Although the Bavarian Academy can be considered as "the conservative centre of the Munich art scene" when Mattis Teutsch was studying here, and students always received "a very thorough technical training",²¹ Adolf von Hildebrand’s interpretation of sculpture, which was taught at the Academy by Mattis Teutsch’s teacher Balthasar Schmitt, was definitely future-oriented. His style of sculpture and relief design continued to be an important influence on Hildebrand’s students, at least in Germany, until the 1930s.

It was the young art student Paul Klee who in 1899 wrote enthusiastically to his parents in Berne following his visit to the exhibition of the Münchner Sezession: "I have been to the exhibition several times. The Secession is fantastic this time. Herterich, Uhde, Zorn ... as painters, and Stuck and Hildebrand as sculptors, are simply magnificent."²² Franz von Stuck and Adolf von Hildebrand are described here by the future member of Der Blaue Reiter as overwhelming sculptors. A year after this letter, and two years before Mattis Teutsch – i.e., in 1900 – Paul Klee (Fig. 22) was to be accepted as a student at the Royal Bavarian Academy, in the class of Franz Stuck, where he met Kandinsky, who was also admitted to Stuck’s class. Stuck, a member of the Secession and a renowned protagonist of Symbolism and art nouveau, was considered to be the most progressive teacher at the Academy. He attracted the most progressive students and knew how to encourage their individual talents. Franz Marc too, a founder member of Der Blaue Reiter and, with Kandinsky, publisher of Almanach Der Blaue Reiter, began his studies at the Munich Academy in 1900, in the painting classes of Gabriel Hackl and Wilhelm Diez.

Despite the closeness in time, Johann Teutsch cannot have met his fellow-students, who were to found Der Blaue Reiter group of artists in 1911, at the Academy, since Kandinsky abandoned his studies there after only a year. He left Stuck’s painting class to found the Phalanx art group in Schwabing at the end of May 1901, together with the sculptors Waldemar Hecker and Wilhelm Hüsgen. This fighting formation of romantic knights of the spirit was to document their self-confidence as the shock troops of the avant-garde and establish their independence from the exhibition jury of the Sezession and the Glaspalast (Crystal Pallace). Kandinsky’s poster (Fig. 24.) of the first Phalanx exhibition in August 1901 shows these shock troops, armed with helmets, shields and spears, cutting down the enemies of modern art and storming the bastion of art, which is occupied by the traditionalists. The strong stylisation of the powerfully contoured figures, the decorative surface, the accentuated rhythmic division of the surface into horizontal and vertical lines, as well as the legendary motif of romantic chivalry, display all the characteristics of international art nouveau with a slightly oriental touch.

The second exhibition of the Phalanx group was dedicated to William Morris, the founder of the English Arts and Crafts movement, which paved the way for art nouveau, and to his successors. Another comprehensive exhibition presented works by Kandinsky and members of the Darmstadt colony such as Hans Christiansen and Peter Behrens, who in his attempt to establish art nouveau in the Munich Academy and the arts and crafts school had made so many enemies among the traditionalists dominating art politics in Munich. Alongside the most important art nouveau artists, the Phalanx exhibitions primarily show works of the German open-air artists such as Lovis Corinth or Wilhelm Trübner, who had also influenced Kandinsky’s painting, as well as works of the French impressionists and postimpressionists – for example, pictures by Monet, who was held in high esteem by Kandinsky (and who can be seen for the first time in Munich in this exhibition). In April/May 1904, the artists organised a comprehensive exhibition mostly of French neo-impressionists, with works by Paul Gauguin, Felix Valloton, Paul Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. "At the centre of the exhibition is his highly-esteemed Paul Signac, whose treatise Von Delacroix zum Neo-Impressionismus (from Delacroix to neo-impressionism), translated into German in 1903, was certainly known to him and whose divisionist-pointillist colour technique he had already experimented with in modified form."²³

Kandinsky himself painted in two styles in the years 1901–1904: on the one hand, he used a symbolist surface style, which included the loosely formed coloured woodcuts in which figure and ground blur into each other; on the other hand, he produced in these Munich years many oil sketches and some larger paintings in the style of the German and French open-air painting schools which clearly show the influence of Monet and the pointillism of Signac. These informal open-air studies, executed in broad brushstrokes (Fig. 23.), which place Kandinsky right in the tradition of Munich landscape painting and its high culture of oil sketches during his first Munich period, become ever more expressive in the years after 1904, also through his contact with the Parisian Fauvists, due to a spatula texture that breaks up the form and makes the motif more abstract. In parallel to these landscape studies, Kandinsky developed a pointillist style of painting from his coloured woodcuts and lino cuttings. The figures, objects and landscape motifs dissolved into a colourful patchwork, which his colour pattern wove into a black background.

