Dr. Moeller & Cie Kunsthandel

The drawing In the Midday Sun, from 1915 as well, presents the viewer simultaneously with three more exotic animals from Richard Müller‘s erotic menagerie: the mute hedgehog, the armadillo as the eternal messenger of love who has no intentions of his own, and the stiff marabou. Müller liked to make use of this symbolic bird in particular, since it represented an elderly, well-to-do, and sometimes pushy suitor, who boasts plumage like a swallowtail but already has a balding head, and who rarely meets his beloved without bringing a gift. In the painting Courting (Fig. 1) from 1922, for example, the gift is a bouquet of red roses, which the naked beauty once again uses to cover her face. In using this motif, however, Müller employed a familiar theme, for one already finds the marabou in the works of his teachers Ernst Moritz Geyger (1861-1941) and, in particular, Max Klinger (1857-1920), whose painting The Legation (Die Gesandtschaft) from 1882 can be considered a direct source of inspiration for the present drawing. Incidentally, these disconcerting compositions of a beautiful but promiscuous woman with lustful animals also played a role in Müller‘s impeachment as the Rector of the Dresden Academy by the National Socialists in 1935.