In Mattis Teutsch’s linocuts, paintings and sculptures produced after 1915, the formal counterparts of dark figures on a light background, vertical and horizontal directions and layerings, concave and convex forms, as well as warm and cold colours, are designed as pointed contrasts which are at one and the same time interwoven and synthesised with each other by flowing, vibrating and circling rhythms. The strongly organised and energetic dynamic unity of these pictures makes them appear as organisms, as microcosmic parables of the universe, which is presented as a single, uniform living substance, in which despite all antitheses material and spirit, organic and inorganic, mankind and nature, man and woman are ultimately one.

It is not absolutely necessary to attribute the influence of "esoteric religions" to Hans Mattis Teutsch to explain his interpretation of the principal uniformity of the universe and its evolution from a common source,³¹ which repeatedly appears as core or seed, as loving couple or family, at the centre of his pictures (Cat. L 38, Cat. L 40, Cat. L 41, Cat. L 42, Cat. L 43, Cat. L 44, Cat. L 45, Cat. L 46, Cat. P 50, Cat. P 52, Cat. P 54, Cat. P 58, Cat. P 60, Cat. P 61). More probable is the influence of the monistic nature theory of the zoologist and natural scientist Ernst Haeckel, who with his pictures of aesthetically fascinating micro-organisms, which impressed the intellect by their inner organisation, had a profound influence on art attitudes of the turn of the century, in particular the Munich art nouveau group.³² The Seelenblumen (Soulflowers, 1919–1924), which are both an enclosed formal unit and at the same time radiate their inner growth forces and emanate their inner energy like an aura, sometimes seem like a late echo of the organisms published by Haeckel, which in their regular formation through a multifariousness of concentric forms and centripetally or centrifugally acting forces were intended to supply the living proof of the corresponding harmony between organic and inorganic, between nature and spirit. The picture motifs of the objective and semi-objective representations, as well as the pictures of organic abstraction, can be clearly attributed to Mattis Teutsch’s inspiration in nature.

This closeness to nature in the colours and forms of apparently the most abstract pictures by Mattis Teutsch is not only a heritage of his origins in a rural farming region, but also a characteristic feature of his art that he shares with the artists of the Phalanx group and Der Blaue Reiter, which was founded later. The return to nature, as Maria Makela writes in her monograph of the Munich Secession, characterises not only the nature lyricism that dominated the exhibition rooms of the Munich Secession in the 1890s, but also the art of Der Blaue Reiter and its predecessors in the Munich art scene. "To put it simply, the Secessionists (in Munich) preferred evocation to direct expression (of the city Brücke Expressionists and their predecessors such as Ensor, van Gogh and Munch), and rural motifs to the city themes of modern life. This preference was not only a provincial refusal to take up the most challenging thematic and stylistic aspects of a nascent modern art, but also part of the tradition that would find its most brilliant expression ten or fifteen years later in the nature-oriented lyricism of Kandinsky, Marc, Klee and their contemporaries."³³ (Cat. BR 1, Cat. BR 2, Cat. BR 3, Cat. BR 21) Mattis Teutsch shared this orientation to nature, which ranged from the Munich landscape painting of the 19^th century to the semi-abstract pictures of Der Blaue Reiter, which continued to feature such landscape formations as mountains, forests and meadows, skies, clouds or lakes.

Mattis Teutsch’s spiritual and formal relationship with the art he saw in the Bavarian capital can also be seen in this antipathy to picture themes of modern city life and in his preference for references to nature and country surroundings that, in contrast to modern Berlin art, was so typical of art in Munich.

Since French Symbolists in the exhibitions of the Munich Secession were mostly presented with pictures of rural themes, and since also the Impressionists portrayed exclusively rural subjects, whereas Neo-Impressionists such as Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Seurat were never present in the salons of the Munich Secession, the resulting impression given by these art movements in Munich, which grew out of the experience of the city, was one dominated by landscape motifs and scenes of country life, instead of city scenes with their new, mechanised and more aggressive forms of life.

