Mela Muter
1876 - 1967

Mela Muter was the daughter of a rich Warsaw merchant, Fabian Klingsland, who supported many writers including Leopold Staff, Jan Kasprowicz, and Władysław Reymont (the artist's godfather). Her brother, Zygmunt Stanisław Klingsland, was an art critic and diplomat who wrote about Polish artists active in Paris.

At age 16, after finishing secondary school, she took drawing and music lessons (1892-1899). In 1899, she married Michał Mutermilch, a writer, art critic and socialist activist. In the same year, she studied at the Miłosz Kotarbiński School of Drawing and Painting for Women for a few months. In 1901, she left for Paris with her husband and, in that year vacationed in Brittany, where she visited Władysław Ślewinski among others and also met Auguste Rodin. She later returned several times to Concarneau and Audierne in Brittany. In Paris, she studied briefly at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere and at the Académie Colarossi. By 1902 she began exhibiting her works.

Often traveling to Poland and Italy, she also went to Spain in 1912, and later, spent summers in Ondarroa in the Pays Basque (Basque countryside). She maintained close contact with several important personages of the Polish and Parisian cultural world with whom she maintained close contact. She often painted portraits: of artists Leopold Gottlieb, Roman Kramsztyk, Diego de Rivera, Bolesław Nawrocki Sr., and prominent writers and poets Władysław Reymont, Henryk Sienkiewicz (both Nobel Prize winners), Stefan Żeromski and Leopold Staff (with whom she maintained a deep affection). She was active in the Society of Polish Artists in Paris, and in the "Circle of Montparnasse," she was neighbors with Leopold Gottlieb and Olga Boznańska.

Following the outbreak of World War I, she stayed first in Paris, then in Brittany, and, finally, in Switzerland. While in France, she took care of war victims. In 1917, she met Raymond Lefébvre, a prominent, actively engaged socialist, with whom she had a close relationship for a number of years. Through him she entered a circle of intellectuals with leftist tendencies; making the acquaintance of Anatole France, Romain Rolland, and Henri Barbusse. She became politically active herself, providing illustrations for the socialist press. After her divorce from Michał Mutermilch, she planned to marry Lefébvre, however he died while on a trip to Russia.

She hosted notable visitors in her atelier such as Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Jules Pascin, Gino Severini, and Albert Gleizes. Severini and Gleizes prompted her interest in cubist works. She was also in contact with famous musical figures including Albert Roussel, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Erik Satie, and Edgar Varese, and represented some of them on canvas. In the early 1920s, she made trips to Saint-Tropez, the Pyrenees and Poland. In 1925 while in Paris, she met Rainer Maria Rilke with whom she established a lasting friendship. The great poet devoted several poems to the Polish painter and continued their relationship by mail during the last two years of his life. Granted French citizenship in 1927, Muter commissioned Auguste Perret, a well-known French architect, to design her a villa with a studio on rue Vaugirard, where she conducted courses of drawing and painting in the early 1930s. In the same decade, she resumed her travels to Italy and Spain.

The artist spent nearly the entire period of World War II in Avignon where she created renditions of the surrounding landscape, often with views of the Rhone River. In addition to painting, she taught art and literature at a local school and occupied herself with writing; her lectures on art history and a novel have been preserved in manuscript form. After undergoing cataract surgery in 1965, she repainted many of her earlier works. The painter bequeathed her estate to the Association Villages SOS des Enfants de France. In Paris, Dr. Bolesław Nawrocki Jr., who had already tried to save her legacy before her death, looked after her interests.

