On Mattis Teutsch's Figural Style
S. A. Mansbach

Notes

1 Without running the risk of distortion, one can’t draw general conclusions from Mattis Teutsch’s bibliography. Nonetheless, the following observations show considerable differences in approach evinced by a host of critics, scholars, and fellow artists. The majority of publications on Mattis Teutsch are articles or reviews that frequently lend themselves to the expositions of personal points of view to a degree greater than is evidenced in the two Hungarian language monographs (by Júlia Szabó [Máttis Teutsch János, Budapest, Corvina, 1983] and Valéria Majoros [Máttis Teutsch, Budapest, 1998]). However, the bibliographies contained in these monographs limit themselves principally to Hungarian language publications, which admittedly constitute the bulk of the literature. A complete bibliography, embracing Romanian and German publications, would helpfully augment the listings in Hungarian.

2 Many of these studies deal with Mattis Teutsch’s relationship with Herwarth Walden’s Galerie and his journal Der Sturm, particularly emphasising the second generation of Expressionism, especially artists from East Central, Southeastern, and Eastern Europe. See the essay by Éva Bajkay in the present catalogue.

3 A good summary of Mattis Teutsch’s contacts with Romanian artists can be found in Mircea Deac’s Mattis Teutsch, ºi realismul constructiv, Cluj-Napoca, Editura Dacia, 1985. Deac disputes the claims made by several Hungarian scholars that Mattis Teutsch was deeply engaged in the Activists’ revolutionary political activity. The author may have overemphasised the significance of intimacy or personal contacts between Mattis Teutsch and the leading progressive artists and critics who were active in Germany during the first two decades of the twentieth century. See also Mariana and Gheorghe Vida’s essay in the present catalogue.

4 The Hungarian press in Transylvania during the 1920s and later also took pride in the attainments of Mattis Teutsch. Post-1968 publications by Claus Stephani, Zoltán Banner, and especially Gheorghe Vida, among others, evince a broader point of view.

5 The first published discussion of Mattis Teutsch in Romanian was the review by Nicolae Tonitza (Avintul, Bucharest, Maison d’art, 1920).

6 See S. A. Mansbach’s The ‘Foreignness’ of Classical Romanian Modern Art, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 80, No 3, September 1998; also, Deac, op. cit.

7 The most important exceptions were the articles on Mattis Teutsch by Lucian Boz (in Facla in 1930), by Eugen Jebeleanu (in Ultima ora [1929], Gazeta Transilvaniei [1930], and Rampa [1931]), and by C. Stoicanescu (in Patria [1933]), in addition to the reviews of exhibitions of the “Arta nouã” in which Mattis Teutsch participated.

8 Perhaps the best example may be the study by Gheorghe Vida with the meaningful title, Hans Mattis Teutsch and the European Dialogue of Forms (Romanian Review, Vol. 12, 1984, pp. 96-101). The article appeared in a cultural forum that was itself subject to political control. It is made obvious by the conjunction between the magazine’s inside cover, on which the colour image on the journal’s cover is identified as Hans Mattis Teutsch’s Soul Flowers, and the frontispiece, which bears a full-page image of Comrade Nicolae Ceaucescu, the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party.

9 An example of the orientation sanctioned by officialdom can be found in Alexandru Cebu’s The National Gallery: Romanian Painting in the Collection of the Art Museum of the Socialist Republic of Romania (Bucharest, 1984. 55.), in which the discussion of Mattis Teutsch reaches its culmination with the following statements: “In the final stage of his career, Mattis Teutsch gradually moved towards compositions focused on social themes - a significant development in the work of a profound humanist for whom human was always the centre of the universe. By linking the problems of art to the aspirations and ideas of man in modern society, Mattis Teutsch programmatically [sic] set about to reconstruct the human figure; his attempt, as he admitted, was ‘the discovery and creation of a new type of man’” (op. cit. 55). By contrast, Deac freely acknowledged the importance of party politics for the artist, especially in the years following World War II. However, the author avoided elaborating the implications of the artist’s explicitly socialist (political) content in works such as Work, Industry, Harvest, The Eighth of March, and Peasants, among many others. Nonetheless, in Deac’s work the treatment of Mattis Teutsch’s production during his last fifteen years of activity is uncommon. As it is characteristic to the literature on Mattis Teutsch, Deac concludes his discussion of the universalising ethics and aesthetics that Mattis Teutsch championed with the particularist claim: “seine ganze Tätigkeit, vor allem jene in der letzten Periode, is auch ein Beweis seiner starken Verbundenheit mit dem Vaterland, mit seinem Volk” (op. cit. 79). Mattis Teutsch’s own comments on the role of his art during the Romanian communist regime can be found in the manuscript, Betrachtungen über das Schaffen der bildenden Künstler im sozialistischen Zeitalter (1959), excepts from which have been published by Deac

