Oskar Mulley

pseudonym: -

birth data

date of birth: 1891

place of birth: Klagenfurt

death data

date of death: 1949

death: Garmisch-Partenkirchen

biography

Oskar Mulley was born in 1891 in Klagenfurt. After attending the School of Crafts in Munich for one year, the young Carinthian moved to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Following his studies, Mulley worked temporarily as a theater painter, before moving his residence to Kufstein in 1918. While Mulley, during his first creative period in Vienna, was preoccupied with the rural still life and rural motifs, he now turned his attention to the mountain motifs in Kufstein. In his large, powerful and perfectly designed landscapes that emerged in the 1920s, Mulley completely abandoned the depiction of people. Inspired by the decorative art nouveau of the Viennese Secession and late Impressionism, Mulley developed his very own style of painting, which is characterized by impastos using pallet knives and spatulas to apply the paint. In this respect, the colours are laid out in several layers on top of each other, forming an almost three dimensional texture and unfolding their own depth.

For Mulley the mountains depicted in his paintings were not just a background, but at the center of his interest, with mountain farms and chapels blending harmoniously into the rhythm of his paintings. Softer and smoother colour shades characterize the years in Garmisch, where Mulley lived from 1934 onwards until the end of his life. During his last years he left the monumentality of the Kufstein period and turned into the style of the School of Barbizon, applying the paint in a finer, more precise manner with the brush. Already during his lifetime Mulley received great recognition. In 1937, for example, he was honoured with the Austrian Golden State Medal for Fine Arts. Mulley even had to take legal action in the 1930s against numerous forgers who tried to copy his paintings and profit from his great success.

Nowadays Mulleys works are to be seen among others in the Städtische Galerie at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, in the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck and in the Local Museum of Kufstein.