Particularly for a modern French artist, the tiredness of the city, the antipathy towards technology, and the flight from civilisation became the actual theme. Paul Gauguin’s flight from the Paris metropolis, first to rustic Brittany and then to Tahiti, where he hoped to discover a paradise remote from civilisation, gave the signal for many artists in Europe to turn their back on the city. After their return from a year in Paris, Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter also left the Bavarian capital, which at that time was still really only a small town in character. In August 1908, they moved for six months to Murnau, (Fig. 32.) to where Kandinsky constantly returned until the summer of 1914. In Paris too, the artist couple had fled the hurly-burly of the city by settling in the rural suburb of Sèvres, where they led quite an isolated existence. In 1910, Franz Marc also left Munich for the country, near to Murnau: first to Sindelsdorf, then to Ried. Alexei von Jawlensky and his cousin Marianne von Werefkin, who lived in a studio apartment in Giselastrasse, Munich, from 1896 until August 1914 and maintained a salon visited by numerous artists, art historians and patrons of art, which would certainly not yet have admitted the student Hans Mattis Teutsch, visited Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter in the summer months of 1908 to work together with them. This first stay in Murnau resulted in the crucial breakthrough for Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, but also for Jawlensky, to an intensive style of colour painting that cannot deny the influence of French Fauvism and their predecessors, the Nabis artists. After many years trying to transform the view of nature in his spatula-painted oil sketches into original pictures, here in rural isolation the Paris experience with Fauvism started hesitantly to take effect (Fig. 33.). "What was previously the reserve of the Fauvists – for example to place a blue mountain in front of a pink sky in homogeneous colour patches – is now recognised also by Kandinsky as a progressive approach."³⁴ The turning point, which now occurred in provincial Bavaria not only in Kandinsky’s but also in Münter’s (Cat. BR 36, Cat. BR 37, Cat. BR 38, Cat. BR 39, Cat. BR 40, Cat. BR 41) and Jawlensky’s painting (Cat. BR 28, Cat. BR 29), led to strong complementary colour contrasts between homogeneously applied colour patches, producing a very flat silhouette effect, which remind us of Kandinsky’s earlier coloured woodcuts. The strengthening of the colourfulness, and the gradual flattening of the picture into decorative colour patterns and colour patches, complemented the design possibilities of autonomous colouring as discovered and practised by the Fauvists and their predecessors, the Nabis. Alexei von Jawlensky was largely responsible for this development of the Murnau group, which a few years later founded the Neue Künstlervereinigung (new artist society, 1909) and then Der Blaue Reiter (1911) – a development towards a flat, homogeneous application of colour, which could emanate either colourful brilliance or a palette with more restrained, cool tones of peace. The pictures painted by Kandinsky and Münter in Murnau (Fig. 34, Fig. 35.) show numerous parallels with the Murnau paintings by Jawlensky, who, among friends,"unswervingly used the term ‘synthesis’, which had been in use since 1890."³⁵ (Fig. 36.)

This term, which he introduced and which was much discussed in the Murnau group, goes back to Paul Gauguin, without whose decoratively flat colour painting and paradise motifs neither the Nabis artists nor the painting of the future Der Blaue Reiter would be imaginable. Gauguin as a model for the development of Mattis Teutsch’s painting style was no less important than for Der Blaue Reiter artists in their maturity.

Paul Gauguin’s basic idea of a synthetical painting style was taken up on the one hand by Kandinsky, Münter, Marc and Werefkin – mainly due to Jawlensky’s explanations – and on the other, though somewhat later, by Mattis Teutsch, and they all applied it in their own personal ways. "The painter" – as Gauguin explained his theory of Synthétisme – "gives form through simplification, through a synthesis of impressions that are subordinate to a basic idea." The aim of painting is "a harmony of sounds", which has its effect "on the soul via the senses."³⁶ This definition of painting is repeated almost word for word in Kandinsky’s book of 1911 Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art) and in his article of 1912 Über die Formfrage (On the Question of Form) in the Almanach Der Blaue Reiter.

Mattis Teutsch’s definition of his own painting formulated in 1921 on the occasion of an exhibition of his works in Brassó owes as much to Gauguin’s idea of syntheticism as Kandinsky’s formulation of the inner sound of form and colours, of the synaesthetic interplay of musical and colourful tones and of the work of art that affects the viewer’s soul via the senses of optical perception.

"My aim" – wrote Mattis Teutsch in the leaflet of the Brassó exhibition – "is to use the methods of painting to create abstract works that have their own destiny and are capable of leading an independent life by moving into the spiritual sphere. I paint compositions whose starting-point is man with his spiritual vibrations. My work is determined by the rhythmic emanations that penetrate the core of the inner vibrations and which I have to perceive. The structure of my works is determined by rhythmic movements in warm and cold chromatics with illuminating contrasts. Concentric and eccentric forms move around fixed points. All elements of my compositions are in perfect harmony, and all have a prescribed aim."³⁷

Gauguin’s painting and theoretical reflections on synthetic art are the common starting-point for the development both of the painting, sculpture and graphics of Der Blaue Reiter and of Mattis Teutsch. Just as Gauguin "showed Der Blaue Reiter the way to the inner paradises",³⁸ he also opened up the way to an independent development for Mattis Teutsch, except that Mattis Teutsch took this path to painting and abstraction somewhat later than the Murnau group.

