In the academic year 1900–1901, the 16-year-old Hans Mattis Teutsch attended the woodcarving department of the Brassó woodcraft school. Already in this first year of professional training in Brassó, the still very young Mattis Teutsch was obviously influenced by art nouveau. Here, the wood-sculptor-to-be produced for his final examination a hand-carved decorative plate, combining folkloristic motifs with typical art nouveau features. (Fig. 11.) The rim of the plate consists of a luxuriant, artistically carved garland of flowers. The blossoms and leaves seem to be entwined in the stem, which is a spiral of energy-filled lines. The centre of the plate, which is taken up by the face of a young woman, is also in the form of a relief. Her face, covered in smiles, seems to be introverted – just like the smile of an Udine, Russalka or Ophelia, garlanded by flowers and shoots, gazing up from mysterious depths. Both the magical picture motif and the floral shapes demonstrate the extent to which Mattis Teutsch was already acquainted with the new art nouveau of the European metropolises.

We can only guess at why this Brassó arts and crafts student was acquainted with these modern design tendencies at such an early stage. In his hometown, Mattis Teutsch received instruction from Friedrich Miess (1854–1935) and Arthur Coulin (1869–1916). As painter and teacher, Coulin was an enthusiastic disciple of art nouveau, so he was probably responsible for the orientation of his student.

Since typical characteristics of art nouveau (such as the emphasis on the flatness of the picture and a dispensation of depth, perspective and physical plasticity, the blending of figure and ground, the pervasion of human and floral figures in an arabesque picture ornamentation, the rhythm of vibrating and intertwined curvatures, the light-dark contrasts, the colourful illuminating power of a decorative flat style, as well as the elegiac mood and the conjuring-up of a paradisic unity of man and nature) had a strong echo in the wood carvings, water-colours, oil paintings and sculptures produced by Mattis Teutsch from 1915 on, the carved plate is an important proof of the early and close association between Mattis Teutsch and art nouveau. This example of his woodcarving art can partly explain the forming of his personal style, even if the development towards his own very individual interpretation of art nouveau and the symbolic art of the Nabis in the years between 1901 and 1916 is, because of the relative lack of documented works from this period, not clear.

Following his studies in Brassó, Mattis Teutsch registered at the Budapest vocational high school, where he studied from 1901 to 1902. The province of Transylvania, which today belongs to Romania, and the town of Brassó, where the artist was born, had been Hungarian since 1867. Following the lost war, Hungary ceded Transylvania to the Kingdom of Romania in 1918. But for the would-be artist, it was natural that he should continue his training in Budapest, the capital of Hungary. Although art nouveau had still not advanced to the prevailing art form in the Hungarian metropolis in 1901, it had already begun to make an enormous impact on arts and crafts, printing and architecture.

One of the features of the Hungarian variant of international art nouveau, which since the end of the 1880s had been appearing ever more frequently in Budapest, is the combination of lineaments and curvatures with motifs of folk art, a combination that is also shown in the ornamental plate produced by Mattis Teutsch. Samples of the new style were to be seen at the Hungarian millennium exhibition in 1896, as well as in the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts, which was completed in the same year. (Fig. 12.) This museum, together with its exhibits, must have been well known to the student of the Budapest vocational high school.

The reconstruction of the arts and crafts museum, which also housed the vocational high school, represents a turning-point in Hungarian architecture, being the first large museum in the western world that, despite its mixture of archaic, oriental, Chinese and Turkish decorative motifs, is not built in a historic style but rather attempts to articulate a new national language of form. Its architect, Ödön Lechner, who designed two other spectacular large buildings for Budapest (the Geographical Institute and the Postal Savings Bank of 1899–1901), in his attempt to found a "Hungarian form language" liberated from historicism and eclecticism, combined the most modern steel construction with colourfully patterned brick façades and interior decorations that give the rational room structure an atmosphere of fantasy equal to the buildings of Antonio Gaudí. One of the first art nouveau buildings in Budapest was built by Emil Vidor in 1901–1902, the Haus Egger (today: Városligeti fasor 24) (Fig. 13.), which adds the Hungarian will to stylise to the Parisian flair of art nouveau. Another was Haus Walko (today: Aulich utca 3), built by Kálmán Albert Körössy in 1901. The richly decorated façade of this house, with its floral-organic curvatures, the restless tendrils of the ornamentation and the gloriously coloured wall tiling, which shows an elegant Eve in a wide sweeping dress plucking the apple, demonstrate the close relationship between the building and its art nouveau contemporaries in Western Europe. In 1903, when Mattis Teutsch had already left Budapest for Munich, Emil Vidor built another villa, Haus Bedõ, which represents a high point of the sometimes effusively richly embellished art nouveau in Hungary and demonstrates an exemplary synthesis of architecture and art. This building, like its predecessors, bear witness to the ideal of the complete and collective work of arts and crafts at the end of the 19^th century. Arts and crafts took on an important role in the realisation of this ideal.

