Contexts: A critical reading of Otto Mueller's "Z***" Portfolio

Valentina Bay / Dr. Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka
Research assistance Brücke-Museum / Deputy Director European Roma Institute for Art and Culture (ERIAC)

Leafing through Otto Mueller’s catalogue raisonné, one encounters mostly depictions of nudes, bathers, and portraits. Among them are a series of drawings, paintings, and prints of the Roma minority, which were created during several trips to Eastern Europe and the Balkans from 1924 onwards. The titles include the term “G***” (in German “Z***”), which is considered problematic today as it is a prejudiced description developed by the non-Roma majority to refer to the Roma. 1

Central in Mueller’s preoccupation is the prints portfolio “Z***/Otto Mueller” dating from 1927, of which one copy is in the collection of the Brücke Museum. On the occasion of the exhibition Sivdem Amenge. I sewed for us / Ich nähte für uns by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, who is a Polish artist of Romani background, the Brücke Museum is revisiting these works by Mueller, created around 100 years ago. How does the artist depict the Roma population, and to what extent do his works correspond to racist images that continue into the present? Since he was a respected German artist, Otto Mueller’s works have made a lasting impact on how a majority views the Roma. Indeed, Mueller’s work has undoubtably contributed to shaping and sustaining deeply anti-gypsyist images, which is why a reevaluation and critical examination of his legacy is both timely and ethically imperative.

The nine color lithographs in the so-called “Z***” portfolio are based on drawings and unpreserved photographs that Mueller made of the Roma community during his summer stays in Hungary and the Balkans between 1925 and 1927. In his studio in Breslau, where he had been a professor at the local art academy since 1919, he turned his impressions into graphics and paintings. 2 The sheets of the “Z***” portfolio show portraits of women with black hair and striking facial features; mostly they are depicted half-naked. Besides some depictions of children, Mueller’s interest seems to be predominantly female – he shows men only in a family context. Except for the motif Zwei Z***mädchen im Wohnraum (Two G***girls in the Living Room), which shows a scene in an interior room, all the figures are depicted outdoors, whether in nature or in front of peasant dwellings or a covered wagon.

The stigmatizing external images about Roma

Mueller’s depictions are, in fact, exemplary of the entire European tradition of pictorial and knowledge production about the Roma, which reflects the deeply anti-gypsyist views held about this marginalized group. Originally from what is now Pakistan, the ancestors of today’s Roma arrived in Europe via Persia, Asia Minor, and the Caucasus in the 12th century, having been displaced by wars, persecution, and expulsion. Since their arrival in the southeast part of the continent, over the centuries art, culture, and especially science have shaped a racist image of the Roma population in several forms. Through stereotypical images, prejudiced writings, and transfiguring narratives, created almost exclusively by non-Roma, a two-fold stigmatizing image of the Other has taken firm shape in the collective consciousness of European majority society, which continues to reverberate to the present day. There is the deeply negative image of Roma as poor beggars, swindlers, and thieves, commonly depicted as dirty, ugly, and culturally backward people who are unable to adhere to societal norms. At the same time, there is the overly romanticized portrayal of freedom-loving and mysterious nomads, skillful musicians, and showmen, who live in groups close to nature and possess magical knowledge; in this case, Roma bodies are fetishized and usually sexualized, too.

This is expressed particularly when it comes to women, who experience even a double, intersectional discrimination – due to their minority as well as their gender affiliation. Both a racist and a patriarchal gaze shape the iconography of the representation of Roma women. Starting in the Middle Ages and through to the present, they have been typically portrayed either as witches or as hypersexualized archetypes of Carmen, as in the novel and opera of the same name. Even when depicted as nursing mothers, Roma women are often degraded to the object of male desire in eroticizing poses.

Shaped by the view from the outside, both stereotypes share a key characteristic: They present the Roma as the exotic Other, eternally, inherently, and irreconcilably different from the non-Roma population. These anti-gypsy representations need to be understood as a form of symbolic violence and as a fundamental element that has enabled and legitimized the persecution of Roma around the world for centuries. What also needs to be highlighted is that the legacy and continued popularity of such representation of Roma were possible because corrective counter-images created by the Roma themselves did not exist, and continue to be rare, in public perception. 3

Mueller’s use of traditional anti-gypsy images

At the beginning of the 20th century, there was an evident growing popularity and fascination with the romanticized fantasy-image of the Roma lifestyle. Advancing industrialization and urbanization in many cases evoked a desire for alternative ways of life, and the depiction of the simple life of the Roma as a dreamy place far away from civilization began to outweigh the themes of theft and fortune-telling that had been popular until then, such as those of Caravaggio or Georges de La Tour. Mueller’s “Z***” portfolio exemplifies this development. 4 Otto Mueller probably had little intention of representing the Roma people realistically; instead, he continued the long-established tendency of stigmatizing images. Through the simplicity of the houses and the clothing of his protagonists he illustrated their poverty, while their outdoor depiction implies a glorified closeness to nature. With the motif of the wagon as a symbol of the supposedly characteristic nomadism, the artist relies on a standard vocabulary. The wagon theme is already present in the etching cycle La vie des égyptiens (The Life of the Egyptians) created by the French printmaker Jacques Callot from 1621-31, one of the oldest known, already stereotypical Roma illustrations. 5 The simple houses in Mueller’s works suggest that he also had contact with settled Roma on his travels. Although these representations cannot be regarded as factual, true-to-life reproductions, they do take up certain aspects of reality while ignoring all socio-political mechanisms of exclusion. Poverty and precarious housing were undoubtedly part of daily life for many Roma at the time. In fact, both scarcity and the living conditions of Roma, whether they belonged to wandering or settled communities, are a direct consequence of historical and then-contemporary anti-Roma legislation and social exclusion, including 500 centuries of slavery in the territories of what is today Romania or the forced assimilation and settlement policies introduced by Maria Theresa of Austria. 6

The extent to which Mueller drew on Roma society to realize his artistic ideas is particularly evident in his motifs of Roma women, whom he mostly exoticizes and sexualizes by staging them naked or half-naked, clad merely in a traditional long skirt or a low-cut blouse. It should be noted that in general there is nothing unusual about the representation of naked women in Mueller’s works; the nude in the landscape is the dominant motif in his oeuvre. Like his former colleagues in the Brücke artist’s group, for Mueller the naked body in nature expresses purity – according to him, in this pure state humans can build unity with their pristine environment, with which they have lost contact due to western civilization. Yet public nudity is a taboo within traditional Roma culture; no Roma woman would pose nude for a painter. The half-naked bodies of women thus clearly become the object of (male) voyeurism in Mueller’s prints; they are eroticized, fetishized, and ultimately exoticized. In this regard, incorporating their traditional clothes serves more as an ethnic marker than it does to show respect, cultural sensitivity, or esteem. In this manner, Mueller perpetuates the stigmatizing imagery of Roma women.

Mueller’s interest in the Roma

The reason why Mueller was so fascinated by the Roma minority – to the extent that for several years in a row he visited their settlements to draw – cannot be precisely identified due to the sparse information available and statements by the artist. For a long time, the classification of the works was overshadowed by the myth of the artist as a “Z*** painter”. With his fictional novel Habakuk and above all Einhart der Lächler, his cousin, the writer Carl Hauptmann, circulated rumors in 1907 that Otto Mueller had Roma ancestors, which justified his “dark” appearance. At first, the story did not find any resonance in contemporary writings. It was only after the artist’s death in 1930 that it was again broached as a reason for Mueller’s preoccupation with the minority. What is certain is that the later titling of many of his early works with the word “Z***” is also the result of this outside attribution and not the artist’s own labeling.