The development that Kandinsky, Münter, Jawlensky and Werefkin from 1908 pursued in their Murnau landscape paintings, a development that eventually led to the expressive forms of Der Blaue Reiter, appears to have followed faithfully Gauguin’s maxims that he gave the German painter Emile Schuffenecker: "Don’t stick to nature too much. Art is abstraction; get it from nature by dreaming about it. And think more about the work you are creating than its model."³⁹ This was easier said than done, since putting this concept into practice had cost the artists of Der Blaue Reiter and Mattis Teutsch many years of seeking and experimenting, step-by-step success, and inevitable disappointment.

When Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter and Mattis Teutsch saw the great memorial exhibition for Gauguin in the Paris Salon d’Automne, this was certainly not the first time they had seen the artist’s originals. In Germany, Gauguin’s painting first aroused public attention in the year of his death, 1903, when his works were to be seen not only at the exhibition of the Berlin Secession but also at the seventh exhibition of the Phalanx group, which was organised by Kandinsky. It can safely be assumed that Mattis Teutsch also visited this exhibition.

One year later, Gauguin’s works were exhibited not only in the two German art centres of Berlin and Munich but also in numerous other German cities. Gauguin began to be accepted in Germany. In 1904, in the widely read magazine Kunst und Künstler (Art and Artists), the art historian Meier-Graefe wrote an obituary to Gauguin, having already profusely praised the extraordinary significance of Gauguin for modern painting in his Entwicklungsgeschichte der Modernen Kunst (The History of the Development of Modern Art), which was published in the previous year and had reached a wide public. The Munich art society was also conscious of this significance: in 1904, when Mattis Teutsch was still studying in the city, they had exhibited 46 paintings by Gauguin and a group of other painters including van Gogh and Emile Bernard. It is fairly certain that Mattis Teutsch visited this important exhibition, which was called the Schule von Pont-Aven (School of Pont-Aven) by the Munich newspaper Münchner Neueste Nachrichten. This would have given him, even before his move to Paris in 1905, a comprehensive overview of Gauguin’s art and the paintings of the Nabis group, which were of such crucial importance for his development as a painter.

However, it is uncertain whether Mattis Teutsch also saw Gauguin’s painting Reiter am Strand II. (Horseman on the Beach II.), which had been hanging in the Munich collection of the lawyer and composer Felix vom Rath since 1904, or whether Jawlensky and von Werefkin also saw it.⁴⁰ In another Munich collection, which was also open only to a limited and interested public, in the collection of the bankers Alfred and Hanna Wolff, who lived from 1904 to 1908 at Karolinenplatz in Munich, four pictures by Paul Signac, three each by Gauguin and Maurice Denis, an interior by Bonnard, a van Gogh, two large and several small sculptures by Maillol, and several other works could be seen. Whether Mattis Teutsch in his time in Munich gained access to this exhibition is also not known, but it is unlikely.⁴¹

The Dutch painter-monk Jan Verkade, an adherent of Paul Gauguin’s art and a member of the Nabis group founded around Gauguin, stayed in Munich between 1906 and 1908, where he had close contact not only with the Wolffs but also with Jawlensky, to whom he could report at first hand about Gauguin and his disciples, which had an enduring effect on Jawlensky’s discussions in Murnau with Kandinsky, Münter and Werefkin.

Even though Mattis Teutsch could not have met the Nabis adherent Verkade in Munich, since he had already moved to Paris in the autumn or winter of 1905, the above definition of his own art shows a broad agreement with the Synthesis idea as it was formulated in reference to Gauguin by the Nabis artists Maurice Denis and Aurier. Whereas Aurier explained to the critics that every work of the Nabis "possesses a soul to animate us, a soul representing the synthesis of two souls, the soul of the artist and the soul of nature", Maurice Denis emphasises the contemporary leading role of landscape painting, since its synthetic form could confirm the "faith in the correspondence between external forms and subjective states".⁴²

It cannot be disputed that Mattis Teutsch’s landscape painting, becoming ever more visible after 1914, bore a close relationship both in its colouring and formal compositions and in its elegiac or idyllic motifs to paintings of Gauguin and Maurice Denis. However, we do not know when the sculpture student gave up his original trade and turned to painting. The strong impressions he had felt on seeing the works of Gauguin and the Nabis, probably first in Munich after 1904 and then in Paris after 1905, must have animated him to make this change.

