Hans Mattis Teutsch was a complex personality: on the one hand a painter, graphic artist and sculptor, on the other an art teacher, theoretician and poet – we see him today as an important member of the avant-garde. For all his contemporariness and internationality, the artist, almost completely and unjustly forgotten today, was always an unmistakable individualist in his artistic language.

The small but growing volume of literature about his life and work regularly mentions his personal links with the Munich group of artists known as Der Blaue Reiter. (Fig. 1.) The profound influence primarily of Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc on his artistic development and his ideas about art-theory appear just as frequently. (Fig. 2.) What interests us here is: do these reports and interpretations merely belong in the realm of legend, as attempts to popularise a largely unknown figure and associate him with famous names, or can these hypotheses be justified with facts?

We know almost nothing about his life, his personal contacts and artistic activities during his studies in Munich, where Mattis Teutsch attended the Royal Bavarian Academy of Pictorial Arts from 1902 until 1905. (Fig. 3.) He was born on 13 August 1884 in Brassó, Transylvania, and spoke fluent German when he came to Munich at the age of 18 to broaden his art studies, but whether he ever met Alexej Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc or Gabriele Münter here, we simply do not know. After leaving Munich, he moved to Paris, Berlin, and Budapest, and finally back to Brassó, but there is also no proof that he had any contact with anyone in Der Blaue Reiter group, though this is often claimed. The few sources that we have to date remain silent on this point.

The only thing we have is an interview between Mattis Teutsch and Stefan Ilarie Chendi in the Brassó newspaper "Pe drumuri noi" in 1929, in which the artist mentions a few members of Der Blaue Reiter in a brief remark: "The first appearance of Expressionism is in Kandinsky’s colourist symphonies. Marc Chagall, Jawlensky and Franz Marc are also great Expressionists who appeal to me."¹ This taciturn and introverted artist makes no further reference to his relationship with any artists of the group Der Blaue Reiter.

It is at least characteristic of his partialities and his own interests that he never mentions the Expressionists of the Brücke school (Kirchner, Heckel, Pechstein, Schmitt-Rottluff) in connection with the other Expressionists. For Mattis Teutsch, who came from a rural region of Eastern Europe, the south German variant of Expressionism, strongly influenced by the Russians Jawlensky, Kandinsky and Marianne von Werefkin, was obviously nearer to his heart than the urban, exotic Expressionism of the Dresden and Berlin Brücke. He found their nervous figure style much less appealing than the colour-intensive landscape motifs and rhythmic abstraction in pure, opulent colours that are so characteristic of the artists of Der Blaue Reiter, even before this group was founded in 1911.

While we may agree with the Romanian art historian Mircea Deac that Mattis Teutsch "was not particularly interested either in the Expressionism of the Brücke nor in Surrealism ... but he felt especially drawn to the group Der Blaue Reiter and in particular to Kandinsky and Klee," there is no proof for the second part of his claim that "Mattis Teutsch was a close friend of Marc."² For this friendship, even for any personal contact, there is absolutely no evidence, even if Mattis Teutsch’s paintings, primarily from the period 1919–1922, seem to be closely related in composition and colour to those of Franz Marc.

Another hypothesis claims, "The new impulses, particularly those coming from Kandinsky, were also influential in Mattis Teutsch’s development."³ This can hardly be denied, but the author of this claim presents no evidence for the effects of this influence. Another Romanian commentator, the art historian Gheorghe Vida, has just as little proof for his claims in an article about the Munich years of Mattis Teutsch, in which he writes: "Kandinsky’s personality and work were well-known to H. Mattis Teutsch, and it is no exaggeration to say that the methods of the two artists developed along almost identical lines from certain forms unique to ‘Secession’ to an Expressionism that I would describe as musical. Although Kandinsky’s high level of abstraction was to lead to an independent form of expression, without any allusion to external reality (...), Mattis Teutsch never attained pure abstraction, and certain visual schemata or patterns were, as in nature, extended musically according to a harmonic, melodic rhythm without excessive exuberance. While Kandinsky could be compared to Schönberg or Stravinsky, Mattis Teutsch tends to remain closer to Bach in his logical, contrapunctal picture structure.⁴

These considerations about a comparable, synaesthetic musicality in the Expressionism of Kandinsky and Mattis Teutsch are as revealing as Vida’s observation that the trees in the polyphonically composed landscape paintings (1916–1919) of Mattis Teutsch "play the same role as the horses in Franz Marc’s works."⁵ (Fig. 4.) However apposite such observations might be in individual cases, they are no more than remarks concerning the plausibility of form analogies and style comparisons. Even the fact that Hans Mattis Teutsch shared an exhibition in July and August 1921 with Paul Klee in Herwarth Walden’s Berlin gallery Der Sturm is no proof that he had any personal relationship with this Swiss member of Der Blaue Reiter, who was already teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar at the time of the exhibition. Herwarth Walden’s decisions about which artists to exhibit in his gallery were made mostly alone and according to social and opportunistic criteria.

