Badende in Braun 1911

Otto Mueller made "Bathers in Brown," sometime in his career, a painting in oil on canvas. Look at how he's applied these earthy, muted browns. The application is quite thin, and this approach really emphasizes the canvas's texture, giving a sort of raw, unfinished feel. It’s like he's letting the materiality of the paint and the canvas really speak. There’s something so elemental about the color and the way these figures emerge from the brown like they were always there. See that figure leaning forwards in the water, she is all simple curves. The brown that defines her back almost merges into the water, and you could almost miss it, but those lines are full of information! It reminds me a little of Paula Modersohn-Becker, another German artist who was doing really interesting things with the figure at the beginning of the century, but Mueller is definitely doing his own thing. Art is this ongoing conversation, right?