Mattis Teutsch’s move from Munich to Paris to study was part of the general trend of the times. During the first decade of the 20^th century, the "art city" of Munich and its Academy became ever less attractive than Paris. The graduates of the Royal Bavarian Academy now flocked to the French capital to continue their studies at one of the numerous private academies or seek their fortune as freelance artists. The meeting point, gossip exchange and marketplace of the latest ideas for German artists was the Café du Dôme. Since 1903 this caféhouse on the corner of the Rue Delambre and the Boulevard Montparnasse had established itself as a meeting place for German artists and those interested in art. "Countless former students of the Munich Art Academy and private painting schools turn up here, together with painters, sculptors, literates, collectors and art merchants from all German art centres, so that the café is gradually becoming a place of contact via which one can more easily find one’s way into the life of the art city... Some of the painters who meet here have during their stay in Paris attended the académie of Matisse, who is seen as the leader of the Fauves."⁴³

From this personal connection to the Matisse academy and the Café du Dôme, the legend probably arose that Mattis Teutsch had been a friend of Matisse during his time in Paris.⁴⁴

But it is relatively certain that, like nearly all artists from Munich except, for example, Kandinsky und Gabriele Münter, Mattis Teutsch often visited the Café du Dôme. The Belgian art critic Michel Seuphor, who met Mattis Teutsch in this café and was impressed by his introspective, melancholic character, testifies to this. If Mattis Teutsch, like many other German artists, really did study at Matisse’s académie, it cannot have been for very long since he left Paris in 1908, the year Matisse opened his academy. The newly founded school was first housed, from January 1908, in two rooms in the Cloître des Oiseaux, on the corner of the Rue de Sèvres and the Boulevard Montparnasse. A few months later, the academy moved to the Cloître Sacré-Coeur in the Boulevard des Invalides.

"The guiding principles of the instruction" – which took place in a light-painted room that was not lacking in pink – "are chalked on the entrance: Harmony – Contrast – Nuance – Movement – Character of the Model. The model concerned took up position on a pedestal 1,50 meters high, surrounded by a throng of (in 1909) more than forty students, sitting on the ground, on chairs or on very high stools."⁴⁵ The academy was so well frequented partly because instruction was free, which would also have been very convenient to the far from rich Mattis Teutsch.

A reminiscence we have from the artist’s son: From Munich "I went to Paris, where I continued my studies until 1908. During my time in Paris, I drew figures in full size and studied the art of various epochs."⁴⁶ Whether this figure drawing took place at the Académie Matisse or in another studio,⁴⁷ is still not clear.

There are no samples or documents of his artistic activity from the Paris years. The few pictures of standing figures (Fig. 37, Fig. 39.) were probably first made around 1914. The watercolours show large-area backgrounds, indicated by curved formations. On this sparsely structured area are placed individual figures, characterised by a frontal view and flat, unsensual bodies, the shapes not filled in or modelled. Like flat, light silhouettes, these women, offset by strong outlines from the background and with curved, tense body contours and blank or only roughly indicated faces, are typical features of the human figures that Matisse placed on strongly coloured but very simplified backgrounds in several important paintings produced in 1907 and 1908. These paintings include: La musique: esquisse, 1907, Le luxe I, 1907, Baigneuses à la tortue (Trois femmes au bord e la mer), 1908, Les joueurs de boule, 1908 , La nymphe et la satyre, 1908 and La danse I, 1908. There is a noticeable similarity between the striped, horizontal and partly wavy colour zones of their backgrounds and the flat formations in Mattis Teutsch’s watercolours (Fig. 38, Fig. 40.).⁴⁸

Matisse painted all these pictures, produced in 1908, in the Cloître des Oiseaux and afterwards in the Cloître Sacré-Coeur – i.e., in his academy. If Mattis Teutsch studied here in 1908, he would certainly have seen these large-format pictures. They possibly gave him the initial inspiration for the beginnings of his post-realistic painting, which broke out of him like a long-suppressed eruption after 1914 and materialised in a large number of watercolours and small-format oil paintings. This effect, delayed but all the more explosive, which the leader of the Fauvists had on the art student from Transylvania in 1908, is comparable to the reaction shown by Kandinsky when he returned from Paris in 1908 and settled in Murnau, where under the impression of the works he had seen by Gauguin and the Fauves, he started his completely new style of colour painting with great vehemence.

