New Year's Card 1949

Hans Alexander Mueller made this New Year's Card, likely a woodcut, where shapes and colors collide in a delightful, slightly wonky dance. It is the kind of image that emerges through intuition, trial, and happy accidents! I feel the artist wrestling with a kind of graphic problem. How do you make a bouquet of flowers with blocky shapes, a limited palette, and still have them look like a bouquet? It is like he's thinking about the push and pull between representation and abstraction, all while carving away at that wood block. Look how the red petals pop against the cool grey background and those blue-green leaves? There's a real conversation happening here between colors and forms, a kind of visual call-and-response. I can imagine Mueller being inspired by German Expressionist printmakers like Kirchner. Each artist passing the baton of creativity across time.