Two years after this exhibition in the Sturm gallery, which had done so much for the spread and renown of the art of Der Blaue Reiter school before the First World War, the gallery’s magazine published on its cover page a wood-engraving by Mattis Teutsch with the title Der Blaue Reiter (Der Sturm, No. 11, 1923, cover page and p. 156). The wood-engraving goes back to two paintings with the same title that also appeared in 1923: an oil study (Cat. P 105) and a large-format oil painting (Cat. P 124). These two paintings with the title Der Blaue Reiter undoubtedly represent a homage to this group of artists, which he estimated so highly, even if the formal vocabulary of these two pictures has moved from an expressionist to a constructivist language. Kandinsky and Jawlensky also took this path in these years, whereas Franz Marc, who was killed in the war in 1916, had already introduced cubist and constructivist composition elements into his more strongly built compositions as early as 1912, with all their expressive colouring.⁶ (Fig. 5.)

Just like these two paintings by Mattis Teutsch, a third picture painted in 1923, and just as colourful, quotes in strongly abstract hieroglyphs the picture motif of equestrian battle with long spears so characteristic of Kandinsky’s compositions after 1909 (Fig. 6., Fig. 7.), (Cat. P 106). This third picture seems to deal more with the farewell to the Expressionist form language and splendid colour of Der Blaue Reiter and to make its echo reverberate than would be the case if it were an initial move by the artist to confront himself with the work of Jawlensky, Kandinsky and Marc. For, after these three works, Mattis Teutsch turns quickly and decisively towards a synthetic constructivism, which also includes organic forms, but which completely abandons the expressionism of the past decade, which was represented by Der Blaue Reiter school.

Yet even in the second half of the 1920s and the early 1930s, as Hans Mattis Teutsch developed the idiom of a self-willed constructivism stemming from the human body, he still, in a certain way, remained faithful to Kandinsky. As the Romanian art historian Gudrun-Liane Ittu assures us, he seems to have been "well acquainted with the writings of Worringer, Kandinsky and Klee, which he used as the basis of his own (theoretical) work, the Kunstideologie (art ideology)."⁷ She says that the terminology used by Mattis Teutsch is very similar to that of his predecessors, even if the brief texts in this ideologically-based composition textbook are more aphoristic than didactic, and the design theory relies more on the expressive quality of the illustrations than on the written word.

Mircea Deac explains that the first part of the Kunstideologie, in which the author analyses the psychic effects produced by geometric picture constructions in the viewer, was written under the influence of Kandinsky’s Bauhaus book Punkt und Linie zu Fläche ("From Point and Line to Area").⁸ Deac names the art historian Wilhelm Worringer as a mediator between the two artists’ philosophies. Worringer’s article Abstraktion und Einfühlung ("Abstraction and Insight"), which had a great impact on many artists at the time, was published in 1908/9 by the Munich Pieper company, which also published Kandinsky’s thesis on Abstraction "On the Spiritual in Art" and the "Blaue Reiter Almanach", edited by Franz Marc and Kandinsky, in 1912. Abstraktion und Einfühlung was read with great approval not only by the artists of Der Blaue Reiter. According to Deac, the book also had a profound influence on Hans Mattis Teutsch, since Worringer’s theory of abstraction reinforced and supported his own "arguments for emphasising the interpretation of form and the perception of art as the visualisation of the relationship between man and the outside world." In particular, according to Deac, Mattis Teutsch tackled the subject of "Worringer’s claim that abstract art is the result of a great inner restlessness in man caused by the phenomena of the outside world."⁹

In addition to Worringer’s more art-historical thesis, it was, according to other commentators, primarily the occult theories of theosophy and anthroposophy, as well as German mysticism (Meister Eckhart and Jakob Böhme), that constituted the third factor between Kandinsky and Mattis Teutsch during their joint time in Munich. In the European "art centre, which left the deepest traces in Teutsch’s work," there prevailed in intellectual circles, as Gudrun-Liane Ittu writes, "profound dissatisfaction with industrialisation, materialism and positivism," which expressed itself in the readings of the German mystics, the books of Buddhism and Hinduism, of Madame Blavatsky and of theosophy and anthroposophy. "Both the pictorial work of Mattis Teutsch and his theoretical articles are deeply influenced by anthroposophical ideas, a fact that was proved by the Hungarian art historian Krisztina Passuth. Blavatsky and Steiner were read diligently in intellectual circles in Munich, so that Teutsch was most probably acquainted with their writings during his student days."¹⁰ But such theories about this German-speaking artist from Brassó must also remain speculation until they can be proved.

