In the preface to the catalogue of the first of the exhibitions devoted to Mattis Teutsch alone, which was organised in Budapest in 1917 by the MA group, Lajos Kassák wrote the following about the artist and his work: "He is not a man of impetuosity and fancy words. He has a partly passive being, yet he has a nervous, restive manner of working, and the result of his creativity is always exciting. That is because his work is rooted in our time. This is the source of the powerful uniformity of his paintings, the pureness of the colours that are sensed and purified by feeling and systematic reasoning, as well as the rhythm of the restless lines, by which the bounds of materiality are broken and which raise the composition to the cosmos."⁵²

The art critic Iván Hevesy referred to the psychic roots of the apparently cosmic picture rhythm, which vibrates through the dimensions of the pictures, the figures and the landscapes, when he wrote in the November, 1918, issue of the magazine MA: Mattis Teutsch "creates out of real forms abstract artistic forms that are no longer symbols of objects but an expression of feelings. Mattis Teutsch’s personification of feelings is not a naïve game with allegories but a direct manifestation of moods by purely artistic means. This painting of sensations has a close relationship to music. ... (Mattis Teutsch) expresses the movement, the pulsing and the dynamism of the soul, that manifold and complex surging that is unleashed in him under this impression."⁵³

Such words, which were certainly written with the artist’s agreement, can be found in very similar formulations in Kandinsky’s writings of 1911 and 1912. But they are even closer to the words of Maurice Denis, drafted in his theory of the "sculptural equivalents" of the spiritual moods of the artist much earlier than Kandinsky: "We maintain that the feelings or mental conditions in the artist’s fantasy, caused by some sort of experience, have symptoms or sculptural equivalents that are capable of reproducing these emotions or spiritual conditions without it being necessary to recreate the original experience."⁵⁴

Much more than the direct contact with the members of Der Blaue Reiter, it is the common roots in the art of Gauguin, the Nabis and Matisse that demonstrate an inner spiritual and outer formal relationship between many works of Mattis Teutsch and the pictures of Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Marc and Münter. Jawlensky, through his early Paris contacts and his interest in Gauguin and the Nabis, was probably the first to explain to his friends in Murnau the attempts of the French to find in nature, through the synthetic combination of forms, the flattening of the picture, the emphasis on rhythmic picture structures and the intensification of colours, "sculptural equivalents" of the artist’s spiritual condition in the moment of his creation. Mattis Teutsch also wanted to create this synthesis of artist’s sensation and natural impression when he turned to painting in 1908 in Paris, or a little later in Brassó.

Not only with Franz Marc, for whom the great Gauguin exhibition in the Munich Tannhauser gallery in 1910 was a turning point in his life, did Mattis Teutsch share a common interest in the great French artist. Both admired in him the "bold attempt to spiritualise the ‘material’ that Impressionism was not capable of abandoning."⁵⁵ Gauguin also seems to have inspired both artists in their portrayals of silent and engrossed animals and people. These reposing figures, lost in dreams and embedded in nature – for Marc the animals, for Mattis Teutsch shadowy sketched humans – and the Tahitian women represented for both artists as well as for Gauguin the return to paradise, to that utopian Golden Age where peace and universal harmony prevailed between man, animals and the earth. Whereas Mattis Teutsch nearly always placed man at the centre of his pictures – a shadowy, abstract, new species of man, who was supposed to symbolise affection and love as the highest principles of life – Franz Marc banished man from his pictures as ‘unclean’ and replaced him by animals. Just as it is man, seeking for unity with creation and the universe, standing, sitting, crouching or lying in the centre of Mattis Teutsch’s pictures, in Franz Marc’s pictures it is the animal.

Gauguin had already "acknowledged that ‘The earth is our animality’. The Tahitian girls of Gauguin, the blue horses of Marc – both guard an imponderable secret. Nearness of figure, distance of the spiritual. The Munich artist (Mattis Teutsch) had found in Gauguin the colourful-sounding arabesque and the philosophy of harmony, but also the reference to the Egyptian relief style with its scenic arrangement of figures on a flat area. But he (Gauguin) meant even more to him: ‘Art is a universal language that expresses itself in symbols.’ This statement by Gauguin recurs in Marc as a fundamental maxim of his metaphysical art and as a missionary task for the artist ‘to create with your work symbols of your time that belong on the altars of the coming spiritual generation and behind which the spiritual creator disappears’. Gauguin too had also wanted something of the ‘mystical inner construction’ of earthly paradise of Marc",⁵⁶ – and also Mattis Teutsch, who reveals a conspicuous agreement with the other two artists, not only in his thinking but also in the language of his pictures.

All three artists in their works constructed the earthly paradise they yearned for as harmonic organisms, vibrating rhythmically in themselves as the contrasts of form and the contradictions melted into each other. In these organisms, man, nature and the cosmos were to form a dynamic oneness.

