Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Rhineland;
Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne, Germany gallery label verso backing;
Private Collection, Toronto

Note:

The daughter of a wealthy and cultivated Jewish merchant family, Mela Muter – born Maria Melania Klingsland – would become among the first professional female painters in Poland. While studying art, she would meet her future husband Michał Mutermilch (1874–1947), a Jewish-Polish writer, critic, and socialist activist. The two would relocate to Paris at the age of 25. There she continued her artistic education, enrolling at the Académie Colarossi and later at the Académie Grande Chaumière. Later, she would claim to be self-taught, explaining that she learnt more from observing the painting of the École de Paris than through formal studies.

In 1902, Muter exhibited her work at the Salon des Beaux-Arts, and in 1905 at the Salon d’Automne and Salon des Indépendants, where her work attracted the attention of celebrated collector Ambroise Vollard. Muter entered the bohemian milieu, becoming friends with writers Henri Barbusse, Raymond Lefebvre, Romain Rolland, Rainer Maria Rilke, the architect Auguste Perret, and the composers Maurice Ravel and Erik Satie. Sitters included Edgar Varese, Chana Orloff, Diego Rivera, and August Perret, though Muter frequently painted ordinary, anonymous people.

Often considered a post-Impressionist, influences of van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Vuillard can be felt in Muter’s expressionist and vividly coloured work. Muter never forgot her Polish roots, and participated in many exhibitions in the country of her birth, as well as throughout France and in New York City.