82.191 Variété (Zirkuspaar)

1920-21

Hand-colored lithograph, shhet: 16 1/2 x 12 1/4" (41.1 x 30.9 cm); composition: 10 1/4 x 7 1/4 (26.2 x 18.6 cm)

Signed, lr: OM

Print from Die Schaffenden portfolio, III. Jg. 1. Mappe; Die Schaffenden stamp in lower left corner

Provenance: Lempertz Auction, Cologne, Nr. 455, June 1959

As were so many other Expressionist artists, Mueller was drawn to images of the circus and the music hall as expressions of life outside the boundaries of bourgeois societal restrictions. That Mueller felt a strong attachment to such images is evident in his frequent depiction of gypsies, as well as figures from the circus world. This work is also representative of his style, in that the figures are young and delicate, conveying an air of melancholy stillness. Mueller’s versions of circus life were never raucous or concerned with the physical aggression that surrounded so many of these activities; the mood here, as in all of Mueller’s works, is one of silence and inner contemplation.

The piece also reveals Mueller’s mastery of the lithograph technique, a medium he preferred above the woodcut so beloved by the other artists of die Brucke. Lithography allowed him to express more effectively the softness of his angular graphic lines. As Paul Westheim wrote about him in Die Schaffenden portfolio in which this work appeared: “He had in him an innate trust in the structural charm of the Solnhof stone, a delicacy in his comprehension of the possibilities it offered him… This subtlety of hand represents a subtlety of spirit. Mueller is in his own way a romantic, a quiet dreamer, an elegiac poet…He has the grace of the silent ones.”