Georg Müller from the sewer

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Marie Stein-Ranke : Portrait of Georg Müller vom Siel, 1902, Dötlingen
Anton Kaulbach : Georg Müller vom Siel

Georg Bernhard Müller vom Siel (born June 13, 1865 in Großensiel ( Butjadingen ), † January 13, 1939 in Wehnen ( Bad Zwischenahn )) was a German painter.

Life

Georg Müller was born in Großensiel (Butjadingen). He derived his stage name vom Siel from his birthplace Großensiel. The Müller family was a widely ramified family, based in Butjadingen since 1812 and important for the development of the region through a variety of activities. Georg Müller vom Siel's siblings lived in New York .

He was the youngest of twelve children of the businessman, shipowner and landlord Johann Hinrich Müller (1816–1871) and his wife Anna Amalie Margarete Friederike, née. Meyer (1820-1872). From 1871 he attended school in Abbehausen , from 1875 the upper secondary school in Oldenburg .

At the age of six, Müller became an orphan . At the age of 15 he stopped attending secondary school and embarked for the USA . In New York he attended a painting and drawing school and after two years went on a journey. His years of traveling took him to Munich, Berlin, Antwerp, Paris and in 1885 back to New York for a year. From 1886 to 1889 he stayed in Paris, where he attended the École des beaux-arts and made excellent copies in the Louvre for the Grand Duke Peter II of Oldenburg , among others . From 1890 onwards, Müller studied at the Berlin Academy with Hans Fredrik Gude , who held him in high regard.

Dotlingen

As early as 1889, Müller vom Siel began to explore the local landscape from Oldenburg. He found Dötlingen and was so impressed by this place and the charming geest landscape that he moved there in 1896. At first he rented a house in a farm. Two years later he had the "Villa Meineck" built. Here he set up his studio and built a center for artists and a private painting school. It initially served to secure a livelihood. In particular, merchant daughters came from Bremen in the summer months. At that time women were still denied official access to an academy. An affiliated pension company was run by his two older and unmarried sisters. The Villa Meineck developed into a cultural attraction and center of the area. Guests were the Oldenburg local poet Georg Ruseler (1866–1920), the painter and poet Arthur Fitger (1840–1909), the painter Ludwig Fischbeck (1866–1954), the Oldenburg editor Wilhelm von Busch (1868–1940), the graphic artist Marie Stein-Ranke (1873–1964), the poet Hermann Allmers (1821–1902) and many other artists. Müller vom Siel thus laid the foundation for the Dötlingen artists' colony .

During the following years he was also able to make a name for himself outside the Oldenburg region . He became a painter for Prince Friedrich von Waldeck-Pyrmont and created etchings for renowned publishers in Berlin and Leipzig.

Gradually, Müller vom Siel had to struggle with a change in his state of mind. In 1909 he was admitted to the mental hospital in Wehnen , where he became incapacitated in 1910 and spent the rest of his life with Wilhelm von Busch as his guardian. He continued to paint in Wehnen until around 1930. After having had enthusiastic and peculiar religious ideas beforehand, in the twenties he developed an absurd worldview related to the universe and the life force. The watercolors created from her, colored with watercolors and interspersed with fine script, are considered to be the most perfect in terms of shape, color and composition. At the same time, however, they are also a shocking testimony to his emotional state and loneliness. Müller was recognized as an artist, but he was denied the honor he deserved. During his lifetime there were memorial exhibitions in Oldenburg in 1925 and 1935. Since he had become penniless, his work was also sold on a larger scale from 1935 onwards. There were further, posthumous commemorative exhibitions in 1947 and 1976 again in Oldenburg. Müller vom Siel died in Wehnen in 1939. His estate fell to the Oldenburg State and is still largely owned by the State Museum for Art and Cultural History. Müller vom Siel was buried in the Dötlingen cemetery. The grave site is maintained by the Dötlingen Foundation.

plant

Self-portrait
Hunt landscape near Dötlingen
Watercolor from water
Watercolor from water

Müller vom Siel was first and foremost a landscape painter and had great drawing skills and an extraordinary confidence in color setting. At the height of his work he dealt with local motifs - with the river Hunte , the view from the slope of the Hunteniederung, the path with birch trees, the oak groups and old buildings. Hardly anyone could capture the sky and clouds in a picturesque way like him. “But despite all the romanticism, the mutedness of his pictures, which only occasionally allow light to break in and otherwise remain their expanse in modest melancholy, remains free from any hint of sweetness.” (Karl Veit Riedel, Georg Bernhard Müller vom Siel).

Müller vom Siel almost never placed people in his pictures; he must have been a master at the art of portraiture, because it is said that he painted the last emperor three times and received a telegraphic order to portray the crown princess. However, the commission did not come to fruition because Müller vom Siel was painting Princess Bathildis von Waldeck and Pyrmont at the time . However, in his biography Karl Veit Riedel takes the view that Müller vom Siel had more skills and experience in this genre than most of the north-west German painters of his time.

Since a comprehensive exhibition in the State Museum for Art and Cultural History Oldenburg in 2014 ("The other Müller vom Siel") with a detailed catalog, the work Müller vom Siels, created after 1909, has been accessible to the public. This shows his engagement with abstract forms on the one hand, and a very private, hitherto largely unknown form of artistic expression that combines text and image on the other. Müller vom Siel distances himself extremely from any "academic" or socially sanctioned context, especially through sexual references, for example, surface-filling abstract penises. How compulsively does he form recurring neologisms (such as "Koith" for coitus) and evidently deal deeply with the meaning of the sexual, for example in this marginal note on one of his 177 sheets of paper that he has preserved and made on greaseproof paper (!): "In Koith there is feeling ( s) knowledge. Knowledge is spirit. " The painter called the arches (and other writing or handicrafts) "studies" which he himself tried to hide in boxes from relatives.