The forms are still very roughly drawn and all the details are primitivistically reduced to airily painted colour patches, which seem cool and restrained rather than glowing in warm colours, for Matisse refrains from using his earlier Fauvist vehemence of gesture and colour explosion in these paintings of 1907 and 1908. The range of colours is more suppressed than expressive. Instead of the complementary contrasts, which intensify the colourfulness and radiant power, Matisse prefers in these pictures closely related colour tones, just as we find in the watercolours and oil paintings by Mattis Teutsch from the years 1914–1918.

Probably under the influence of the great Gauguin retrospective of 1906, but also due to an increased familiarity with Cézanne, Matisse, the leader of the "wild ones", whose anarchy of form and impetuousness of colour had so provoked the art world and were so predominant at the peak of Fauvism from 1905 to 1907, had now calmed down again. In 1907 and 1908, Matisse was looking for a new balance in painting, a balance between ebullient outbursts and a disciplined painting style, between natural representation and abstraction, and between colourful intensity and moderate hues. He also tried to put this harmony of opposites across to the students of his academy, including possibly Mattis Teutsch. Using the example of his own pictures and the works of older masters, with practical drawing and painting exercises as well as art-theory considerations that Matisse had summarised in his famous Notes of a Painter,⁴⁹ he had taught the students at the academy since 1908 "that in the creative confrontation with nature and the model, freedom, sensation and sensibility always have to be balanced and corrected by order, discipline and construction".⁵⁰

Mattis Teutsch seems to have taken this message to heart. At least, the striving towards this balance of opposed forces can be felt clearly in the watercolours and oil paintings he produced between 1914 and 1918.

Although we have no paintings, drawings or watercolours from his study period in Paris, it appears that he did indeed produce not only sculptures but also pictures at this time. The Hungarian art critic Iván Hevesy, for example, who was well acquainted with Mattis Teutsch and possessed some of his pictures (Cat. P 13, Cat. P 17, Cat. P 19), wrote in the October 1917 issue of the magazine MA (Today): "... Mattis Teutsch is fundamentally different from the painters of the new generation. It is difficult to imagine a straighter and purer artistic development than his – no derailments, no aberrations, ... and we can hardly imagine a longer stretch, with more conspicuous difference, than those overcome by Hans Mattis Teutsch with regard to results and styles in his career. Landmarks for this are his ten-year-old landscapes and his absolute (themeless) pictures of today."⁵¹ This clearly means that pictures had already been produced in 1907, mostly landscape views that had nowhere near achieved the degree of abstractions of the paintings and linocuts of 1917.

But not only the paintings by Matisse of 1907 and 1908 were the starting-point for Mattis Teutsch’s change to a new style of painting and watercolour technique around 1914. In about 1908, the former head of the "wild ones" had cooled his Fauvist colours and forms down to restrained, flatly decorative colour fields, which placed him for a time nearer to Gauguin and his successors in the Nabis circle. It was also from Gauguin, the painter of the lost paradise, and his disciples that Mattis Teutsch had received numerous inspirations in his choice of soft, light colours and supple, figure-like forms. Not only with the parallel vertical tree trunks so excellently suited for a rhythmic surface structure had Mattis Teutsch imitated Gauguin and the Nabis: the individual trees too, with their flourishingly contoured and energetically coloured crowns of foliage (Cat. L 5, Cat. L 25) can also be found in paintings by Gauguin (Fig. 41.) and Roussel.

When the artist himself mentions the works of his youth, he names not only landscapes from the surroundings of Brassó but also titles such as Das Leben (Life), Frühling (Spring), Geschwister (Siblings), Das tägliche Brot (Daily Bread) or Bildnis des Vaters (Portrait of Papa Teutsch) (Cat. P 1). The realistically painted portrait of his father still exists and is dated today at 1913. This portrait, in brown tones, shows a certain awkwardness or indecisiveness between an emphasis on three-dimensional volume and a flat representation of the trunk, hands and head. The latticework visible behind the father gives the background a rhythmic structure, which increases the contrast between it and the person.