In the catalogue for Muter's posthumous exhibition in 1967 at the Gmurzyńska Gallery in Cologne, we find a key to the painter's art in the following words of self-reflection: "There is no doubt that feelings of certain melancholy, certain sufferings and sadness are closer to me than elegance and happiness. I am even inclined to see in this the certain weakness of mine and my Slavic brothers as compared to people from Latin cultural circles" (see Lazowski 1997, p. 32). Throughout her oeuvre, the artist addressed subjects from a sphere of influence that might be referred to as "miserabilism." She often painted the elderly, the poor, the disabled, the physically and mentally handicapped, and those on the social margins. She also had a particular predilection for depicting motherhood in its various stages: pregnant women, nursing mothers, as well as grandmothers or old nannies with a child. These pictures reveal elements of transitoriness and a fatalistic view of the future.

Consequently, her art has been described as based on an aestheticism of turpitude, sometimes verging on the grotesque, yet, she never tried to shock with ugliness. In her portraits and genre scenes from France, Spain or Switzerland, her very inclination to deform and put poverty and old age before beauty, revealed her efforts to contain the essence of the existential truth about man in anti-idealized physiognomies or silhouettes. Apart from her own psychological makeup and the environment in which she had grown up, her choice of subjects may have been determined, by her connections with the intellectual-political spheres of the French and Polish socialists.

At an early date Muter took up landscape painting, a theme that can be found throughout her oeuvre. Her works include a range of views from Brittany and landscapes of southern France, Spain (Toledo, Ondarroa), the Eastern Pyrenees (including Collioure) and Switzerland (Gandria), to those of Avignon and Paris. She also painted still lifes composed frequently of simple kitchen utensils and even more often of vegetables, fruit and crabs. In the international art community of Paris she made her name, above all, as an excellent portraitist, who reproduced faithfully, albeit with the help of the language of modern pictorial forms, the likenesses of representatives of the international literary and artistic Bohemia and of the world of politics and science.

At the outset of her artistic career, Mela Muter painted in the spirit of turn-of-the-century Symbolism, and then later was inspired by the synthetism of the Pont-Aven School. In her Breton paintings, she enclosed areas of flatly laid, homogenous color with a distinct contour. In time, she tended towards a technique closer to divisionism, which employed "small daubs." She based her own pictorial "writing" on the expressive course of the brush, a method inspired by van Gogh, which utilizes thick brush marks and contrasting color juxtapositions. From Cézanne, she adopted a constructive approach to composition in landscape and still lifes as seen in a flattening of perspective and geometrization of forms that, in some of her pictures, approached early Cubism. A monumentalizing of the depicted object, which fills the entire frame and frequently seems to enter the viewer's space, is visible both in numerous (often large-format) portraits and still lifes.

A distinctive feature of Muter's painting technique was her frequent use of ungrounded, coarse, highly absorbent canvases, whose textures and unpainted areas are plastically active, yet left empty in the fauvist fashion. Her palette was full of broken, subdued tones, while in the case of watercolors and some oil paintings; there were also pure colors, deriving from Fauvism. It should be noted that Henri Matisse favorably appraised her art when he visited Muter in her studio.

Mela Muter's expressive painting, based on the emotional tension of existential experience, has placed itself in the circle of the School of Paris. Her concept of color; certain portrait type; grotesque elements, exploitation of the subject of motherhood and, finally, her emphasis on the "miserabilist" conditions of human life connect her with the Polish School. Particularly, one can find a certain kinship between her painting and the art of Leopold Gottlieb, Witold Wojtkiewicz and Eugeniusz Zak. Today, Muter is regarded as one of the most eminent woman-painters, not only in Poland, but internationally as well.

Mela Muter had numerous one-woman shows in her lifetime. The most important ones took place in Warsaw (1902, 1903, 1923), Barcelona (1911), Paris (1918, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1930, 1966), Cologne (1965), San Francisco (1966), New York (1967), as well as in Gerona, Avignon, Lyon and Marseille. Large retrospective exhibitions were organized after the artist's death at the Gmurzyńska Gallery in Cologne (1967), the Musée du Petit Palais in Geneva (1977), the Gallerie Albert 1er in Paris (1990), the Musée de Pont-Aven (1994) and the National Museum in Warsaw as part of the Lina and Bolesław Nawrocki collection show (1994-1995).

Works in the collection: