Art: Airless Despair

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The late Jan Müller had little sympathy with conventional notions of beauty; his visions were tormented, and he purposely painted them as bluntly as he knew how. As could be seen last week at a retrospective exhibition at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, Müller was a painter of extraordinary power and skill: even at his most grotesque he fascinates where a lesser talent would only repel.

In the 35 years of his life, German-born Jan Müller knew few moments of tranquillity. When he was ten, the Nazis arrested his father for campaigning against Hitler, and though friends managed to secure his release through bribery, the elder Müller realized that he and his family had to flee. The Müllers went to Prague, only to find the city overburdened with refugees already. For Jan Müller, life became one long search for a home—in Switzerland, in Amsterdam, in Paris. When World War II broke out, the French interned the boy as a German; when the French surrendered, he fled the Nazis again.

Abstraction Ran Out. In time. Jan got to Spain, to Lisbon, and finally to the U.S. He worked as a dishwasher, a factory worker, a day-camp instructor; but in 1945 he decided to devote himself to painting. He studied at the Art Students League, six months later switched to the school run by Hans Hofmann, the most influential teacher of U.S. abstract expressionism. But Müller could not follow so doctrinaire a master for long.

By 1950 he had started working in a mosaic style which, though still abstract, was tightly disciplined. But the mosaics did not satisfy him either. "Abstraction is no longer enough for me," he said. "So I'm returning to the image. The image gives one a wider sense of communication."

Time Ticked Away. For his subject matter, Müller often used episodes from the Bible, from Shakespeare and Goethe. He did a series of landscapes and also a number of figure paintings which, like The Accusation, had no literary source. In all his paintings, even when there is a touch of grim humor, the mood of despair persists. The composition of his landscapes is brilliant; but the landscape is so clogged with color that it becomes airless, a kind of prison. In the figure paintings, his creatures are chalky, emaciated scarecrows that stare out from cruel masklike faces. They accuse, torture, mock; they crouch on each others shoulders, ride each other's naked backs. To a large extent, the theme of Jan Müller's work is humanity devouring itself.

The despair was intensified by the state of Müller's health. Since the age of 13 he had suffered from attacks of rheumatic fever. In 1954 a plastic valve was inserted into his heart to replace a damaged natural valve. The new valve made a ticking noise with every heartbeat, a cruel reminder that the operation had been only partially successful and that time was running out. Four years later, having worked feverishly to the end, Jan Müller was dead.