Lot 47 N

Mela Muter actually became known and renowned for her highly expressive portraits. Born into a wealthy Jewish-Polish family engaged in the retail business, she quickly found her footing in Parisian society at the start of the 20th century and became friends with important avant-garde artists. She had studied in Warsaw as well as the Grande Chaumière and Colarossi academies in Paris. Shortly thereafter, she was creating portraits of public figures: from the art market, literary world, politics and upper-class circles.
At the same time, however, she had an exceptionally empathetic interest in poorer members of the populace. With psychological curiosity, but never lacking distance, society’s disadvantaged are depicted in sometimes prominently proportioned formats: children attired in a meagre and impoverished manner as well as street musicians or families in a domestic atmosphere.
Our large-format painting depicts a young woman having a meal with her children. The room is filled with light, and a mild breeze gently passes through the open window to stir the curtains. The view of mountains and a river anchors the domestic scene in a rural natural setting and also points to Mela Muter’s interest in landscape painting. Points of light and the perspective unfolding rapidly from the lower edge of the painting invigorate the figural scene, and this is further enhanced by the summery boldness of the colours found in the dresses and utensils. The pyramidal structure and use of light here present the mother as the origin of all life and thus as an allegory of Maternité, possessing an innate aura of sacred calm. Muter always also seeks the characteristic, the timeless, in the individual.
This picture meant so much to the painter that she kept it until the end of her life and, evidently responding to the wish of a collector, she later preferred to paint a smaller version than to give it up (for the smaller version, see: Magda Michalska, Mela Muter – Accomplished Portraitist and devoted Mother, in: Daily Art Magazine, 27 Jan. 2023, p. 2; exh. cat. Paris 1966 (Galerie Jean-Claude Bellier), Mela Muter, cat. no. 29 with ill.; exh. cat. New York 1967 (Hammer Galleries), Mela Muter, cat. no. 17 with ill.).