Naked Girl Sitting by the Water, 1912

About the Work

Otto Mueller first sojourned on the island of Fehmarn in 1908. From that time onwards, the motif of the nude figure in the outdoors dominated his artistic work. Here we see a girl sitting in the high grass of a large seaside meadow, her back turned towards us. The artist has zoomed in close, capturing the outlines of her body and the elements of the landscape with rapid brushstrokes in greyish purple. The simple, soft contours – for example those of her leg bent at the knee – resemble the curved lines denoting the individual blades of grass. As a way of showing the close bond between human beings and their natural surroundings, Mueller availed himself of a similar formal language for both.

About the Acquisition

From 1900 onwards, the Frankfurt chemist and industrialist Carl Hagemann (1867‒1940) assembled one of the most important private collections of modern art. It included numerous paintings, drawings, watercolours and prints, especially by members of the artist group “Die Brücke”. After Carl Hagemann died in an accident during the Second World War, the then Städel director Ernst Holzinger arranged for Hagemann’s heirs to evacuate his collection with the museum’s collection. In gratitude, the family donated almost all of the works on paper to the Städel Museum in 1948. Further donations and permanent loans as well as purchases of paintings and watercolours from the Hagemann estate helped to compensate for the losses the museum had suffered in 1937 as part of the Nazi’s “Degenerate Art” campaign. Today, the Hagemann Collection forms the core of the Städel museum’s Expressionist collection.