Häuser Mit Ofen Und Schwein 1928

Otto Mueller made this drawing using colored chalks. The pastel sticks were coaxed into being a landscape. Just look at the weight of the brown pigment, a velvety foreground where the titular pigs might happily reside. I can only imagine what it was like for Mueller to create this, smudging the colors with his fingertips, building up the layers to create a tangible surface. The blue outlines around the buildings and foliage give a graphic sensibility to the scene. It reminds me of the way Milton Avery used blocks of flat color to depict a landscape. The textured strokes bring life to the forms: the soft clouds in the sky, the patterned roof, the cylindrical shape of the oven. There's a subtle nod to folk art here, in the reduction of the forms, their simplified essence. It feels like a memory—a fleeting moment captured in chalk. The more I look, the more I feel like I have been here before. The collective artistic memory connects us all.