Mela Muter (1876 Warsaw - 1967 Paris), Portrait of a Man

oil, panel, 92.3 × 72 cm

Provenance:
Cologne, Galerie Bargera
Private collection, Poland

In her work, Melania Muter eagerly reached for the motifs of landscapes, still lifes, but it was portraits that became the artist's true painterly calling card, appreciated by critics and the public alike. Muter's portraits can be divided into two galleries. The first is paintings in which the artist adoringly immortalized anonymous figures of children, elderly women and men stigmatized by an often harsh working-class life, beginning with her first artistic journey to the Brittany coast. The second gallery, are paintings of a more representative nature, where Melani's models included some of the most prominent figures from the world of science, culture, politics, and she was posed by, among others: Leopold Gottlieb, Władysław Reymont, Auguste Rodin, Diego Rivera, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Leopold Staff and many others. Mela was able to show, in her characteristic way, not only the external appearance of the portrayed, but also his personality, although the artist herself did not agree with this statement - "... when you say, trying to make me a compliment - you create psychological portraits - I rebel! No, I don't paint psychological portraits at all, I don't even know what it takes to create a psychological portrait. I never ask myself whether the person in front of my easel is good, false, generous, intelligent. I try to capture and portray her, as I do a flower, a tomato or a tree, to get into her essence; if I succeed, I express myself through the prism of her personality..."
("Collection of Bolesław and Lina Nawrocki, Mela Muter (Maria Melania Mutermilch) 1876-1967.", Exhibition Catalogue, National Museum in Warsaw, December 1994 - February 1995, Warsaw 1994, p. 35).