Waldsee Mit Zwei Akten 1917

Otto Mueller made this painting, Waldsee Mit Zwei Akten, with oil on canvas. The way Mueller lays down these strokes makes me think about how painting isn’t just about illustrating something, but about how color and form come together. Look at the texture here. The paint isn’t trying to hide itself. It’s not blended to make the scene more real, but it is a surface of visible marks. There are all these vertical, loose strokes. It feels like Mueller's process involved this back and forth, between the figures and the landscape. See how these marks around the forest meet with the color and shape of the female figures. Mueller was part of Die Brücke, a group of German Expressionist artists, and you can see that shared interest in the expressive potential of raw, unrefined forms. I find this painting especially interesting when I think about someone like Marsden Hartley, who also wrestled with similar ways of understanding the relationship between figures and abstraction.