Known as a great traveller who travelled regularly to Brittany, Spain, visited Switzerland, Italy and Germany, as well as various corners of France - Mela Muter took a liking to Collioure in the 1920s, a tiny port at the foot of the Pyrenees, close to the Spanish border. She used to go there for busy painting holidays, succumbing to the charm of the unusual light of the place.

Mela Muter - plans and dreams dashed
Maintained in cool tones, the painting entitled 'Mediterranean Landscape' depicts a bay and harbour in a small village in the south of France, Collioure. 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. The purchase must have at least provided some relief from her dire financial situation. Thus, her beloved corner repaid her long-standing love.

Mela Muter wrote on 29 January 1920 to her beloved, Raymond Lefèbvre, that Mr Lapauze (Henri Lapauze, art critic and curator of the Petit Palais Museum in Paris) had offered her an exhibition in the autumn. So she planned to spend the spring and summer 'in the open air' in Collioure in the Eastern Pyrenees to prepare a sufficient number of works for the Paris show. The artist had already become somewhat familiar with the region in 1918-1919, when she visited Lefèbvre, who was being treated for lung disease, in the Pyrenees sanatoriums. Beautiful mountain landscapes and views of the town of Prades were created then. Perhaps this was also the route she took when she travelled to Catalonia earlier, even before the First War.

In 1920, however, neither the plein-air show in Collioure nor the exhibition in Paris took place. Raymond Lefèbvre, as an activist of 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 left Soviet Russia crashed in the Barents Sea. Lefèbvre and his companions perished. The news of their death reached France in December, plunging Muter into a deep depression. Dreams of a happy future at the side of her beloved were shattered forever.

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

Collioure the artistic Tower of Babel
The charming port of Collioure has been known since antiquity. The silhouette of the bell tower, a former lighthouse topped by a distinctive red dome, attached to the church of Our Lady of the Angels, built in the 17th century, has become the symbol of the village. The historic buildings, spread out like giant blocks over a picturesque bay filled with water the colour of liquid 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 paintings there that were a veritable explosion of colour. He was assisted in this by André Derain. In addition to Matisse and Derain, other artists of various nationalities painted there, such as Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, Charles Rennie McIntosh and Hans Purrman. Of the Poles, the following travelled to Collioure from as early as 1903. Jean (Jan) Peské. His ambition was to establish a museum of modern art here, which came true. Simon Mondzain (Szymon Mondszajn) and Roman Kramsztyk also painted there. The beach surrounding the bay and the nearby cafés fulfilled the same role towards the international art 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 village, which stretches around a circular, almost completely enclosed bay connected to the Mediterranean by a narrow isthmus, as evidenced by her numerous paintings. Some depict the harbour bay itself, where a circus with carts was stationed in the summer - for example, 'Landscape of Collioure' (c. 1925, collection of Bolesław and Lina Nawrocki).

"Mediterranean Landscape" shows the bay at the very centre of the composition. Muter looks at it from the hills that dominate the harbour from the south-east. On the right, the massive, cubic blocks of the royal castle are piled up. It was in front of it that small fishing boats setting out to catch anchovies were moored between the wars. In the depths, the slopes of the Pyrenees loom, with the Church of Our Lady of the Angels with its bell tower stuck at their feet.

Based on the juxtaposition of two complementary colours - yellow and blue and their various shades - the composition is marked by a marked tendency to schematise the observed landscape and to transpose it into geometric figures, mainly triangles and rectangles. Apparently, Mela Muter observed Paul Cézanne's paintings very carefully and drew conclusions from them, which she then developed in her works.

She also painted views of steeply lit streets, with a gutter in the middle and narrow steps leading up to the houses, often enlivened by the presence of bustling human figures ( Street in Collioure , c. 1925, Villa La Fleur collection). In turn, the gifts of the sea caught by local fishermen inspired her still lifes (e.g. Still Life with Fish ), painted with impasto (a technique involving the application of paint in a thick, convex layer with a brush or spatula), with a rich texture. And this composition is based on the juxtaposition of complementary colours: the blue of the enamel bowl and the yellow of the sliced lemon, resulting in a vibrancy and sonority of colours that entices the viewer's eye.

Collioure the beloved city of Mela Muter
Muter wrote affectionately of her beloved corner and its colours: "Collioure with its charming fishing port, rounded like a ripe fruit, full of multicoloured boats, with its 11th century church watchtower transformed into a tower, with its mighty walls of the Templar castle stretching along the seashore, with its reddish, yellowish, violet-coloured hills, on which an invisible, clever hand has attached here and there little bouquets of trees or pink enclosures, all dominated by the fortress of Vauban, located on the highest hill, like a crown. [...]. It would seem that nature took special care to gather all the elements of a masterpiece in this place, with all the artistry, and, bored by her efforts, neglected the other surroundings".

Mela Muter's holiday in Collioure
While the first holiday in Collioure spent in the company of Ms Scoffield, still mysterious to researchers, seems to have been a way for Mela Muter to earn money during a difficult period in her life, the holiday stays between 1927 and 1929, when she came in the company of Anta Rupflin, her family and artist friends, were probably a moment of mental rest and respite for her. It was a time before the material worries associated with the Great Depression, which hit Europe in the early 1930s and brought a brutal end to the frenetic, joyous 1920s.