This technique of juxtaposed colour patches and folklorist motifs, deriving mostly from Russian saga, legends and folktales, is a legacy of the pointillist divisionism of Paul Signac, but also has great affinity with the Hungarian painter and member of the French Nabis group Rippl-Rónai (Fig. 25). Hans Mattis Teutsch, who was certainly acquainted with the works of the Hungarian symbolists from his time in Budapest, even though he was not, as the literature often claims, his student in the Budapest vocational high school, would have recognised Rippl-Ronai’s painting style in these magical pictures by Kandinsky if he had seen them at one of the Phalanx exhibitions in Munich during his studies. (Fig. 27.)

The first woodcuts we have by Mattis Teutsch, from 1915–1916, show a certain affinity to form-related pictures by Rippl-Rónai.(Fig. 26.) The richly contrasted grid structure in the vertical and horizontal bar view of trees works with silhouettes standing against a light background, solid and black like the trees and crosses in Rippl-Ronai’s painting "Friedhof in der Tiefebene" (Cemetery on the Plain), 1894. But this painting, which is closely related to the surface style of the Nabis and imitates their typical motif of rhythmical rows of trees, also seems to anticipate the accentuations and expressive strength of the imminent Expressionism, with its contrast between the tree trunks and the background. It is quite probable, though not proved, that Mattis Teutsch saw the Phalanx exhibitions, but whether he was impressed by the symbolist works of the Nabis group or the neo-impressionists exhibited there, we just do not know.

The few preserved photographs of the sculptures he produced in his sculpture classes under Rümann and Schmitt tend to demonstrate an interpretation of figures similar to the sculptures, as can be seen in the photographs from 1902 taken in the studio of Waldemar Hecker and Wilhelm Hüsgen. The studio was part of the Phalanx school run by Kandinsky and the two sculptors (1902–1903). One of the students who entered this private art school (in Hohenzollernstrasse 6 in Schwabing) in 1902 was Gabriele Münter, who as a woman was barred from entering the Munich Academy of Pictorial Arts, where Johann Teutsch matriculated in the same year. Whether he met Gabriele Münter in this period is just as unlikely as whether he met his fellow-student Paul Klee, who had left the Academy in March 1901, travelled around, and returned to Berne before settling in Munich in 1909.

Franz Marc, with whose art Mattis Teutsch’s pictures show the closest relationship after 1920, did not stick it out long at the Munich Academy either. After great inner conflict, he had begun his study of painting there in 1900 under Gabriel Hackl and Wilhelm von Dietz, but was so discouraged by the pedantic anatomy drawing and the strict corrections of his teachers that he fled from the Academy and went on his travels: in 1901 to Venice, in 1903 to Paris, where he discovered Manet and Impressionism, Japanese woodcuts, and the Egyptian and Assyrian collection in the Louvre. When he returned from Paris, he finally turned his back on the Academy. He spent the summer painting and drawing in the foothills of the Alps, on the Staffelalm. From 1904 to 1907, Franz Marc had a studio at Kaulbachstrasse 68 in Munich, but due to personal problems produced very little art. His artistic breakthrough did not happen until his second Paris trip in 1907, during which he got to know and love the painting of van Gogh and Gauguin. His first tentative attempts at drawing, and his few vaguely impressionist oil sketches, now gave way to a penetrating view of nature and animals inspired by the simplified and thus more expressive forms and colours of van Gogh, Gauguin, the Nabis and Fauves.

The discovery of the works of these artists sparked off a profound reorientation in Klee’s artistic creativity, just as it did with Mattis Teutsch, who was in Paris in the same year as Franz Marc (on his second French trip), though he stayed there much longer than Klee, who lived in Bern.

Marc’s contact with the new French art in 1908 caused him to change to a more linear and rhythmic colour painting style, but this does not seem to have happened to Mattis Teutsch until a few years later, in the years after 1910, for he was apparently still active mostly as a sculptor until then. But we still do not know when he started painting in the surface style and colourfulness of the Nabis artists.