During the art nouveau period, the status of arts and crafts rose enormously, so that it came to be considered as the equal of the so-called free art forms of painting and sculpture (the British equivalent was even known as the Arts and Crafts movement). This stylistic movement of the turn of the century would bring all design forms together and thus break the bounds of art in its restriction to the traditional media. With his carved plate of 1901, therefore, Mattis Teutsch was in good company with far more important members of the art nouveau movement, who had turned to arts and crafts with emphatic enthusiasm. These included the painter József Rippl-Rónai, certainly one of the most important artists in Hungary at the turn of the century. Rippl-Rónai, who was a member of the Parisian artistic circle of the Nabis before he returned to Budapest in 1902, designed complete interiors in both France and Hungary. Of the artists of the Nabis group, who had dedicated themselves to arts and crafts in addition to their painting and sculpture, this Hungarian concentrated on the decoration of ceramic objects.(Fig. 14.) On 15 January 1897, he wrote to the first director of the newly founded Budapest arts and crafts museum, Jenõ Radisics: "In May I shall have completed my furniture, and in summer my tableware, 300 pieces in all."¹⁵ The motifs of the tableware, designed for Count Tivadar Andrássy, differ considerably in colour and form. Most of the plates have arabesque plant motifs and strongly contoured leaf compositions that cover the entire surface, and are thus similar to Mattis Teutsch’s carved plate of three years later. Whether Mattis Teutsch had seen these plates, which were exhibited in the Budapest arts and crafts museum in 1898, or whether he was acquainted with a wood relief created in 1895 by another Nabis, Aristide Maillol, a friend of Rippl-Rónai (Fig. 15.), we just do not know. In this bas-relief, a dancer and her softly flowing dress carved with energetic curves, are fitted into the circular disc of the wooden piece. Although the design attempts of the young Mattis Teutsch to combine a female figure with the shape of a plate are nowhere near as successful or complex in their realisation as with Maillol, there are conspicuous similarities of motif and form both between the two reliefs and between Rippl-Rónai’s painted tableware and Mattis Teutsch’s carved plate.

With his final examination piece for his first training course in Brassó, the student demonstrated that he was in accord with the latest art fashion, which makes it seem even more astounding that no other work from his periods of study in Budapest or Munich demonstrating his further involvement with art nouveau is known to us. Not until he was in Paris between 1906 and 1908 does Mattis Teutsch appear to have turned again to the decorative and strongly contoured flat-style art of the Nabis, while the Munich "Jugendstil" (the German equivalent of art nouveau) seems to have left him completely untouched. At least, this is the only conclusion we can draw from the few documents that still exist from his time at the Bavarian Art Academy. It is tempting to speculate that this break with his early attempts at Jugendstil had something to do with the reorientation in his training. From his training in Brassó and the Budapest school of arts and crafts, the real domain of Jugendstil, Mattis Teutsch turned his attention to "high" academic art in Munich. At the Academy there, he was now to be trained as a real sculptor.

In arts and crafts and in the new architecture, in graphical illustration, in advertising and dress design, Jugendstil in Munich at the turn of the century was just as prevailing as in Budapest. In public and private life in the Bavarian metropolis, Jugendstil possibly made an even greater impact than in Budapest, whose appearance, like that of Munich, was to change radically as a result of the art nouveau invasion after 1900.

In 1896, the first edition of the magazine Jugend (Youth) appeared in Munich, giving its name to a whole new art movement and its connected lifestyle. The Bavarian capital was seized by the new style, as was the rest of Europe: "It is impossible to say how many shops closed and how many workshops and furniture shops were founded. ... It was no coincidence that this new art was more at home in applied art than in pure art. It came about as a courageous reaction to the everlasting Biedermeier, Empire, and Renaissance furniture and its industrial production, it was artistic handiwork, and it spread to all areas of art. The new style breathed new life into areas that had fallen asleep, and bridged the gap that separated the muse-besotted artists from the simple workshop inhabitants."¹⁶

