Mela Muttermilch. Photograph published in the magazine "Feminal" on June 25, 1911. Mela Muter is the pseudonym used by Maria Melania Mutermilch (April 26, 1876 - May 14, 1967), the first professional Jewish painter in Poland. She lived most of her life in France.
|
|
She was a regular participant in the Floral Games, where she was awarded prizes in 1878, 1882 and 1891. In 1909, she was the first woman to chair a poetry contest. A journalist as well, she wrote for the periodical, La Renaixença, and the magazine, Feminal.
|
|
Domènech contributed to several publications including La Pàtria and Camp de Tarragona using the pseudonym Josep Miralles (not to be confused with Bishop Josep Miralles i Sbert (1860-1947)).Maria Domènech Escoté al Diccionari Biogràfic de Dones In 1910, Doménech settled in Barcelona with her husband, a doctor from Tarragona, Francesc Cañellas, and their two children. There she started her social activism and collaborated with more magazines: Or i Grana, La Tralla, Feminal, El Poble Català, Renaixement, La Veu de Catalunya. For Feminal (a feminist publication), she had become a local correspondent when she lived in Tarragona, and when the Cañellas family moved to Barcelona, she became a collaborator with the magazine, which disappeared in 1917.
|
|
In 1914 she held a renowned exhibition at Sala Parés, and Barcelona's press qualified her as a "distinguished woman" and "celebrated artist", which Carmen Karr (aka Joana Romeu in Feminal) found deeply annoying. Vidal died of the Spanish flu in 1918. She wrote her will on October 12 and left all her belongings to her single sisters. She did not state her profession, as that information was not needed in Spanish documents of that period.
|
|
Vidal went back to Barcelona with a lot of finished artworks and a feminist mentality. She met Carmen Karr, Dolors Monserdà and Francesca Bonnemaison, and started preparing several exhibitions. Pèl & Ploma magazine published several of her artworks, and she held an exhibition again at Sala Parés. On the other hand, while her family life was crumbling she reached the best stages of her artistic life, becoming the illustrator of Feminal magazine and holding several exhibitions in Madrid and Barcelona.
|
|
Throughout the years, she was also an active writer. In 1915, Doménech published a collection of poems and narratives entitled Verso i prosa, as well as the novels Neus (1914), Contrallum (1917), Golden Toads (1919) and Inheritance (1925). Doménech collaborated with the Barcelona Institute of Social Reforms (1918) and gave speeches on the condition of women, work at home, and workers and women's professions at the Ateneu Barcelonès and other institutions such as the Agrupació Feminal and the Social Museum of Barcelona. In 1923 she attended commissions in Switzerland for the "study of institutions" aimed at the protection, moral progress and material well-being of all workers, not just women.
|
|