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Mela Muter

Mela Muter is the pseudonym used by Maria Melania Klingsland Mutermilch (April 26, 1876 – May 14, 1967), the first professional Jewish painter in Poland. Muter's painting career began to flourish after she moved to Paris from Poland in 1901 at the age of twenty-five. Before World War I, Muter's painting practice aligned itself with the Naturalism movement with her signature works containing loud colors and strong brush strokes. Muter gained swift popularity in Paris and within five years of her residency in the city, had already begun showing her works in local salons. Despite receiving French citizenship in 1927, a little more than a decade later, Muter fled to Avignon for safety during the Nazi occupation. After the war, Muter returned to Paris where she worked and resided until her death in 1967.

copied from Mela Muter

Early Life

Before Mela Muter took on her pseudonym, she was born Maria Melania Klingsland Mutermilch. Maria's family were living in Warsaw, Poland at the time of her birth and enjoyed a role with social elites of the city. Muter's father, Fabian Klingsland, was a a supporter of the arts and cultures that resonated with his identity as a Jewish and Polish citizen. The Klingsland family were financially generous and morally well-read, both are factors that would be reflected in Mela's artistic sensibilities. Muter's parents had Mela enrolled in lessons for both piano and drawing by the age of 16. Maria had three siblings: one brother and two sisters. Her younger brother, Zygmunt Klingsland, having also felt the affects the role of culture held in the family, went on to become an art critic and diplomat for the Polish Embassy in Paris.

The family's status allowed Maria to expand her artistic interests. At the age of twenty three, she married the Polish Jew, Michal Mutermilch. Michal had a membership with the Polish Socialist Party and enjoyed a career as an art critic and writer. In 1900, Maria and Michal welcomed their first and only child, Andrzej. Yet, hardly chained to the bubble of domesticity, Maria continued her artistic studies at the School of Drawing and Painting for Women. Muter's early work was marked by a symbolic style that spoke to the ideals of landscape and portraiture. Even at this stage, her work demonstrated a reflective quality that negated strictly representational boundaries.

Muter in Paris

In pursuit of the avant-garde art scene, Muter and her family moved and took residency in Paris in 1901. Muter began to study at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and the Academie Colarossi. Muter maintained a relationship with the Polish art community of Warsaw while living in Paris by visiting family frequently. Muter made her career debut in 1902 at the Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts. It was in the same year that Muter also showed her works in her new home city of Paris at the Salon des Tuileries. Muter soon began to show her works on a regular basis in Paris salons. Most notable of these salons are: the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, the Salon d'Automne, and the Salon des Independants. Not limited to their new home in Paris, Muter and her family traveled all over Western Europe in the decade after leaving Warsaw. It was through these travels that Muter's focus shifted away from the landscapes she saw and onto the people who inhabited them.

Artistic Style and Ideals

By her early thirties, Muter's painting style was distinguished with heavy brushstrokes that layered paint around the faces and hands of the people she painted. Muter reflected on her fixation with the human subject as artistic inspiration by stating:

Painting must be based on plastic values but also on fraternal fervor: love of country, of children, of the humble, which makes up the beauty of the human soul. This fervor, so developed in the people, allows us to discover in them permanent elements of creation. That is why the artist and the people have a lot to learn, a lot to gain from contact with another.

Vincent Van Gogh, Dr Paul Gachet, 1890, oil on canvas, 26x 22 cm.

In style and application of paint, Vincent Van Gogh can be seen as an influence on Muter's work.

Unlike other painters of the time, Muter had little interest in depicting "notable" people, instead preferring to be witness to the everyday faces one would pass by. The more Mela hoped to capture the essence of her sitters, the more expressionistic her paintings would become. Muter wrote of her portrait painting process:

I don't ask myself whether a person in front of my easels is good, false, generous, intelligent. I try to dominate them and represent them just as I do in the case of a flower, tomato or tree; to feel myself into their essence; if I manage to do that, I express myself through their personality.

After witnessing the tragedies of World War I, Muter's style went through another change. No longer preoccupied with the harsh realities, Muter hoped to capture the beauty and hope of her surroundings. This is reflected in her newfound use of bright colors and an even more liberal application of paint. Her works took on a new liveliness.

Loss and War Time

While her husband Michal was away during the first world war, Mela was able to develop a romantic relationship with Raymond Lefebvre, a socialist activist. After receiving a religious divorce from her former husband, Mela cared for and resided with Raymond. After taking up his political ideals, Muter began producing pacifist artworks for the local socialist magazine, Clarte. Tragically, before Muter and Lefebvre could wed, he died due to mysterious circumstances while on a trip to the Soviet Union. Four years later, Muter also lost her only child to his battle with bone tuberculosis. All of Mela's tragedies led to a deep depression and a conversion to Catholicism.

In between war times, with painting as a solace for the distraught artists, Muter continuously helmed one-woman art exhibitions in Paris and Warsaw.

Having to flee Paris during World War II, Muter resided in the countryside of Avignon. As a pacifist, the war was not reflected in Muter's work. During this time she chose to paint the delicate landscapes around her.

Towards the later part of her life, Muter's scope of celebrity expanded and she had shows in Lyon, New York, Avignon, and Cologne.