Only in the Royal Bavarian Academy of Pictorial Arts was a different wind blowing. In 1902, the same year that Mattis Teutsch began his studies in the sculpture class, the Munich painter, designer and later famous architect Peter Behrens, who had made a name for himself with the new style even before 1900, dared to apply for the setting-up of a master class for applied art at the Academy and the Arts and Crafts school in Munich. His application provoked a great uproar among the professors of the Academy. His request, according to the conservative professors, was targeted at "establishing the so-called modern style, pursued by himself, as a fully-qualified style with equal rights at one of the state art schools." Behrens’s way of ignoring "all the claims of style history, and his low esteem of the conservatories of serious studies… is an intolerable testimony to his mediocre talent in combination with the greatest overvaluation of his ability."¹⁷

Some of Behrens’s graphic designs such as the coloured woodcut "Schmetterling mit Wasserlilien" (Butterfly with Waterlilies) of 1897 (Fig. 16.), where the east-Asian inspiration is immediately visible, certainly have stylistic similarities with Mattis Teutsch’s carved wooden plate in the art nouveau ornamentation. Also the graphically linear curvatures and horizontal waves, as well as the vertical rows of trees (Fig. 17.), which in their harmonious interplay of formal opposites give a strongly polyphonic rhythm to Behrens’s prints, are reflected in a similar form in the watercolours, oil paintings and linocuts that Mattis Teutsch produced after 1916 (Cat. P 9, Cat. P 11, Cat. P 20, Cat. P 23, Cat. L 14). Here we find the immediate effects of the forms of art nouveau that he saw first in Munich and later in Paris, even though with a certain time delay.

Hans Mattis Teutsch, who came to Munich as a graduate of the Budapest vocational arts and crafts high school, did not continue his studies there or even at the reform school of Obrist and Debschitz, which was also working in the spirit of art nouveau, but rather at the Academy where the "high" form of art continued to be taught with an academic blessing. When he decided to study free art at the Munich Academy, the Bavarian "city of art", rich in tradition, was still trying to protect its reputation despite all the fermentation among the many artists and all the spirit of endeavour to cross new boundaries. The long training in the Academy, with the special emphasis on handicraft skills, continued to give it the appearance of a solid place of preparation for a successful artist’s career in a bourgeois society. A preserved study register from 1903 has under the matriculation number 2573 the entry: Teutsch Johann Brassó/Hungary. His certificate, which surprisingly was not issued until 30 June 1908 by the Royal Bavarian Academy of Pictorial Arts in Munich, says: "This certifies that Herr Johann Teutsch, of Brassó/Hungary, matriculated from the Royal Academy in Munich in the summer semester 1902/03 as a student of the Rümann school of sculpture and in the winter semester 1903/04 and 1904/05 as a student of the Schmitt school of sculpture." (Fig. 18.)

The entrance examination, which every new arrival had to take, was conducted twice a year: in the second week of October for the winter semester and on the first Monday after Easter for the summer semester, which was when Mattis Teutsch arrived in Munich in 1902. Since the statutes had been fully valid ever since 1889, he too, like every new entrant, had to "register in the secretariat of the Academy and at the same time present works. On the basis of these presented works, a commission shall meet and inspect them, and determine who shall qualify for the entrance examination. (...) The tasks of this examination shall be: Drawing a head and a nude from living models."¹⁸ He would pass this entrance procedure, which the 18-year-old underwent in the week after Easter 1902, "if the work is judged as good."¹⁹ Apparently it was good, for Mattis Teutsch was admitted to his study at the Academy.

Students normally had to take obligatory drawing instruction for two years. The maximum duration of study was to be eight years – two each for drawing and painting and four for composition classes. Since of the antiquities class in 1882, they drew from the living model. The drawing classes were led by Professors Raab, Nikolaus Gysis and Gabriel Hackl. After two years of drawing, they went to either a technical drawing class or a sculpture class for beginners. Because of his courses in Brassó and Budapest, Johann Teutsch seems to have skipped the first two drawing classes and gone straight to the sculpture class of Wilhelm von Ruemann. This is confirmed not only by a testimonial but also by an entry in the study register: "with Ruemann 24 April 1903".

