Gypsy Woman in Profile, 1927

The so-called Gypsy Portfolio is considered the last high point in the life work of the Silesian-born Expressionist Otto Müller (1874–1930). In 1910, he had been the last but one member to be accepted into the Dresden artists group Die Brücke. Unlike the conceptual ideas of his younger colleagues—liberation of color from the object and abstraction of the natural form into an expressive hieroglyph with use of a rather angular, splintery formal vocabulary—his work is based on comparatively harmonious shapes and does without intensification of expression through distortion of form. Müller had previously concentrated in his work on gentle and unagitated representations of young women and quiet landscapes, the unity of man and nature in the form of lovers and bathers, but in 1927, after a stay in Szolnok, Hungary, he expanded his oeuvre’s range to include a preoccupation, and identification, with the marginalized ethnic groups of the Roma and Sinti. The series of multicolored lithographic prints lavishly produced at the Academy in Breslau thematically revolves around the romanticized reality of life of the traveling people. The soft, rounded shapes of the lithographs and the atmospheric density of the dreamy depictions speak to a heartfelt empathy with the “existence of the outcasts and the restless”—as stated by contemporaries—and have been interpreted as Müller’s gentle contrarianism. His representations are informed by poetry, atmospheric density, and lyrical narrative power and reveal a fascination for different ways of life. The prints are entitled Gypsy Woman in Profile, Two Gypsy Women, Two Children in Front of the Cabin, Two Gypsy Girls in the Living Room, Gypsy Woman Standing With Child on Her Arm, Gypsy Woman With Child in Front of Covered Wagon, Resting Gypsy Family With Goat, Gypsy Family With Covered Wagon. One print that has garnered special popularity is the Gypsy Madonna (Gypsy Woman With Child in Front of Wagon Wheel). The cardboard paper folder in bright vermilion has the title, “Gypsy,” in crafted lettering on the front, with the artist’s full name below, and in the following line a small pentagram. The inserted title leaf in pale ocher bears the inscription “9 colored lithos—in 60 folders—numbered & signed by hand—folder no.—printed by Lange Akademie Breslau.”

MH, 2021