Lot 92 Nα

From the very beginning, depictions of motherhood and images of children were central themes in Mela Muter's oeuvre. Displaying the same deep faculty for empathy with which she met all of her models, she portrayed mothers and children marked by poverty, hunger and illness with an unparalleled intensity. The subjects of the portraits who are placed before our eyes neither reproach us nor demand our sympathy. They are visualised in the picture with a forceful presence, and they confront their viewers with earnest pride.
In 1916 Muter created two large-format paintings of the “Kellerkinder” motif: double portraits of little girls framed obliquely within the picture and looking up at their viewers. A painting shown at a 1966 solo exhibition organised in Oslo and reproduced on the flyer created for the exhibition at that time (“Kjellerbarn”, 1916, 108 x 84 cm) shows two girls shifted somewhat apart, sitting on a stool and a chair and dressed in simple clothes and clumsy laced boots, with their fixed gaze directed towards an indeterminate point.
The other painting featuring this general motif is being offered at this auction. Here Muter has placed two girls, presumably sisters, in the centre of the picture as a compositional and thematic unity. They are more strongly marked by the misery of their living conditions than the children in the version described above. One of them has bare feet, and the other is wearing women's shoes that are far too large. Their pale, angular faces have lost every trace of the childlike and innocent. The girls sit, leaning against one another, their hands touching. Certain of each other's support, they look at their viewers directly, with a mixture of mistrust and defiance. The depth and intensity of this gaze is fascinating and unsettling; it produces a mesmerising effect that draws us in, and it is characteristic of almost all of Mela Muter's portraits. The harmony of the composition is ruptured by the colours selected for the dresses: one red, the other white. They shimmer in the midst of the shades of brown, grey and beige which dominate the depicted space, and they provide the two sitters with a stronger individuality.