Jan Müller (December 27, 1922 – January 29, 1958) was a New York-based figurative expressionist artist of the 1950s. According to art critic Carter Ratcliff,Paul Schimmel and Judith E Stein, Carter Ratcliff assay, Selfhood Paints a Self-Portrait (Newport Beach, Calif. : Newport Harbor Art Museum : New York : Rizzoli, 1988.) "His paintings usually erect a visual architecture sturdy enough to support an array of standing, riding, levitating figures. Gravity is absent, banished by an indifference to ordinary experience." According to the poet John Ashbery,John Ashbery, "Jan Muller," Art News 56, no. 2 (January 1958), pp.16-17. Müller "brings a medieval sensibility to neo-Expressionist paintings."
Biography Jan Müller was born on December 27, 1922, in Hamburg, Germany. In 1933 his family fled the Nazis to Prague, and later to Bex-les-Bains, Switzerland;Vivian Endicott Barnett; Thomas M. Messer; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, ‘’ Handbook, the Guggenheim Museum collection, 1900-1980; Jan Müller, 1922-1958’’ (New York : The Museum, 1980.) , pp.464-465, there he experienced the first of several attacks of rheumatic fever. He visited Paris in 1938 and two years later was apprehended and interned in a camp near Lyon. Shortly after the fall of Paris, Müller was released, at which time he moved to Ornaisons, near Narbonne. Following an unsuccessful attempt to escape to the United States from Marseille, he was able to cross the border into Spain in 1941 and proceed via Portugal to New York.
Jan Müller began to study art in 1945. The Art Students League of New York, New York City, for six months Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts for five years He became a US citizen in 1957.
Jan Müller died on January 29, 1958, at the age of thirty-five, in New York.
Selected solo exhibitions 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958: Cooperative Hansa Gallery, New York City, which he founded with Allan Kaprow and Richard Stankiewicz 1955, 1956: The Sun Gallery, Provincetown, Massachusetts 1960: University of Minnesota 1961: Zabriskie Gallery, NYC 1962: Jan Müller: 1922–1958 organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC 1970, 1971, 1972: Noah Goldowsky 1976, 1977: Gruenebaum Gallery, NYC 1980: Rosa Esman Gallery, NYC
Selected group exhibitions 1952: 813 Broadway (Gallery), NYC 1953: The Art Institute of Chicago 1955: University of Minnesota 1955, 1956: Stable Show, Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, Stable Gallery, NYC 1957: The New York School, Second Generation, Jewish Museum, NYC; Young America, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC 1958: Carnegie, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto, Perugia, Italy 1958, 1959: Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA 1959: New Images of Man, Museum of Modern Art, NYC 1960: American Federation of Arts, circ., NYC 2009: Days Lumberyard Studios, Provincetown, MA, 1915-1972, ACME Fine Art, Boston, MA;
Collections Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina Museum of Modern Art, NYC Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA
See also New York School Action painting
References
Paul Cummings, Dictionary of Contemporary American Artists, (St. Martins Press New York, 1994.) Martica Sawin, "Jan Müller: 1922-1958," Arts, vol. 33, Feb. 1959, pp41, repr.,44
Books Paul Schimmel and Judith E Stein, The Figurative fifties : New York figurative expressionism, (Newport Beach, Calif. : Newport Harbor Art Museum : New York : Rizzoli, 1988.) Barbara Rose, American Art Since 1900; a critical history. (New York, F. A. Praeger, 1967.) OCLC: 256107 p. 236, repr., 237 Irving Sandler, The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties, (New York, Harper & Row, 1978.) , p. 124, fig. 86 Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.) pp. 32,38 Marika Herskovic, American Abstract and Figurative Expressionism: Style Is Timely Art Is Timeless: An Illustrated Survey With Artists' Statements, Artwork and Biographies. (New York School Press, 2009.) . p. 172-175