The Roma first entered Mueller’s work after he had been stationed to Russia during World War I, where he met a local group. In the following years the Roma culture appeared only in the context of his interest in occultism in various portraits, for which he used magical amulets of fidelity and love from the Roma community. During this period, Mueller had been appointed Professor of Nude Painting at the Breslau (Wroclaw) Art Academy. He had fouond the orderly life associated with this position repulsive, and he never felt comfortable with the bourgeois lifestyle. Longing for a simple, happier life away from civic conventions, he sympathized with the romanticizing idea of “bohemianism” as a non-conformist and non-traditional lifestyle. Popular in artistic circles at the time, it was notably inspired by predominating eroticized and romanticized ideas about Roma life. Given that he projected his personal desires onto the marginalized minority, Mueller’s travels to Eastern Europe and the Balkans should also be considered in this light.

In fact, Mueller’s trips to these regions were no exception – he joins a list of artists and photographers in the 19th and early 20th centuries who used the Roma population for their art. The Hungarian town of Szolnok in particular developed into a veritable pilgrimage destination for artists wishing to draw the minority. In addition to Mueller, Austrian artists especially, such as August von Pettenkofen, Leopold Carl Müller, and Gualbert Raffalt, found themes for their work here and introduced these into exoticizing genre paintings. Their interest is directly linked to the emergence of ethnography and the popularity of folkloric genre photography by non-Roma photographers in these areas from the mid-19th century onward. They picked up on the existing stereotypical staging, and the supposed truth of the medium of photography further sharpened clichés. As popular postcard motifs, these depictions contributed massively to the final consolidation of previous outside images throughout Europe and promoted the exoticizing fascination for this minority. 7 The inner-European search for foreign places and populations resembles the journeys of many artists to overseas colonies, such as those of Mueller’s Brücke colleague Emil Nolde or the French artist Paul Gauguin. Both are an expression of similarly ethically questionable attitudes, including social and economic exploitation, sexual violence, or racial dominance and superiority.

Mueller’s depictions of Roma in the context of National Socialism

One may be tempted to see Mueller’s fascination with Roma as benevolent. But as a member of the European majority – even if unconsciously – Mueller was influenced by its zeitgeist and so his art was, too. His preoccupation with Roma developed at a time when pseudo-scientific theories of biological determinism were thriving as harbingers of later eugenics and starting to shape public policies and public perceptions of the majority. Long before National Socialism, the state-sponsored persecution of Roma by German authorities had already begun – as far back as the late 19th century, institutions and laws were introduced that gradually stripped Roma of their rights and freedoms. In this context, art and culture played a strong role in propagating and legitimizing persecution of the Roma. Timea Junghaus, Roma art historian, and Delaine Le Bas, Roma artist, note the importance of not underestimating this role:

“In the case of the Roma genocide, part of what made it possible was the Nazi regime’s use of visual humiliation – mocking caricatures that ridiculed and demonized Roma to erode public empathy for them. […] Visual humiliation was central to the Nazi propaganda machine, and laid the groundwork for the destruction of the ‘Other’.” 8

Indeed, the stereotypes constructed by Mueller’s works can also been found shortly thereafter in the racist ideology of the National Socialists, which was used to legitimize the gradual disenfranchisement, persecution, and later murder of European Roma. The apparent contradiction in the case of Mueller is that precisely these artworks were themselves deemed “Degenerate Art” in the National Socialists’ campaign. The “Z***” motifs were the main reason why hundreds of his works were removed from public institutions in 1937, and several “Z***” paintings were presented at the subsequent defamatory exhibition. 9 Although Mueller had died seven years previously, his posthumous defamation as a “degenerate artist” by the Nazis determines his narrative to this day. In view of the Nazi genocide of some 500,000 European Roma, this circumstance cloaks Mueller’s “Z***” works, which themselves reproduce racist thought patterns, in a supposed but inappropriate innocence. For they nonetheless remain an expression of both a stereotypical and stigmatizing image and of the same racism that contributed to the persecution and later murder of the Roma – and which persists to this day. Hence, in 2020 the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma wrote:

“Otto Mueller, whose paintings we highly appreciate and at the same time always discuss controversially, has repeatedly painted Zigeuner, i.e. the construction of a figure that for him represented a possibly rebellious ideal, in any case a construction – but precisely not ‘Romni’, i.e. the actual living people.” 10

Statement by the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma on Otto Mueller, November 2019, on the occasion of the exhibition Bild und Gegenbild. Zur Revision der Sammlung at Museum Ludwig, Cologne 2020.

