Lot 421 Dα

Otto Mueller's Gypsy pictures are undoubtedly among his most important works, and he created them from around 1923. Mueller romanticises the beautiful, describes the captivatingly exotic and does not reflect the social adversity, prosaic everyday life or, for example, the societal exclusion of this minority group living in the Balkans and central Europe. Mueller's approach to the world of the Gypsies is special. In his pictures we can sense a respectful and personally motivated gaze that observes in order to trace the fascinating situations of their lives in his paintings, watercolours and - in this case - in a colour lithograph. The “Zigeunermappe”, which is where this episode featuring a family with a covered wagon comes from, was the result of the artist's long and intense scrutiny and encounters in various places during the summer months of 1924 to 1927. In 1928 the Berlin gallerist Ferdinand Möller presented 9 colour lithographs in a portfolio entitled “Zigeuner” for the first time. Otto Mueller and Eugen Meyerhofer produced an edition of 60 hand-printed impressions with additional, modest hand-colouring - such as here in red-orange, a little blue and yellow. The pigments applied by Mueller can vary in terms of nuances: no sheet is like any other. Around 20 portfolios had found their way to admirers and collectors by the time of Mueller's death in 1930. Erich Heckel found the rest of the edition in the artist's estate; after it was distributed among his heirs, individual sheets from the portfolio also found their way on to the market.