Maria Melania Mutermilch Mela Muter (1876 Warsaw - 1967 Paris), View of St. Andrew's Fort in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, ca. 1940

Origins
legacy of the artist
Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne
private collection, Europe

Biography
She was born into a Jewish merchant family in Warsaw as Maria Melania Klingsland. In 1899 she married writer and socialist activist Michal Mutermilch. From this union was born her only son, Andrew. Already at the end of the 19th century, she attended Milosz Kotarbinski's Private School of Painting and Drawing. In 1901, the whole family moved to Paris, where Muter opened her own studio and continued her studies at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere and Académie Colarossi. Until the outbreak of World War I, the artist painted extensively, took part in numerous exhibitions and traveled, especially fondly to Brittany, as well as Spain. She also began an affair with Leopold Staff. She just spent the war in the north of France. After its end, she returned to Paris. Later, she accompanied her son, who was suffering from bone tuberculosis, on stays in sanatoriums, where she met Raymond Lefebvre, with whom she was united by strong feelings. The end of the second decade of the 20th century saw traumatic events for Muter - divorce from her husband and the death of her lover.

The interwar period is the time of the greatest development of her career. At that time, Muter became a sought-after portraitist working on commissions from artists, writers, politicians and the Parisian aristocracy. In the early 1920s she succumbed to the influence of Cubism for a brief moment, traveled to the Côte d'Azur for the first time, converted to Catholicism and survived the unexpected death of her son. She painted not only portraits, but also landscapes and still lifes. She created her own original style, using characteristic impasto textures and her own expressive style. During World War II, she was in hiding in the south of France, first in Villeneuve-les-Avignon and then already in Avignon itself. From this time come numerous landscapes and symbolic religious scenes set against the backdrop of the Rhone valley. After returning to Paris, Muter gradually began to fall into obscurity. Her legacy was rediscovered in the 1960s by Lina and Boleslaw Nawrocki, and popularized by high-profile exhibitions at Cologne's Galerie Gmurzynska, as well as through a presentation at Warsaw's National Museum in 1994.