Thoughts That Cure Radically: ‘Faust and Other Tales: The paintings of Jan Müller’ Lori Bookstein Fine Art

German born expressionist painter Jan Müller’s paintings contain a medieval frenzy latent in mid-century New York painting. Born in 1922, Müller relocated to New York City in 1941 after a circuitous route through poorly functioning European sanitariums, that left the painter's heart permanently scarred. Müller was fitted with a fake plastic ventricle at the age of 31 that, due to the technology of the time, continuously and audibly clicked every time his heart took a beat, literally sounding out the passage of time inside his chest. Owing to a burst of late frenetic energy, Müller created a series of large, fevered figurative tableaus before his early death at the age of 36 in 1958. Around a dozen of these late, Gothic paintings clumped around literary themes are currently on view at Lori Bookstein’s gallery in Chelsea.

Jan Müller, who never painted in Germany, still references Germanic and Romantic preoccupations in his work, particularly the legend of Faust and the temptation of St. Anthony. Müller’s Walpurgisnacht-Faust I from 1956 is a large frieze composition that celebrates the festival of walpurgisnacht or Walpurgis Night, a celebration held in Germany exactly six month after all-hallows-eve. In addition to a scene in Goethe’s Faust, walpurgisnacht was believed to be a holiday of covens, sorcery and the devil. Müller’s painting is quite large and depicts several pale figures in a shallow pictorial space climbing and falling while a red cloaked figure points from the left side of the dramatic happenings at a figure holding a face mask. The Temptation of St. Anthony from 1957, meanwhile, depicts a group of naked figures splayed across the composition while an off colored beast-figure anchors the painting to the center. The legend of St. Anthony holds that, similar to Christ, the Saint was tempted by various beasts and demons in the desert, yet heroically avoided succumbing to their temptations.

Müller’s literary subject matter, while seemingly at odds with the high Modernist dictates of 1950s New York, hinted at a truth now more greatly apparent to a contemporary audience. Coming from a German Expressionist tradition that includes Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Müller’s paintings nonetheless partakes of a New World sensibility. Looking back to the medieval world for subject matter, Müller managed to paint a metaphor for the New York school. Wrestling, parallel to St. Anthony, with his own private demons, his heart troubles were contracted attempting to escape the Nazis, Müller attempted to turn his studio into a permanent walpurgisnacht, a place of pictorial sorcery. While eschewing the abstraction of his teacher and fellow German expat Hans Hoffman, Müller captures the desperate, internal flight into the studio to salve the constant, finite, and expiring clicking beating inside his chest.