Footnotes

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Barbara Brus-Malinowska.

Provenance
Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne, no. 1434.
Galerie Bargera, Cologne, no. 15.
Anon. sale, Dom Aukcyjny Unicum, Warsaw, 30 November 1997, lot 9.
Private collection, London (acquired at the above sale).

Exhibited
(Possibly) Cologne, Galerie Gmurzynska, Mela Muter, Bilder, Aquarelle und Zeichnungen, 20 November 1965 - 10 January 1966.

Mela Muter is regarded as the first professional Jewish female painter in Poland. Largely self-taught, she formed part of a rich coterie of Polish artists – among them Moïse Kisling – who relocated to Paris, attracted to its civil freedoms and bohemian lifestyle. There she developed a highly individualistic style resting upon a diversity of Modern and historical influences. At the time she painted Rue avec clocher d'église, Muter had suffered a slew of tragedies, including the deaths of her father and son, her close friend Rainer Maria Rilke, and her partner Raymond Lefebvre, a social activist who died under mysterious circumstances at the Communist International in Moscow in 1920. She sought sanctuary in a newly optimistic artistic style.

In the present work, Muter evokes the town's quiet splendour with lively brushstrokes and glowing colours that bespeak the joy of observation. In its twisting amalgamation of curvilinear forms – echoing the Cubist leanings of her friends Albert Gleizes and Gino Severini – the city street seems to breathe and move with a life of its own. The spatial distortion and rushing verticality of the buildings, along with the splashes of chromatic intensity in the teal door and lime-green accents of the tenement façade, betray her admiration of El Greco's Spanish cityscapes. The force of the bright afternoon ripples through the scene, the sky rendered with broken strokes of vivid azure, criss-crossed with powerlines that evoke an aura around the church tower. Thick textures abound in her expressive handling of oil paint across the dappled surface of her support, as she leaves portions unpainted to denote light, in the style of the Fauves.

Muter became immediately successful upon her move to Paris, exhibiting regularly at the Salons, thence gaining international renown. She painted portraits of central artistic figures, including Ambroise Vollard, Diego Rivera and Erik Satie. Throughout her life she remained staunchly devoted to social activism, creating pacifist illustrations for the leftist periodical Clarté, and founding a society for the protection of disadvantaged people at the Polish borders on the Oder and the Nysa. In 1965, she donated a significant amount of her collection to the Galerie Gmurzynska in Cologne.