Franz Marc’s animal motif drawings and paintings after 1908 clearly show "the newfound organic rhythm of line that reduces the deer to a few strokes and incorporates them in a flowing rhythmic context to which the landscape is also subordinated. The flat, ornamental style is inspired by art nouveau, artists from van Gogh to Gauguin, but also Puvis de Chavannes’ decorative compositions, highly praised by the Nabis in Paris. Gauguin’s Cloisonnism, the decorative, linear division of the picture and the patches of colour were also adopted and further pursued by the Nabis. Marc was particularly interested in Maurice Denis and his theories, upon which he stumbled in 1908 in the magazines Die christliche Kunst (Christian art) and Kunst und Künstler (art and artists). Alongside the formal undertones, however, there is also a more profound spiritual relationship between the Nabis and Marc."²⁴

This description of Franz Marc’s new painting style and his reference to both the Munich Jugendstil and the French Nabis aesthetic does not apply precisely to the watercolours and oil paintings produced by Mattis Teutsch after about 1914. There are obvious formal and spiritual parallels between the works of the two artists, but this seems to be a result not so much of Mattis Teutsch’s reference to Franz Marc’s work as to the orientation of both painters to the Nabis aesthetic and art nouveau. The same could also be said about the formal parallels between Mattis Teutsch’s paintings after 1914 and the pictures of Alexei von Jawlensky and Gabriele Münter produced after 1908, which, like the new colour painting of Kandinsky and Marc developed under the strong influence of the Nabis group, the French neo-impressionists under Paul Signac and ultimately the Fauvists.²⁵

During his study period in Munich, Mattis Teutsch could have seen works by these French artists as well as works of the above artists in the similarly influential art nouveau style.

Can we assume that Johann Teutsch, like Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Franz Marc, received his training not only at the Academy but also – and perhaps more importantly – from visits to the exhibitions of the Munich Secession as well as from reading the art nouveau magazines Pan, Die Insel, Simplicissimus and Jugend, which all appeared in Munich while he was studying there? These spectacular and popular magazines, which like the most important exhibitions of the Munich Secession propagated the idea of uniting arts and crafts, must have appealed to this student of the Budapest arts and crafts school, where he was already acquainted with art nouveau. We can certainly assume that Mattis Teutsch also visited the art exhibitions of the Munich Secession in the Bavarian capital and that he was just as impressed by them as his fellow-students Kandinsky, Klee and Franz Marc. Kandinsky and Klee, for example, regularly applied for their works to be included in the Secession exhibitions, but with little success. While Paul Klee, after numerous unsuccessful attempts, at least managed to get six etchings into the Munich Secession exhibition of 1906, Kandinsky claims to have tried and failed three times. On the last occasion, when he submitted nine pictures in 1906, he sent a letter of protest to the management of the Munich Secession, accusing them of excluding not his works but his person by their repeated rejection of his application, since he had already exhibited his pictures at the Berlin Secession, in the German artists’ association, and in the Paris autumn salon (Salon d’Automne).²⁶ It was certainly this rejection that caused Kandinsky to write in June 1907 to Gabriele Münter, with whom he was now living and who was to found the group Der Blaue Reiter with him four years later: "I went to the Secession not without a certain nervousness. But ... already in the first room I found the same old (Franz von) Stuck. Everything just as ever. And only two new German artists, both insignificant."²⁷

This harsh criticism of the Secession, which he had admired only a few years before, is not only a result of the disappointment of rejection. This so progressive group of artists, founded in the 1890s, really did begin to stagnate around 1907; worse, it was very obviously moribund. Coming from Paris, the centre of the newest art movements, Kandinsky, who like Mattis Teutsch had moved there in May 1906, must have found this stagnation and clutching to the traditional particularly conspicuous. The decline of the Munich Secession had already begun after 1900, when most of the art nouveau artists had been excluded from the numerous Secession exhibitions. Deprived of their former exhibition forum, at which the leading figures of the Munich Jugendstil movement such as Peter Behrens, Otto Eckmann, August Endell, Hermann Obrist, Bruno Paul and Bernhard Pankok had made their sensational public debuts in the 1890s, these artists and designers left Munich after 1900, most of them for Berlin. Only Richard Riemerschmid and Hans Eduard von Berlepsch remained in the city. Nevertheless, the Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk (united workshops for art in craft), founded in Munich in 1898, which had made art nouveau their program and whose members later founded the Deutscher Werkbund and the Weimar Bauhaus, continued faithfully in their work. The privately owned Münchner Lehr- und Versuchs-Ateliers für Angewandte und Freie Kunst (Munich teaching and experimental studios for applied and free art), founded in Munich’s artist quarter Schwabing in 1902 by Hermann Obrist and Wilhelm von Debschitz, also continued its work under the now more famous name Debschitzschule until 1914 with constant success and a growing number of students, so that Jugendstil in Munich, even after the arrival of Mattis Teutsch in this city in 1902, was still very present and lively.