On one of these sheets is a poem with an astonishing closeness to Holderlin. Müller vom Siel interweaves it with a chiselled yellow ornament that hovers like a sun over the text:

If the maypole hangs colorful
wreath in the sky
,
the tree reveals all of life's round dance ! Cheer blessed blossoms =
de linden trees announce: Spring comes
again and again, eternal God does
not want death! Both have the same
striving, tree and you, to be and
paint, die, live, grow
without rest! Oh , but
May comes , when the flowers
sprout again and spring clothes are
new! It is now there again, the
lovely, lovely time of spring
which gives us a special opportunity to contemplate
omnipotence, wisdom and

(the poem breaks off here, a continuation sheet has not survived)

During the painter's lifetime, no one paid any attention to this work, which was created over decades. It was dismissed as the work of a madman, but fortunately it was kept in parts by doctors. An interpretation is still pending, as well as a deeper examination of the painter's psyche from 1909 onwards. Immediately before the admission to the sanatorium in Wehnen in 1909, the brother Carl Friedrich Müller-Königsfeld reported on Georg's "extensive overstimulation of the entire nervous system" ( see Röske / Stamm: "The other miller vom Siel" 2014, p. 17), of "severe emotional depressions", of his "erotic actions and gestures when confronting women". In later years in the sanatorium he must have liked one of the nurses very much, so he painted a picture for him and had relatives frame it. Unfortunately, no pictures have survived outside of the 177 watercolored sheets.

Biographical overview

  • 1865 On June 13th Georg Bernhard Müller was born in Großensiel, Abbehausen municipality in Butjadingen an der Unterweser, as the youngest of 12 children of the businessman Johann Hinrich Müller and his wife Anna Amalie Margarete Friederike, née. Meyer, born.
  • 1871 Attended elementary school in Abbehausen. Death of the father.
  • 1872 death of the mother.
  • In 1875 he moved to the Oberrealschule in Oldenburg, where he went to school until his senior years.
  • In 1880 he quit school and began his years of traveling, which initially led him to America. In New York, where three of his siblings are already staying, he attended a painting and drawing school and made the decision to become a painter.
  • 1881 to 1883 in Munich pupil of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, most recently with Joseph Wenglein (1845-1919)
  • 1884 to 1885 at the Academy in Antwerp. Works as a copyist in Oldenburg.
  • 1885 Second stay in New York.
  • From 1886 to 1889 he lived in Paris. Visit to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts Concours d'emulation.
  • 1888 While copying in the Louvre, the private scholar Friedrich August Leesenberg-Hartrotte from Hamburg speaks to him and writes down the encounters with the artist in his diary. He and Leesenberg-Hartrotte travel together to St. Denis and Mont St. Michele. Grand Duke Nikolaus Friedrich Peter von Oldenburg commissioned him to copy Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna in the Rock .
  • 1889 return from France. While hiking along the Hunte he discovered the village of Dötlingen, where he stayed for a long time in 1894 and settled in 1896.
  • 1890 studies at the Augusteum.
  • 1892 and 1895 at the Berlin Academy with Hans Gude. Return to Dötlingen.
  • 1898 On August 15, the inauguration is celebrated at "Haus Meineck", his residence in Dötlingen. Over the years he has welcomed numerous guests here, including the local poet Georg Ruseler, who dedicated a poem to him, and the Bremen painter and writer Arthur Fitger .
  • 1905 Participation in the large Northwest German art exhibition in Oldenburg.
  • 1908 stay at the Theresienhof sanatorium in Goslar.
  • 1909 admission to the state hospital in Wehnen near Oldenburg due to a mental illness that was described as incurable.
  • 1910 The Grand Ducal District Court of Wildeshausen pronounces the incapacitation and appoints the editor Wilhelm von Busch as guardian.
  • 1925 Exhibition of works by the artist at the Oldenburger Kunstverein.
  • 1935 At the instigation of the museum director Walter Müller-Wulckow and the painter Richard tom Dieck , a large sales exhibition comprising paintings, prints and hand drawings is held in the castle hall of the State Museum.
  • 1939 Died in Wehnen on January 13th. Burial in the cemetery in Dötlingen.

Etchings

In his etchings, which Müller vom Siel produced in the first few years of the century, probably mainly for economic reasons, he designed the same motifs as in his paintings, whereby the moods appear darker.

  • Dötlingen with old oak

  • Windmill near Dötlingen

  • Dötlingen in winter with birch trees on the way

  • Winter heathland with a sheepfold

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Karl Veit Riedel: Müller vom Siel, Georg Bernhard In: Hans Friedl u. a. (Ed.): Biographical manual for the history of the state of Oldenburg. Edited on behalf of the Oldenburg landscape. Isensee, Oldenburg 1992, ISBN 3-89442-135-5 , pp. 492-493 ( online ).

Web links

Commons : Georg Müller vom Siel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Müller vom Siel, Georg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Müller, Georg Bernhard (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH June 13, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH Großensiel ( Butjadingen )
DATE OF DEATH January 13, 1939
Place of death Aching