Landschaft Mit Badenden 1915

Otto Mueller made this painting, Landschaft Mit Badenden, with oil on canvas. He was a painter who lived a short life, but with a long reach. Just look at the way Mueller laid down the paint, almost like fresco. See how he’s thinned it out? I feel like I can see the weave of the canvas coming through, like he’s scraping it back. I feel the air and heat. I’m thinking of Piero della Francesca. But then I’m thinking, too, about the German Expressionists. You know, there's something about the way those figures are arranged that reminds me of other paintings of bathers. Like the way the women seem to emerge from the cool, watery depths. Artists are always talking to each other, across time, across space. They borrow, steal, and share ideas, and that’s how art evolves. The process of painting is like a form of embodied expression, an acceptance of ambiguity. There’s no right or wrong way to read it.