Actual name: Maria Melania Mutermilch nee Klingsland. Born in 1876, Warsaw, died in 1967, Paris. Muter came from an affluent Jewish family assimilated in Poland. Throughout its history the family had remained loyal to the Polish independence tradition, however, Muter she spent most of her life abroad, primarily in France. She maintained loose contacts with Polish artists in Paris, who were a part of the international École de Paris circle, though she did exhibit with them (e.g. at the Galerie du Musée Crillon). She attended a yearlong course at Milosz Kotarbinski's Drawing and Painting School for Women in Warsaw. In 1901 she departed for Paris. Years later this would turn out to be a permanent resettlement, and Muter accepted French citizenship in 1927. Once there she attended classes at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie de la Grande Chaumiére, though she did neither regularly as she was a young mother at the time. Generally, in an academic sense, she was self-taught. In 1902 she began to present her works at the annual Parisian Salons; she also sent works to be exhibited at a number of domestic group exhibitions (held in Krakow, Lviv, and Warsaw). A series of solo exhibitions began with a presentation at Barcelona's Galeria José Dalmau in 1912, and she became a member of the Parisian Societé Nationale des Beaux-Arts the same year. She painted a great deal and presented her work often in Paris, less regularly in Munich and Pittsburgh. She had important solo exhibitions at the Chéron Gallery (1918) and Druet Gallery (1926 and 1928) in Paris and in Poland at the Towarzystwo Zachety Sztuk Pieknych / Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts (1923). Her personality was shaped by broad and direct contacts with members of the Parisian artistic and intellectual elite. The painter's acquaintances included Paris-based Polish artists and authors like Leopold Gottlieb, Wladyslaw Reymont, and Leopold.