One thing seems certain: Hans Mattis Teutsch, with his artistic creativity and this way of thinking, belongs to "a ‘spiritualist’ family of artists, which also included Franz Marc, August Macke, Wassily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Kazimir Malewich, Piet Mondrian and many other important names."¹¹ This very general statement is probably true, even if we cannot be sure about the period and extent of his reading and the literary sources of his artistic philosophy.

Since we can only speculate about the relationship between Hans Mattis Teutsch and the artists, works and writings of Der Blaue Reiter until new documents turn up, the conclusion reached by Gheorghe Vida is probably the only one justified at present: "Since Der Blaue Reiter group was not founded until 1911, he could not have had any immediate contact with this crucial manifestation of Expressionism because he had already left Munich in 1905. Nevertheless, the artist had an opportunity in 1913 to see a great international exhibition in Budapest, organised by Herwarth Walden and called a ‘Post-impressionist Exhibition’, with numerous works by Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, Marianne von Werefkin, Archipenko, Delaunay and other famous names of the European avant-garde."¹² Mattis Teutsch visited this exhibition and obviously gave it close attention. A copy of the exhibition catalogue, found among the artist’s possessions, contains remarks written by the artist. This can be seen today in the Art History Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest.

Before dealing with the extent to which the paintings of Der Blaue Reiter exhibited there influenced Mattis Teutsch’s further artistic development, we should consider the impulses he may have received in Munich for his artistic development while he was a student at the Royal Bavarian Academy of Pictorial Arts from 1902 until 1905. (Fig. 9.)

To recapitulate: In 1896 – i.e., six years before the considerably younger Mattis Teutsch – Kandinsky had come from Moscow to Munich, (Fig. 8.) where he met his compatriots, the Russians Marianne von Werefkin and Alexei Jawlensky. (Fig. 10.) A close friendship soon grew up between them and the newcomer. Together with Paris, Munich still counted at the turn of the century as the European art metropolis, even if its star had already begun to decline. Certainly, for would-be artists from Central and Eastern Europe, Munich and its Royal Bavarian Academy of Pictorial Arts had lost nothing of their attraction at this time. There was a considerable number of Hungarians, both students and teachers, at the Academy in the Bavarian capital. The close relation between Hungarian art and the Munich Academy is shown by the fact that 335 Hungarian artists studied here between 1809 and 1945. The decision by Mattis Teutsch to register at the Munich Academy following his studies at the arts and crafts school in Budapest was therefore part of a long and customary process. Three professors of Hungarian origin at the Academy were Gyula Benczúr (1844–1920), Sándor von Wagner (1838–1919) and Sándor von Liezen-Mayer (1839–1898). These three academic representatives of the Hungarian artists’ colony in Munich, which had more than a hundred members at the turn of the century, were at first completely dedicated to the Piloty school of costume-adorned historical painting that dominated official Munich painting in the 1870s and 1880s. Von Wagner and von Liezen-Mayer remained faithful to the legacy of their previously so respected teacher until well into the 1890s, and were referred to sarcastically in an article from 1898 on "Official Bavarian State Art" as "mummified relics of the Piloty school."¹³ Gyula Benczúr, on the other hand, left Munich in 1883 to take up a Professorship at the national school of painting in Budapest. After becoming a director of this school, Benczúr "steered the fortunes and development of Hungarian painting with dictatorial authority." He imported the academic historical painting of the Munich school to Budapest. Applied to the national themes of Hungarian history, this historical painting style, imported from the Bavarian capital, swamped "the rooms of the Budapest art gallery with their works at the turn of the century."¹⁴ The so-called Munich Realism was a great success with the Hungarian public, even though the first signs of a completely new artistic movement were visible on the art horizon in the last decade of the 19^th century. The triumphal advance of art nouveau, which had the whole of Europe in its grip around 1900, did not stop at the gates of Budapest or even of Brassó.

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