Mela Muter (Maria Melania Mutermilch) - Dorfplatz im Regen. Verso: Biblische Szene (Flucht nach Ägypten) - image-1
Mela Muter (Maria Melania Mutermilch) - Dorfplatz im Regen. Verso: Biblische Szene (Flucht nach Ägypten) - image-2
Mela Muter (Maria Melania Mutermilch) - Dorfplatz im Regen. Verso: Biblische Szene (Flucht nach Ägypten) - image-1Mela Muter (Maria Melania Mutermilch) - Dorfplatz im Regen. Verso: Biblische Szene (Flucht nach Ägypten) - image-2

Lot 75 D

Mela Muter (Maria Melania Mutermilch) - Dorfplatz im Regen. Verso: Biblische Szene (Flucht nach Ägypten)

Auction 1200 - overview Cologne
01.06.2022, 18:00 - Evening Sale - Modern and Contemporary Art
Estimate: 60.000 € - 80.000 €
Result: 75.600 € (incl. premium)

Mela Muter (Maria Melania Mutermilch)

Dorfplatz im Regen. Verso: Biblische Szene (Flucht nach Ägypten)

Oil on canvas. 80 x 80 cm. Framed. Signed 'MUTER' lower right in black. - Nice condition.

Townscapes occupy a special place in Mela Muter's work. In this image of a small-town marketplace during a summer rain, she achieves a particularly vibrant depiction of an everyday scene. The village fountain, which forms the composition's visual anchor, has been shifted to the painting's left edge; the heavily cropped facade of a church rises up behind it. Women, some of them provided with umbrellas, hurry across the square with bowed heads: the slender crowns of the plane trees offer them little protection from the rain. The yellow and grey facades of the houses surrounding the square can be seen in the background.
Muter has built up the entire composition out of loosely placed brushstrokes and expertly employed the light ground of the canvas as a compositional element. She has dissolved the uneven, puddle-filled cobblestone surface into short, multicoloured, wavy lines - thus setting it in motion visually. The contours of the houses and the crowns of the trees have become blurred in the rain and the painter has used rapid, diagonal layers of strokes to cause them to merge together and shimmer. Scattered across the picture plane, long and narrow streaks - some added in white, some scratched into the wet paint - very vividly suggest the paths of the falling drops. Despite the rain and the dark sky, the atmosphere is by no means gloomy; in fact, light yellow and tints of white as well as warm tones of stone define the composition.
In the view carried out on the reverse side, but ultimately discarded, the artist has combined two contrary subjects in an extraordinary way. She has transferred the Holy Family's Flight into Egypt to a modern industrial landscape - an iconographic juxtaposition that Muter also realised in a very similar manner in the painting “Flucht nach Ägypten: Flusshafen von la Villette”, circa 1938/39 (Boleslaw Collection and Lina Nawrocki).

Certificate

The work is documented in the photo archive of Galerie Bargera, Cologne.

Provenance

Galerie Bargera, Cologne; private collection, Rhineland

Literature

Cf. for the subject on the reverse: the painting 'Flucht nach Ägypten' and the preparatory watercolour, illustrated in: De París a Girona. Mela Muter i els artistes polonesos a Catalunya, exhib. cat. Museu d'Art de Girona 2018/19, col. illus. p. 156/157