‘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. 

Jan Müller

Walpurgisnacht-Faust I

1956

Oil on Canvas

68 x 119 inches

Jan Müller

The Temptation of St. Anthony

1957

Oil on Canvas

80 x 121 inches

Jan Müller

The Concert of Angels

1957

Oil on Canvas

56 ½ x 148 inches

Jan Müller

Bacchanal Triptych

Oil on Canvas

17 ¾ x 36 ¼ inches   

Jan Müller

Faust Scene with Red Mouse

1956

Oil on Board

9 ¼ x 9 ¼ inches 

Dana Schutz 'Piano in the Rain' Friedrich Petzel Gallery

                Dana Schutz's career and critical reputation has survived the 2008 financial implosion.  Unlike the artists from the 1980s whose white hot careers came to be associated with the over-hyped go-go Reaganomics that the era's art market indulged, Dana Schutz's large, jazzy paintings do not seem to carry the taint of Bush era decadence. Coming out of Columbia's M.F.A. in the early 2000s and entering a smithy furnace of moneyed expenditure, Schutz, then still in her twenties, enjoyed phenomenal critical and market success with her previous dealer Zack Feaur. Given the astronomical climb of her work's estimation, a natural decline of repute and value would seemed to have followed in the wake of the recession. Instead of overproducing and over saturating the market, however, Schutz maintained a steady pace of production and focused over the last few years, perhaps a little prematurely, on mini-museum retrospectives. Older and still intact, Schutz's first solo show with her new bluer chip gallery, Friedrich Petzel, affords an opportunity to see the young painter shorn of the bright glare of overnight success and perhaps, as nearly as possible, objectively.

            Schutz's new exhibition, 'Piano in the Rain', employs bohemian images of decadence and boredom.  Heroin addicts, brightly colored figures yawning, cramped apartment dwellers, romantic piano players who continue to perform in the rain, are all apart of Schutz's cast of comic characters. Schutz's gauchely lit universe is constantly on the verge of anarchy, visual and otherwise. Skirting disaster is a mark of ambition, of which Schutz's paintings demonstrably contain. 'Building the Boat While Sailing' (all paintings from 2012) is an example of Schutz's compositional determination. Grandly scaled at ten by thirteen feet, this large, catastrophic painting is Schutz's homage to and competition with Gericault's Raft of the Medusa. 'Cramped Apartment' is not as large and shows a young couple fretting in their small, cluttered home. 'Heroin in the Wind', meanwhile, depicts a young person injecting the drug into their arm in the middle of what appears to be a tornado. 

            A viewer coming upon Schutz's painting for the first time will be struck by their color. Schutz's gift as a colorist is immediate and genuine. 'Yellow Yawner' especially has a compelling juxtaposition of warm yellows and activated purples. 'Heroin in the Wind', despite its abject subject matter, is a tornado of fuchsias, purples and reds. Schutz's paintings are held together by their color and narrative. Given that all the paintings--some of which are gigantic-- where made in the last four months, the surface can feel perfunctory and filled in. Regardless, Schutz's ambition for her painting is evident. Gericault's subject matter of decadence, isolation and anxiety prefigures Schutz's. Plasma colors and frogman figures update Gericault's madwoman or shipwrecked passengers into a contemporary painting idiom. Thematically Schutz has mapped out a career's worth of material. Brazen, sloppy and charged, Schutz's paintings are beginning to follow through on their promise.  

Dana Schutz

Yellow Yawner

Oil on Canvas

23 x 20 inches

Dana Schutz

Ear on Fire

2012

Oil on Canvas

40 x 36 inches

Dana Schutz

Building the Boat While Sailing

2012

Oil on Cnavas

120 x 156 inches

Dana Schutz

Small Apartment

2012

Oil on Canvas

57 x 83 inches

Dana Schutz

Heroin in the Wind

2012

Oil on Canvas

57 x 33 inches

Dana Schutz

Piano in the Rain

2012

Oil on Canvas

88 x 84 inches

Dana Schutz

Hop

2012

Oil on Canvas

96 x 90 inches

Dana Schutz

Flasher

2012

Oil on Canvas

75 x 88 inches