Wilhelm von Ruemann (also known as Wilhelm Rümann) was considered as the favourinte sculptor of the Bavarian Prince Regent Luitpold. The two stone lions flanking the steps of the Feldherrnhalle at Odeonsplatz were produced in 1905 by Ruemann, who since the 1880s had been, together with Hans von Hildebrand, one of the most independent sculptors in Munich. It was probably from Wilhelm von Ruemann, the Neo-classicist, that Mattis Teutsch learned the traditional craft of sculpture. The two portrait busts (Fig. 20.) – one in plaster and one in wood – which Mattis Teutsch exhibited in 1907 in the Budapest Nationalsalon, bear witness to this academic training under Rümann, for the plaster bust at least is dated 1903. A photo of it has, written on the back: "Johann Matisz Teutsch II. Büste Atelier Meyer in 12 Stunden München 1903. den 28. März" (Johann Matisz Teutsch, 2^nd bust, Studio Meyer, in 12 hours, Munich, 1903, 28^th March).

After Mattis Teutsch had worked until April of that year in the Wilhelm von Ruemann class, he switched for the summer semester 1903 to the class of Balthasar Schmitt. (Fig. 19.) Schmitt had been appointed to the Academy in 1903 as sculptor for religious sculpture, a subject in which he had made his name not only in Munich. Together with Georg Busch, another sculptor working in Munich, Schmitt was one of the most recognised masters of his subject, which comprised mostly church sculpture and sepulchral art. For the war memorial chapel of Munich’s St. Paul’s Church in St. Paul’s Square, which was built in the gothic style of historicism between 1892 and 1906, Balthasar Schmitt produced a Pietà group, which still stands on its original location.

Schmitt’s appointment to the Academy broke the previous predominance of the neo-baroque, neoclassical and naturalist styles. A newer interpretation of sculpture, oriented to the understanding of form of Hans Hildebrand, but having nothing to do with art nouveau, started to make inroads here. Like numerous other Munich sculptors, Balthasar Schmitt was much influenced by Hildebrand and his return to the clear and closed forms of Renaissance sculpture. Hildebrand’s rejection of the restless, fissured or detailed surface design of a naturalistic or neo-baroque sculpture popular at the turn of the century in favour of a connection of a neoclassically purified and clarified sculpture with its surroundings and the architecture seems to have been a precedent not only for Balthasar Schmitt but also for his student Mattis Teutsch.

His two undated, but certainly pre-1910 sculptures, which we know only from photographs (Fig. 21.), contrast strongly with his previous sculptures in their reduction to smooth, solid but at the same time dynamic blocks. These and the study made by Mattis Teutsch in Paris (1906–1908) and Berlin (1908) of ancient Egyptian, antique and neoclassical (Gottfried Schadow) sculptures seem to confirm the interest of the young sculptor in Hans von Hildebrand’s ideal of a neoclassical simplicity, clarity and balance of sculptural form. The relief-type sculptures that are so characteristic of Mattis Teutsch in the early 1920s, which in many of his carved works present only a front instead of an all-round view (Cat. S 1, Cat. S 2, Cat. S 3, Cat. S 4, Cat. S 5, Cat. S 6, Cat. S 7, Cat. S 8, Cat. S 9, Cat. S 10, Cat. S 11), have very obvious parallels to the significance played by the relief in sculptural works and theories of Hans von Hildebrand.

Although they are executed in a different, more abstract form language that emphasises curves and flourishes, many of Mattis Teutsch’s relief-type wood sculptures are in the same vein as the structure of sculpture developed and theoretically established by von Hildebrand, which arranges layers of independent reliefs, from front to back, parallel to the front of the picture. Although created principally as freestanding sculptures, most of Mattis Teutsch’s pre-1925 sculptures are front-view reliefs in the style of Adolf von Hildebrand.

Just as this interpretation of sculpture bears a classical imprint, so also does Hildebrand’s striving to glean the permanent and the essential from the changes in the appearance of nature and portray their general form in sculptural equivalents. Mattis Teutsch seems to share this striving to seek the timeless in movement and to express the enduring in the transient. And this we know not only from the amalgamation of the static and the flowing in his pre-1925 sculptures, but also from an explanation he published in 1921 on the use of colour in his sculptures:

"I carve the wood sculptures freely in oak, following its emanations and direction of movement. I paint it partly with strong colours to be independent of light and movement, to create a clearer and more independent expression."²⁰ The use of colour in sculpture clearly emphasises the individual parts and distinguishes them from each other and relates them to each other, independently of the randomly changing light conditions. The differentiating and dividing function of the colours, as well as their emotional content, makes the superficial shape and emanation of the sculpture relatively independent of changes in nature in varying light conditions. The colourfully painted sculptures are thus an antithesis to the impressionist sculptures of Rodin and of art nouveau, which make visible and tangible precisely this change of times, the flowing and the unstable in the turbulent, fissured surfaces of their sculptures.

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