No reason for this page, just a fan impulse. Otto Mueller was the last and least German Expressionist to join Die Brücke in 1910 and hook up with Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-Rotluff. All heavier hitters than he. On this page these images of Mueller's work are color-distorted and with no names and dates my curatorship would get me punted cleanly out the front doors of the Neue Gallerie with dirty looks, just like last time, but I love them and I've collected these images so here is all I have, all in one place.

The above image is my favorite, my first. Among the other Expressionist paintings on the second story of the St. Louis Art Museum it was the one I gazed at the most. Much better in person. We have dry goods king Morton D. May of the May Company to thank for buying up a bunch of Max Beckmanns and one excellent, generous, soothing Express-cezannesque-ist painting of three naked gypsies and carting them all to Missouri, leaving me the fun of finding how who this guy was.

The other members of die Brucke specialized in urban angst, of course, all electric tension and inverted colors. Mueller took them out, aired them out, during relaxing field trips to Bohemia and the lakes in southern Germany. You can see a pastoral sensibility slip into their work. It's easy to imagine their waistcoats coming off, losing their heads of steam. And part of what made Kirchner and Schmitt-Rotluff and Nolde better painters than Mueller was that Mueller tends to paint one image over and over again - naked women lolling around in the grass. Did you notice?

For awhile I tried to convince myself that Mueller always returned to these figures-in-a-landscape, human figures without a social context, as an attempt to abstract and rationalize the figure in a way that's emotionally consistent with the abstraction of the landscape. Or something like that. It's hard to paint a human figure that's not freighted with social meaning and maybe this recurring theme isn't Edenic or escapist as much as it's an attempt to depict human shape integrated with other natural shapes. But maybe there's not Cezanne's level of ambition or discipline here. Finally I reached the conclusion that naked slender women lolling around in the tall grass of the German countryside in the summer of 1910 provide their own explanation.

This cow is ridiculous.

The image above, Liebespaar, painted in 1919 and reworked in 1925, is the one I had a photograph of, tucked inside the clear slip-cover of my loose-leaf notebook I carried for years, all through graduate school. My law professor made snide comments about it.

There aren't that many Muellers around, y'know. This is a pretty obscure guy. He died in 1930, so he didn't get to see 357 of his best canvasses confiscated out of German museums in 1937, most of them destroyed or sold immediately, and a few of them ridiculed as Entartete Kunst (this image was in the show), then burned in the courtyard of a Berlin fire station.

So it was surprising to turn the corner in a random visit to a Leipzig art museum called the Museum der Bildenden Künste in the year 2000, basically killing time, thinking about Napoleon, breezing through their permanent collection, to suddenly come face-to-face with this image again, live, the original Liebespaar. So familiar, like a friendly face out of the past, but so deeply colorful and unexpected. And it was so big.