Untitled (Outdoor Food Market)

Hans Alexander Mueller

Known primarily as an illustrator, Hans Alexander Mueller was nevertheless an apt student of capturing everyday imagery in deft, elegant compositions. In this untitled woodcut from 1922, a group of vendors sell their wares at an outdoor farmers market, perhaps in Vienna, Austria.

Mueller packs a whole visual narrative into a small space, carving the block so the white lines create the composition featuring a butcher's stand with clients. In the foreground a vendor stirs the contents of a barrel with a ladle. In the background is a village of thatched roofed homes. The artist balances and stabilizes the activity with a vertical tree that extends through the entire composition.

Some time in the mid 1930s Mueller emigrated from Germany to the United States and settled in Scarsdale, New York, where he worked as a freelance book illustrator and artist. The December 4, 1939 issue of Life Magazine included a profile of the German-American artist H.A. Mueller, who had just published Woodcuts & Wood Engravings: How I Make Them. It was somewhat surprising and bold that a major magazine would be interested in highlighting a German born printmaker or a book on printing techniques in 1939, but it helped cement his reputation in the United States and it became a textbook for a generation of relief printmakers.