"I am seeking to increase my feeling for the organic rhythm of all things, to feel my way pantheistically into the trembling and flowing of blood in nature, in the trees, in animals, in the air. ... My sculpture is a groping attempt in the same direction. The circulating of the blood in the two bodies of the horses, expressed by the manifold parallelisms and vibrations of the lines."⁵⁷ So described Marc in 1910 his three-dimensional attempts in sculpture and painting to create this pictural organism from rhythmically vibrating and circling lines. Rhythmus in konzentrischen Bewegungen (rhythm in concentric movements) is the frequently recurring title that Mattis Teutsch uses for his pictures of the years 1918–1922.

The reactivated view of the world and of the work of art as an organism, a view that originated in Romanticism and in the neo-romantic Symbolism of the turn of the century had since the beginning of the 19^th century been aiming at the embodiment of the harmony between material and spirit, between the formless, manifold soul and forms – a harmony described by the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs shortly after the turn of the century in his article "Die Seele und die Formen" (The Soul and the Forms) as a oneness that had become problematic but that could be recovered by art. To make this lost harmony reappear, this philosopher wrote, works of art had to "form an organic continuum that is diversely structured and shaken by contradictions, yet still forms a unified, closed form."

Organisms of this type form most of the pictures and sculptures produced by Mattis Teutsch between 1918 and 1925. It was primarily the series of Soulflowers (Cat. P 77, Cat. P 78, Cat. P 79, Cat. P 80, Cat. P 81, Cat. P 82, Cat. P 83, Cat. P 84, Cat. P 85, Cat. P 86, Cat. P 87, Cat. P 88, Cat. P 89, Cat. P 90, Cat. P 91, Cat. P 92, Cat. P 93, Cat. P 94, Cat. P 95, Cat. P 96, Cat. P 97, Cat. P 98, Cat. P 99, Cat. P 100, Cat. P 101, Cat. P 102, Cat. P 103, Cat. P 104), which marked a high point in the artist’s work, that illustrate this romantic and neo-romantic idea of the work of art and the world as an organism in a highly impressive way. They strive to appear to us as the visual realisation of the world soul to which the romantic natural philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling in 1798 had dedicated his treatise "On the soul of the world, a hypothesis of higher physics to explain the general organism, in addition to a consideration of the relationship of the real and ideal in nature or development of the first theories of natural philosophy based on the principles of weight and light".

Organism metaphors in philosophy, in literature and pictorial art, but also in our everyday thinking, stand for the cycle of nature, for the eternal repetition of birth and death, for rotations of machines, for organisational perfection – whether in social structures such as the city organism or in economic units – for the unity of body and cosmos or microcosm and macrocosm, and for centripetal or centrifugal forces that penetrate the closed cycle and fertilise or explode it, or emerge from the closed cycle to give birth to new organisms.

Some of the linocut serie Seelenblumen (Soulflowers) (Fig. 2.) that Mattis Teutsch had cut and printed in the form of such organisms show a close relationship with the woodcut vignette that Kandinsky created for the cover of the catalogue of the Erste Ausstellung der Redaktion des Blauen Reiters (first exhibition by the editorship of Der Blaue Reiter. (Fig. 1.) The exhibition took place from 18 December 1911 until the beginning of January 1912 in the Munich Tannhauser gallery. The programmatic title vignette designed by Kandinsky shows an almost closed circular shape with a broad black contour being violently penetrated by a horse and rider from the bottom left. The diagonal formed by the figure of the rider inside the capsule is overcoming with force a horizontal bar that is barring the way as a contrast form. In the counter-movement and the equestrian battle that this represents, the inner contradiction and movement can be seen in this closed form, which reminds one of a cave, a bud, or an egg.

In one of Kandinsky’s designs (Fig. 50.) for the Almanach Der Blaue Reiter (1912), these counteracting movements in the ‘nutshell’ are paraphrased again by the battle between St. George on horseback and the dragon.

Both vignettes are exemplary metaphors for the organism that unites and reconciles the contradictory movements and tendencies in itself without disintegrating into pairs of opposites. Mattis Teutsch’s Seelenblumen (Soulflowers), produced a few years later, gave graphic expression to this anti-dualist world view of dynamic Monism. The woodcuts of 1920 show that they are of the same spirit as the two Kandinsky vignettes, which were to introduce the triumph of the Geistiges in der Kunst (The Spiritual in Art).

When parts of the Erste Blauer Reiter-Ausstellung (first Der Blaue Reiter exhibition), initiated by the Der Sturm Gallery of Herwarth Walden, to which Mattis Teutsch belonged after 1918, were to be seen in the Budapest art gallery in February and March 1913, Mattis Teutsch was one of its visitors.⁵⁸ On display were six works by Jawlensky, ten by Kandinsky, seven each by Franz Marc and Gabriele Münter, and three by von Marianne von Werefkin. There were also many pictures and sculptures by other international and Hungarian artists. Mattis Teutsch was not, as the references insist, one of the exhibitors. Reduced to Der Blaue Reiter artists, this exhibition toured numerous German and European cities from 1912 to 1914 and was a triumphal success for the Munich artists’ group. But it was also its end, for in 1914 the First World War broke out and destroyed all the international ties that had existed up to then, even within the group itself. In the same year, Mattis Teutsch painted his first watercolours, which demonstrate his close relations both to Der Blaue Reiter and French Modernism.

Notes
Figures

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