Mela Muter (1876-1967), originally Polish and established in Paris since 1901, became one of the most recognized painters during the first half of the 20th century. Also in Catalonia, especially in Barcelona, where she exhibited in 1911 and 1912, and in Girona, where she stayed in the spring of 1914. The city of Girona, which preserves two works by the artist in its museums, is now recovering her figure and work after twenty-five years since the last exhibition dedicated to the artist.
The exhibition, promoted and produced by the Girona Art Museum-Catalan Agency for Cultural Heritage with the collaboration of the Department of Culture, has had a shared curatorship of art historians Glòria Bosch and Susanna Portell and the doctor in Polish art history Artur Tanikowski.
The exhibition, without intending to become an anthological exhibition of the artist, focuses on the exhibitions and stays of Polish artists, and especially of Mela Muter, in Barcelona and Girona. Her exhibitions at the Galeries Dalmau – in 1911 and 1912 -, the visit to the city in 1912 and the painter’s subsequent stay in Girona during April and May 1914, as well as the exhibition she presented at the Sala Athenea in Girona the same year, are the central axis of the exhibition.
At the same time, the life journey of the artist Mela Muter is presented with a careful selection of works, most painted between 1906 and 1930, in which the themes that occupied and particularly concerned her throughout her extensive artistic career become evident: women, motherhood, old age, blindness but also portraits and landscapes, two genres that were very close to her. Unjustly forgotten after World War II, Muter’s work stands out for its strength; with influences from post-impressionism, including Cézanne, Van Gogh, the synthetists linked to Gauguin and the Pont-Aven school, the Nabis and the Fauvists. The Polish artist developed her own, energetic and forceful painting, which earned her more than once the comment that she painted like a man, to which she always rebelled by affirming that she painted and that was all.
The exhibition includes a total of 75 works – 53 oils, 19 drawings and 3 sculptures –, 57 of which by Mela Muter. Added to these are press articles from the time and the artist’s personal documents: notebooks and notes, photographs and, most especially, his memoirs, written at the end of his life, in which he reflects on his works and his travels.
Many of the works in the exhibition, most of which come from Poland, but also from Berlin, Paris and Castres and Switzerland, have never been seen in Catalonia, where few paintings by the artist are preserved: two in the National Art Museum of Catalonia ( Santa Família , 1909 and Portrait of the dealer Josep Dalmau i Rafel , 1911), today on permanent exhibition; one in the History Museum of Girona ( Carrer Cúndaro , 1914), one in the Art Museum of Girona ( L’Onyar in Girona , 1914) and three more in private collections ( Maternitat , 1911; En Nando , 1914; and Portrait of the painter Leopold Gotllieb , c.1908-1911).
With this exhibition in Girona, you can now see such outstanding works by the artist as The Sad Country (1906 ) or Breton Woman with Child (1911) from the Bolesław and Lina Nawrocki collection; The Blind-Auvegle of Gérone (c.1914) from the Musée Goya et Jean Jaurès in Castres; Two Old Men (1902) and Two Children (1912) both from the Jankilevitsch collection in Warsaw.
Beyond Mela Muter, it is worth highlighting the works of the Polish artist Leopold Gottlieb – a total of 4 works of which are very relevant: the Portrait of André Salmon (c. 1908-1910) and the work Christ the Beggar (1908-1910), all of them from the Bolesław and Lina Nawrocki collection – and the works of the artists Eugeniusz Zak and Elie Nadelman, the latter especially the bronze Head of a Woman and the bronze bas-relief Autumn (c.1910-1015).
The works of the latter are perhaps the ones that best demonstrate the reason for the fascination that Mela Muter and the Polish artists aroused among the Catalan public and critics of the time: artistic proposals that were interested in themes of a social nature and that proposed, in their execution, a look towards the classics and the return to the order that the Catalan Noucentisme of the time defended, added to the defense of the independence of Poland that the artists raised and that was twinned with the yearnings for national freedom that were also defended, as today, in Catalonia.
All the works present in the exhibition are included in an extensive catalogue, translated into English and Polish, which incorporates, in addition to the curators’ texts, articles by Mercè Doñate, Aitor Quiney, Eva Vázquez or Maya Nawrocka, as well as the biography of Muter and the Polish artists and an extensive bibliography of the artist.
The exhibition at the Girona Art Museum can be visited from November 24, 2018 to April 23, 2019 and is accompanied by an extensive program of activities (a dramatized reading of biographical texts by the artist, by the actors Meritxell Yanes and David Planas; guided tours, family activities, a reading club and a cycle of two-voice dialogues around the artist by experts such as the exhibition curators themselves and Pere Parramon, Àlex Susanna, Carme Clusellas and Eva Vázquez. Check out the full program on the website: ww.museuart.com.
Likewise, the exhibition at the Art Museum will be complemented by the exhibition Les Llibertats perdudes , also curated by Glòria Bosch and Susanna Portell, which will be dedicated to her by Les Bernardes, the Gironès Culture House (C/Major 172 in Salt), from December 14, 2018 to March 1, 2019. An exhibition that will focus on and delve into Mela Muter’s vital and sentimental correspondences with the historian and politician Raymond Lefebvre and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. At the same time, the exhibition, in a slightly smaller version, will be presented at the Tobacco Museum of Andorra from May 2019.
The exhibition has been included in the invited proposals section of the Biennial Miradas de Mujeres 2018, an initiative of MAV, Asociación de Mujeres en las Artes Visuales Contemporáneas . This section of the Biennial compiles the activities organized by museums, art centers, foundations, universities, galleries and educational and cultural spaces, throughout 2018, whose themes and contents have as their main objective the visibility of women in the visual arts from a feminist perspective, in which content is addressed that is committed to the social context and good practices.
