Mela Muter – plans and shattered dreams

Painted in cool tones, the painting entitled ‘Mediterranean Landscape’ depicts a bay and harbour in the small town of Collioure in the south of France. Painted by Mela Muter in the 1920s, it was purchased from the artist by the French state during the difficult post-war period for artists. This purchase must have provided at least some relief from her dire financial situation. In this way, the corner of the world she loved so dearly repaid her for her long-standing devotion.

On 29 January 1920, Mela Muter wrote to her beloved, Raymond Lefèbvre, stating that Mr Lapauze (Henri Lapauze, art critic and curator of the Petit Palais Museum in Paris) had offered her an exhibition in the autumn. She therefore planned to spend the spring and summer ‘en plein air’ in Collioure in the Eastern Pyrenees, in order to prepare a sufficient number of works for the Paris exhibition. The artist had already become somewhat familiar with the region in 1918–1919. At that time, she visited Lefèbvre, who was undergoing treatment for a lung condition, in sanatoriums in the Pyrenees. It was then that she produced beautiful mountain landscapes and views of the town of Prades. Perhaps this was also the route she took when, earlier, before the First World War, she travelled to Catalonia.

In 1920, however, neither the plein air session in Collioure nor the exhibition in Paris took place. Raymond Lefèbvre, as an activist on the French left, left France illegally at the beginning of August, travelling to Moscow for the Second Congress of the Comintern. In October, the ship on which the French delegation had left Soviet Russia was lost in the Barents Sea. Lefèbvre and his companions perished. News of their deaths reached France in December, plunging Muter into a deep depression. Her dreams of a happy future alongside her beloved were shattered forever.

Friends and family tried to help her. The writer Henri Barbusse offered her a position at the magazine *Clarté*. He also invited her to his summer house in Le Trayas on the Côte d’Azur. It was there that she created the beautiful series of seascapes *Red Rocks*. She stayed in Collioure as a teacher of painting and French to a wealthy American woman, Ms Scofield. Over the next few years, Muter’s holidays in Collioure were always busy and creative. She was accompanied there initially by Ms Scofield, and from 1927 to 1929 by the German painter and pupil, Anta Rupflin (1895–1987).

Collioure: an artistic Tower of Babel

The charming harbour of Collioure has been known since ancient times. The silhouette of the bell tower – a former lighthouse, topped with a distinctive red dome and attached to the 17th-century Church of Our Lady of the Angels – has become the town’s symbol. These historic buildings, scattered like giant building blocks along a picturesque bay filled with water that shimmers in shades of turquoise or ultramarine, depending on the weather, have gone down in art history as the cradle of Fauvism.

Captivated by the unique, one-of-a-kind light, Henri Matisse painted works there that were a veritable explosion of colour. He was joined in this by André Derain. Alongside Matisse and Derain, other artists of various nationalities also painted there (including Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, Charles Rennie McIntosh and Hans Purrman). Among the Poles, Jean (Jan) Peské had been visiting Collioure since 1903. His ambition was to establish a museum of modern art there, which he succeeded in doing. Simon Mondzain (Szymon Mondszajn) and Roman Kramsztyk also painted there. The beach surrounding the bay and the nearby cafés played the same role for the international artistic community as the famous La Rotonde, Le Dôme or La Coupole in the Montparnasse district of Paris.

Mela Muter and her plein air paintings

Muter was enchanted by this town, which stretches around a circular, almost completely enclosed bay connected to the Mediterranean Sea by a narrow isthmus, as evidenced by her numerous paintings. Some of them depict the harbour bay itself, where a travelling circus with its wagons used to set up camp in the summer – for example, ‘Landscape from Collioure’ (c. 1925, the collection of Bolesław and Lina Nawrocki).

‘Mediterranean Landscape’ shows the bay at the very centre of the composition. The artist looks out over it from the hills that dominate the harbour from the south-east. To the right, the massive, cubist-style blocks of the royal castle tower up. It was precisely in front of this castle that, during the interwar period, small fishing boats setting out to catch anchovies would moor. In the background, the slopes of the Pyrenees are visible, with the Church of Our Lady of the Angels and its bell tower nestled at their foot.

Based on a combination of two complementary colours—yellow and blue, and their various shades—the composition — is characterised by a distinct tendency to schematise the observed landscape and transpose it into geometric figures, chiefly triangles and rectangles. Clearly, Mela Muter observed Paul Cézanne’s paintings very closely and drew conclusions from them, which she subsequently developed in her own works.

The artist also painted views of steep, sharply lit streets, with a gutter running down the centre and narrow steps leading up to the houses, often brought to life by the presence of bustling human figures ( A Street in Collioure , c. 1925, Villa La Fleur collection). Meanwhile, the bounty of the sea caught by local fishermen inspired her still lifes (e.g. Still Life with Fish ) , painted in impasto (a technique involving the application of paint in thick, raised layers using a brush or palette knife), with a rich texture. This composition, too, is based on a juxtaposition of complementary colours: the blue of the bowl’s enamel and the yellow of the sliced lemon, creating a vibrant interplay of colours that captivates the viewer’s eye.

Collioure, Meli Muter’s beloved town

Muter wrote tenderly of her beloved corner of the world and its colours: ‘Collioure, with its charming fishing harbour, shaped like a ripe fruit, full of multicoloured little boats, with its 11th-century watchtower converted into a church spire, with the mighty walls of the Templar castle stretching along the seashore, with its reddish, yellowish, violet-coloured hills, upon which an invisible, wise hand has scattered here and there small clusters of trees or pink-hued farmsteads, all dominated by the Vauban fortress, perched on the highest hill like a crown. [...]. It would seem that nature had taken particular care to gather in this place, with the utmost artistry, all the elements of a masterpiece, and, weary of her efforts, had neglected other regions’.

Mela Muter’s holidays in Collioure

Whilst her first holiday in Collioure, spent in the company of Ms Scoffield—who remains a mystery to researchers—seems to have been a way for Mela Muter to earn a living during a difficult period in her life, her holiday stays in the years 1927–1929, when she arrived in the company of Anty Rupflin, her family and her artist friends, were probably a time of mental rest and respite for her. This was a time before the financial worries associated with the Great Depression, which reached Europe in the early 1930s and brought the wild, joyful 1920s to an abrupt end.