Roger Mühl

(1929-2008)

Roger Mühl was born in Geudertheim, Bas-Rhin, at the end of 1929. He entered the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts in 1939. After the interruption of the war, he resumed his studies in 1945 until 1948.

From then on, he worked as a decorator at the Barabli, a satirical cabaret created in Strasbourg by Germain Muller. He designed murals for schools in the region, notably Ittenheim in 1952, then, at the request of the French Ministry of Education, in other regions of France, in Brittany and Normandy, as well as in Paris (1954-1955). Meanwhile, in 1953, the Maison d’Art alsacienne in Strasbourg offered him his first solo exhibition. The city’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art acquired two of his works. In 1954 he moves to Montreux-Château in the Territoire de Belfort.

Roger Mühl is a painter of color. His paintings are preceded by a great deal of drawing work to find the desired relationships between line and mass. He paints portraits, still lifes and, above all, landscapes, in which he translates light with great mastery.

He carries out numerous public commissions in the context of the 1% artistic scheme (set up in 1951), extending his practice to the creation of stained-glass windows and tapestries (at Aubusson, atelier Pinton). He also created decorations for religious buildings, including a Christ engraved in a stone cross for the choir of the Ostheim temple designed by architect René Joseph Schmitt in 1958, and a wrought-iron Christ for the exterior.

In 1960, his work was the subject of a solo show at the Galerie de Paris, which met with great success and led to further exhibitions in Paris and New York, notably at the David Findlay gallery, which remained loyal to him until the end of his career. The artist took up lithography in 1960 at Fernand Mourlot’s famous studio, frequented by some of the 20th century’s greatest artists, including Picasso, Matisse and Chagall. Lithography led him to illustrate books, including Denis Rougemont’s L’Aventure occidentale de l’homme (Monte-Carlo, André Sauret, 1972).

In 1965, he left the east of France for the light. He settled in Grasse, then ten years later in Mougins, where Picasso lived until his death in April 1973. The Art Center Hall in Tokyo hosted an exhibition of his work in 1987. The following year, a major retrospective of his work was held in Belfort. The Charpentier gallery in Paris associated him with several exhibitions of the École de Paris.