Zwei Mädchen Am Wasser 1926

Curator: Immediately striking! There's an unsettling yet tranquil quality in the poses and the color choices. Editor: Today, we're observing "Two Girls by the Water," a 1926 pastel and colored pencil drawing by German Expressionist Otto Mueller. Mueller often depicted nudes within a landscape, evoking a return to nature. Curator: The figures do blend rather seamlessly into the scenery, almost disappearing with the staccato application of pastel, the lack of hard outlines. They are just another form within the natural landscape, really. There is a simplification of the form, where everything takes a very angular character, including the landscape and the nudes themselves. Editor: Absolutely, and this emphasis on nature needs to be seen in context of the social and artistic climate of the Weimar Republic, where movements such as Nudism and back-to-nature philosophies challenged bourgeois norms, as did Mueller himself by joining the artist collective Die Brücke. Curator: Yes, but let's return to what we can observe on the page. It’s not about a likeness of natural life. There is an apparent discord between the treatment of figures against the pale colors. Everything flattens the depicted subjects, especially within this compressed foreground that defies logical depth or linear perspective. Editor: The lack of a real foreground and background does throw one off, I'd agree, perhaps signaling that there were undercurrents in German society related to increased industrialization. It wasn't merely enough to portray life, one must confront the alienation of everyday society by portraying its emotional affect on a painter in the 1920s. It is an Expressionist tenet, after all. Curator: A fascinating juxtaposition. While I’m immersed in this consideration of its visual strategies, you contextualize this emotionally, sociologically, as more than just aesthetic form. Editor: These artworks invite us to not only perceive their structural form, but also how artists navigated the shifting tides of history to construct unique worlds, as Otto Mueller certainly accomplished.