Valentina Bay is an art historian. As a research assistant at the Brücke Museum, she was involved in the preparations of the exhibition Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Sivdem Amenge. I sewed for us. Ich nähte für uns.

Dr. Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka is an anthropologist, researcher, author, and Roma activist. Since 2018, she has served as Deputy Director of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC).

• 1
  The text uses the term “Roma” (in Romani language Rom (singular) means man or human; Roma is the plural form) as an all-encompassing term to describe all groups of the European minority who share Romani heritage. The term Sintizze is a self-ascription of the Romani subgroup resident in Germany and a number of other German-speaking areas. The term “G***” is considered a racist, prejudiced, and pejorative external designation developed by the non-Roma majority to refer to the Roma. The text uses this word exclusively for works assigned by Mueller himself with it and where it serves to distinguish the population of Roma from the constructed stereotypes. Out of respect for Roma, and in order to avoid using this word in public, the curatorial team decided to use a self-censored writing “G***” and “Z***” to make visitors acknowledge that this word is inappropriate and problematic.
• 2
  The information on Mueller’s artistic engagement with the Roma is based on extensive research by Tanja Pirsig-Marshall, for whose advice we are grateful. Her research has been published here: Tanja Pirsig, Otto Mueller. Mythos und Wahrheit, in: Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern (ed.), Otto Mueller. Eine Retrospektive, ex. cat., Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich 2003, p. 124-132; Tanja Pirsig-Marshall, Otto Mueller. Mythos und Wahrheit, in: Nicole Fritz (ed.), Otto Mueller – Gegenwelten. Sinti und Roma in der historischen Fotografie, ex. cat., Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, Ravensburg 2014-2015, Berlin, Heidelberg 2014, p. 12-29.
• 3
  Karola Fings, Sinti und Roma. Geschichte einer Minderheit, Munich 2019. Further information in: Klaus-Michael Bogdal, Europa erfindet die Zigeuner. Eine Geschichte von Faszination und Verachtung, Berlin 2014.
• 4
  Peter Bell, Z*** Otto Mueller. Ein Rollenspiel, in: Dagmar Schmengler (ed.), Maler. Mentor. Magier. Otto Mueller und sein Netzwerk in Breslau, ex. cat., Neue Galerie im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin 2018-2019, Berlin, Heidelberg 2018, p. 107-113.
• 5
  Malgorzata Mirga-Tas herself echoes Callot’s prints in her five-part series Out of Egypt (2021).
• 6
  The traditional art-historical reading of Mueller’s depictions testifies to how little is known about the particular local Roma groups the artist visited during his travels and their exact living conditions and traditions. In this respect, Mueller’s motifs must be seen as a mixture of his impressions of several journeys and especially his projected biased ideas. How much the artist really knew about the conventions and traditions of the Roma he drew, and how closely he sought personal contact, is unknown due to the lack of reliable sources.
• 7
  Uwe Schögl, Sinti und Roma in der historischen Fotografie, in: Nicole Fritz (ed.), Otto Mueller – Gegenwelten. Sinti und Roma in der historischen Fotografie, ex. cat., Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, Ravensburg 2014-2015, Berlin, Heidelberg 2014, p. 30-50.
• 8
  Timea Junghaus, Delaine Le Bas, Europe’s Roma Struggle to Reclaim Their Arts Scene, in: Open Society Foundation, July 15, 2015, URL: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/europe-s-roma-struggle-reclaim-their-arts-scene (June 22, 2023).
• 9
  Stephanie Barron, “Entartete Kunst.” Das Schicksal der Avantgarde in Nazi-Deutschland, ex. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles 1991, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Altes Museum, Berlin 1992, Munich 1992, p. 307-310.
• 10
  At the request of Herbert Heuss, former member of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma and author of the statement, the original spelling is quoted. We thank Herbert Heuss and Julia Friedrich, curator of the exhibition at Museum Ludwig, for the permission to use the quote.