his contemporaries, such as the artists of the 'Brücke', Otto Mueller's persistent recourse to similar subjects makes the painter stand out as an aesthetic, unworldly eccentric. His lack of response to the zeitgeist - a significant exception in his oeuvre is the theme of gypsy life - the obvious negation of the mundane, of private or social life, in short, the lack of “edges”, has always been the decisive angle for the evaluation of his style. The art historian and museum curator Werner Schmalenbach aptly characterized Otto Mueller's painting in 1956 as a “youthful dreaminess”, the “full passion of youth”, “within German Expressionism, his paintings earn their status less through their ‘boldness’ than through their quiet but haunting quality .. often of fascinating beauty; they gain their value as ‘peinture’ rather than as an exaltation of expression.” (Otto Mueller. Gemälde, Handzeichnungen und Aquarelle, Druckgraphik, ex. cat., Kestner-Gesellschaft e. V., Hanover 1956, p. 3). [MvL]