This flattening of the physical and its combination with similarly flat vertical stripes, which structure the picture, reminds one of many pictures of the Nabis artists in which the vertical stripes of tree trunks are similarly combined with silhouette figures (Fig. 44). This method of composition, which goes back to Gauguin and Puvis de Chavannes, was further developed and radicalised in a masterly way by their successors, such as Maurice Denis (Fig. 45.). These lattice structures emphasising the flat character of the picture were made up mostly of rows of trees and earth formations in Mattis Teutsch’s pictures after 1915 (Fig. 46.). Such flatness rapports of vertical and horizontal stripes are closely related to the rhythmic rows of trees in the pictures of the Nabis.

Maurice Denis’s painting dated 1893 "Sie sahen Feen an der Küste landen" (They saw Fairies Landing on the Coast, (Cat. P 2, Cat. P 3, Cat. P 4, Cat. P 6) with its colourfulness lightened by the addition of a lot of white paint and its composition of monochrome, wavy and almost abstract colour patches, but mostly in the contrast between horizontal and vertical colour strips, is so similar to Mattis Teutsch’s landscapes after 1915 (Fig. 42.) that we have to assume that these are a direct reference to their predecessor. And Mattis Teutsch’s symbolism-inspired subjects are much closer to the fairy-tale subject of Maurice Denis’s picture (Fig. 47), which is so essentially different from the heathen wildness of the figures in the paintings of Matisse mentioned above, than to Fauvism.

The works of the 1920s have titles revealing their origin in the symbolism of the Nabis circle: Mutterschaft (Motherhood), Familie, Tanz (Dance), Freude (Joy), Jugend (Youth), Schwung (Swing/Momentum/Energy). Even the titles of the ten wood-and-aluminium sculptures listed in the catalogue of the "Ferdinand Möller" gallery in August 1931 make no secret of their spiritual relationship to the symbolism of the turn of the century: Tanz, Erwartung (Expectation), Sehnsucht (Longing), Erhaben (Sublime/Exalted), Kniende (Kneeling), Versunken (Submerged), Frau, Trauernde (Mourners/Mourning), Jugend, Schreitende (Striding).

It is precisely these personifications of human psychic conditions and physical postures that we see in the paradises of Gauguin and the Nabis artists. In his search for the Golden Age, in which man was at peace with himself and with nature, Gauguin painted the paradise on Tahiti, which was already lost because it had been discovered by civilisation (Fig. 48.), in an illumining splendour of colour, with dreamy figures, mostly women, engrossed in themselves. The Nabis took these exotic pseudo-paradises further and transformed them into pastoral idylls with fairylike maidens (Fig. 43.), which were transposed back from Tahiti to France, where the dream of the Golden Age and natural bliss remote from civilisation continued to be dreamed.

The shadowy human figures in the woodcuts, watercolours and oil paintings produced by Mattis Teutsch in the second decade of the 20^th century are a reference to these fairylike Nabis figures, which as arabesquely flourishing silhouette figures are united with the equally melodiously flourishing paradise landscapes. As personifications of virginal purity and innocence, the engrossed figures (Cat. L 3, Cat. L 16, Cat. P 52, Cat. P 53, Cat. P 54, Cat. P 56, Cat. P 58) merge freely into the vegetation-filled, rhythmically organised flat pattern of the backgrounds. They blend into the surrounding nature, becoming part of its growth and life rhythms.

Mattis Teutsch developed this lyrical harmony and these gentle rhythms, which show the ethereal feminine creatures in complete accord with the natural forms of the landscape, into an ever more energetically flourishing linear rhythm, gradually giving an expressionist rigour and expressiveness (Fig. 49). to the gentle, supple wave movements of art nouveau. For all that, the basic elegiac tone of Gauguin and the Nabis remained in Mattis Teutsch’s works, which show their relationship to the organic abstraction of the Expressionists of Der Blaue Reiter. Nowhere in the woodcuts, watercolours, oil paintings or sculptures produced by Mattis Teutsch up to the early 1920s are angular forms or sharp edges to be found. Even the vehement counter-movements and contrasts of direction resulting from the antithesis between the feminine, passive horizontals and the masculine, active verticals (Mattis Teutsch) unite and merge into an all-embracing flow of lines, lithe and rounded, without notches or interruptions.

This all-embracing picture rhythm causes every single work by Mattis Teutsch to appear as a self-contained microcosm, reflecting the movements and laws of the macrocosm.

Notes
Figures

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