News & Events

The first words in the exhibition's title – and at the same time of the series of events – prepared by the Art & Modern Foundation, announce the story of someone with strong inner energy. The words are reinforced with an exclamation mark to draw attention to a truly exceptional case.

 

The first words in the exhibition's title – and at the same time of the series of events – prepared by the Art & Modern Foundation, announce the story of someone with strong inner energy. The words are reinforced with an exclamation mark to draw attention to a truly exceptional case. The person referred to in the title is Mela Muter, the great Polish painter, whose life was filled to the brim with art, because through it, she looked at everyday life, talked about her fate, emotions, love, partings, longings, and people close to her heart, but also strangers, children, mothers and old people, the poor and the rich of this world.

 

Another of her heroes was nature. In her work, it was given human qualities. Muter's trees, water, rocks, and landscapes spread over several planes, have a sensitivity, pulsate or, on the contrary, remain in silence. Everything that Muter focused on and that surrounded her ceased to be inert matter.

 

The Art & Modern Foundation presents the painter and her work surrounded by the works of her artist friends. She loved a few, admired many, but always went her own way, developing her own style, which was initially appreciated by few. And when she became fashionable and her circle of admirers suddenly widened, coming from the Parisian elite of the early years of the past century, it changed nothing in her attitude. She was aware of the fleeting nature of that moment and of that applause. Her distance from reality, and her concomitant sense of self-worth, can be seen in the sketch for Muter's portrait by René-Xavier Prinet.

 

The photograph, chosen as a kind of binder for the exhibition and the series of events around Mela Muter, captures her at a joyful time in her life. Here is a backstreet in Barcelona, late spring 1912. The artist's sense of happiness is given not only by her youth and the success of the exhibition she has just had in the Catalan capital but also – perhaps above all – by her pleasant company, especially that of Leopold Gottlieb, the painter, treated like a member of the family, her beloved confidant. For Leopold, she was a muse. They portrayed each other and painted several pictures together. Among the friends photographed is also the sculptor Elie Nadelman.

 

Project co-financed by the Śródmieście District of the City of Warsaw.

 

 

 

 

  

 

Our event is a symbolic repeat of the famous Barcelona show from over a century ago. Muter, Gottlieb, and Nadelman come together again. Muter's work is represented by a watercolour with an unusual subject for this artist. It invites you inside a room illuminated by the summer sun in the charming town of Collioure in the south of France. A woman is staying there, as evidenced by the 'footprints': a hat and women's shoes. Is it Mela who goes out to the harbour and beach in them?

She was an emigrant and a tireless traveller, but she never forgot her Polish and Warsaw ancestry, a value that was all the more valuable as it manifested itself in times of partition and war. From the windows of her family home, she looked out onto busy Leszno Street. She used to get to Miłosz Kotarbiński's Drawing and Painting School on Widok Street. She eagerly visited the Aleksander Krywult Salon on the second floor of the Hotel Europejski in Krakowskie Przedmieście. She left her parents and siblings in Warsaw. After the Second World War, she never came here again.

The Wejman Gallery, which has made its space available to the Foundation, is located in a historic part of Powiśle, which allows you to travel back in time with Mela Muter and her friends. Imagine: exactly one hundred years ago, Warsaw, 1923, Zachęta, the National Gallery of the Society of Fine Arts. Muter opens her exhibition. She astonishes everyone with the boldness and individualism of her work. One reviewer writes: Ms. Muter's paintings do not remind us of things seen, not only in Polish painting. And this impression remains to this day.

 

 

Join us!

Art & Modern Foundation
ul. Jaracza 8

 

Dates:

• 14 September 2023, 11am
• 20 September 2023, 11 am
• 20 September 2023, 6 pm

 

Mela Muter, actually Maria Melania Mutermilch, née Klingsland, was fortunate in her childhood and youth. She was born in 1876 in Warsaw to a wealthy Jewish family. Her father, Fabian Klingsland, was not only knowledgeable about commerce but also highly respected people of the arts and helped them financially. He supported the literati in particular: Leopold Staff, Jan Kasprowicz and Władysław Reymont. So when it turned out that Maria Melania had artistic abilities, he willingly paid for her drawing lessons and enjoyed her passion.

The school of life and the refinement of talent was Paris for Mela. She left Poland in 1901 already married and the mother of one-year-old Andrzej. Her chosen one was the writer Michał Mutermilch, also a native of Warsaw. In Paris, she attended renowned schools, the Colarossi Academy and the Grande Chaumière Academy. Despite the art education she received, she usually referred to herself as “self-taught” and claimed that direct contacts with artists, such as Władysław Ślewiński, whom she met in Brittany, gave her the most in her development.

Critics find links in Muter's work with Vincent van Gogh because of her expressiveness and colour, her geometrisation of forms is said to link her with Paul Cézanne, and her ability to create intimate moods with Edouard Vuillard. Art history classifies Muter as part of the École de Paris, but the artist escapes all affinities and classifications.

She enjoyed her greatest fame in the 1920s as a portraitist of the personalities of the time, musicians, politicians, and writers, among them Nobel laureates. Muter was hailed as a psychologising portraitist because she had a gift for extracting from people the truth about themselves. She disliked the term and even disagreed with it. She paid attention to another aspect. She only portrayed those who wanted to work with her sincerely “through their intellectual and spiritual charge”.

Maturity brought her personal dramas. Art helped her through the deaths of her parents, her only child, her friends, and her beloved Raymond Lefebvre. Another remedy for the pain was the open air. She immersed herself in nature, and her favourite destinations for years were invariably Catalonia and the French Mediterranean coast. During the Second War, she had to go into hiding in Avignon. Always sensitive to the plight of those in need, she continued to help them even after the war, forgetting her own material standing. Her popularity dimmed, she did not fit in with the new trends in art, but she continued to create intensively and had exhibitions, including a retrospective in Paris in 1953.

She died in Paris in 1967. Her body of work was scattered at the time due, among other reasons, to the painter's numerous moves. It is estimated that she left over a thousand paintings and drawings, although – perhaps – there are twice as many. The search for her works is still ongoing.

Several decades after her death, she is experiencing a major comeback. She is increasingly appreciated by collectors and art historians, as well as audiences to whom she speaks passionately about the basics of life, about who we are and the values to which we remain true.

 

→ Mela Muter Research Center – melamuter.com