The sculptor Hermann Obrist, one of the most active of the Munich art nouveau school, also formulated the methodological principles of the didactic programme of the Lehr- und Versuchsatelier für angewandte und freie Kunst. The teaching programme of the Debschitz School reads like a methodological guideline for creating pictures of lyrical abstraction, like the instructions for producing abstract paintings as they were produced soon after by Wassily Kandinsky and then Hans Mattis Teutsch in their confrontation with nature. Human history, which had celebrated great orgies in historical painting before the turn of the century in Munich, was now replaced by a study of nature. Not its outer appearance, as in landscape painting, but its inner evolving forces and formative processes, which visibly come to the fore in the external appearance of nature. As for Herrmann Obrist himself, for Kandinsky and Mattis Teutsch, it was the dialogue with the diversity of form in nature that was the starting point for ever more novel inventions of form. Obrist’s teaching programme thus prescribed the following steps: "Examine the forms of nature. Recognise the principles of growth and networking. Grasp the structure. Draw what you have seen from memory. Develop the basic structure. Distance yourself from the initial view. Develop your own purely artistic form."²⁸ (Fig. 30.)

The way leads from inspecting the external form of natural objects, deals with recognising their inner structures and their growth principles and standing back from the natural example, and ends with designing ‘purely artistic’ – i.e., abstract dynamic structural and networked forms that do not attempt to deny their origins in nature. How such art forms, derived from a perception of nature and yet completely abstract, can look, is demonstrated vividly by Obrist’s embroidery design Peitschenschnur (whiplash) (Fig. 31.). This embroidery, produced around 1895, was exhibited together with 34 other embroidered textiles of the Munich artist and craftsman in the Munich Galerie Littauer, where they attracted further attention and reinforced the reputation of the art nouveau artist. This excellent example of Munich Jugendstil, with its flourishes of trembling stems and leaves, presents a unified form and a strict rhythm through the repetition of forms, despite all its freedom of form. This dynamically energetic arabesque no longer reflects an objective piece of nature such as Dürer’s Rasenstück or Manet’s Asparagus, but rather a representation of the forces of growth of nature and their laws of formation in almost abstract arcs, flourishes and fanlike shapes.

Between 1918 and 1920, Mattis Teutsch painted numerous compositions in watercolours and oil that show a close relationship with these floral inventions of Obrist. The extremely dynamically and rhythmically arranged arcs and flourishes of these pictures (Cat. P 32, Cat. P 37, Cat. P 39, Cat. P 45), despite their advanced stage of abstraction, still show clear reminiscences of trees, flowers and other vegetable shapes. It is no coincidence that some of these semi-abstract pictures bear the title Seelenblume (Soulflower), which makes reference to the "development of the independent, purely artistic form" (Obrist) from an inner view of the flower, or of the natural forces and growth processes in nature, which Mattis Teutsch, in contrast to Hermann Obrist, sets in glowing, highly intensive colours. These colour tones derive from quite different – i.e., French – sources.

Whereas Mattis Teutsch differs strongly in the colourfulness of these pictures from the drawings and textile designs of Hermann Obrist, there are conspicuous similarities between their graphical interpretations of plant structures that do not imitate the externally visible natural forms but derive from "what vibrates everywhere".²⁹ Obrist takes his inspiration for these rhythmical vibrations, which are capable of causing spiritual vibrations in the artist and the viewer, from biological and geological phenomena, which to him are of a perceptive, psychological and musical nature. In 1906, Obrist became a member of the Monistenbund (monistic association) of the natural scientist Ernst Haeckel.

Hans Mattis Teutsch too saw sculptural design and evocation of rhythmic vibrations as the main task of his art after 1915. Just as for Hermann Obrist, he felt bound by the monistic interpretation of the world as represented theoretically by Ernst Haeckel, who tried to prove it graphically in his volumes of folios with the Kunstformen der Natur (art forms of nature), published between 1900 and 1904. Haeckel’s identity philosophy, which was so popular around the turn of the century, and which claimed to recognise harmonies between nature and spirit as well as between the inorganic and the organic, for which his Kunstformen der Natur that he discovered under his microscope produced the finest proof, attributed to the whole of nature a psychic-spiritual character, which appears to express itself in Obrist’s structure forms of nature just as in Mattis Teutsch’s pictures painted between 1918 and 1924. The concentric rhythm created by his arc shapes vibrating around a centre makes the abstract pictures seem like a demonstration of Haeckel’s hypothesis "that inorganic and organic nature are uniformly derived as a ‘universe’ from the same principle of development".³⁰

Notes
Figures

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