10 The fact that Nicolae Ceaucescu had approved the pictures by Mattis Teutsch to be hung on the walls of the former royal palace in Bucharest might be understood as an endorsement of the artist’s status in the 1980s. During the revolution of December 1989 several works by Mattis Teutsch were destroyed when the National Museum was damaged by fire.

11 As research into Mattis Teutsch’s figural work continues, it is likely that future scholars will be able to chart a more refined development stylistically and, possibly, ideologically in Mattis Teutsch’s painting, graphic cycles, and three-dimensional creativity through the early 1960s than the periodisation by Deac. The present discussion, which focuses on the period of the mid-1920s through the late 1930s, corresponds to the terminus ante quem of the exhibition. It ignores also the “figural” references of Mattis Teutsch’s poetry.

12 Among the positive results of revisionist art history is a number of reassessments of 1920s, 1930s, and post-World War II figuration. Scholars who established themselves as advocates of classical modernism have recently rekindled interest in what might be called the “representational side” of modern art. The sign of this broader interest is the exhibition (with accompanying catalogue) on Norman Rockwell, organised by Robert Rosenblum, and installed in the venerable temple of mainstream modernism, New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

13 Establishing the dating for Mattis Teutsch’s visual creativity is extraordinarily difficult; for few of his paintings, sculpture, or prolific graphic production were dated by the artist, though most bear the author’s signature in the form of initials. Further, the artist kept no “liber veritatis” with corresponding documentation. Additionally, the artist occasionally worked simultaneously in several “styles” – or at least variations or combinations of styles. This is especially true from roughly 1922 through c. 1927. Finally, Mattis Teutsch returned over years to favourite themes, colour harmonies, and compositional motifs. Such practice complicates efforts by art historians to chart a convincing stylistic development from which reliable dating might be derived.

14 Mattis Teutsch 1959 op. cit.

15 CEBU 1984 op. cit.

16 Of particular note is the assessment of Mattis Teutsch’s work by Marcel Janco, published in Contimporanul (“Prima expozi_ie interna_ionalã de artã modernã,” Contimporanul III, 1924) and excerpted (in German) in Deac (op. cit. 69.)

17 Based on the installation photographs and on the generic titles provided in the checklists, it is difficult to say with certainty whether the 1924 exhibitions held in Romania reprised exactly those works shown earlier abroad.

18 Many scholars have affirmed a continuity of philosophical interests between Mattis Teutsch’s “soul flowers” and his explicitly figural art. Most have claimed that the artist had always put the human at the centre of his aesthetic and ethical world view, an assertion that Mattis Teutsch’s own writings seem to confirm as well. However, as is suggested below, there is an important difference in emphases that Mattis Teutsch places on the human figure and its symbolic meaning; and these variations are decisive for a richer understanding of his art.

19 “Linie ist Führer und Betoner der Bewegung.” (Mattis Teutsch) from Kunstideologie (1931). Majoros 1998, 179.

20 For a discussion of Mattis Teutsch’s expressionist theories, see the essays by Majoros and Bajkay in the present volume.

21 During his several stays in Berlin, Mattis Teutsch likely visited the sculpture galleries in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and saw the impressive collection of casts in the Prussian collections. His interest in ancient Greek renditions of the human form - from geometric period vase painting to Hellenistic sculpture - was animated more by his philosophical faith in essential humanistic values (made visible through the nude form) than it was motivated by a desire to master the ideal proportions of the human body. His reading of theoretical texts, for example Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1907) and, equally likely, Adolf von Hildebrand’s Das Problem der Form in den Bildenden Kunst (1893) are probable sources for Mattis Teutsch’s attachment to the human (nude) form. Nowhere is this clearer than in his sculpture from the mid- to late-1920s through to the mid-1930s.

22 “Die Konstruktion der Arbeiten besteht in farbig rhythmischen Bewegungen durch kalte, warme, dunkle, helle Gegensätze, Ruhepunkte, konzentrische und exzentrische Bewegungen...” (Mattis Teutsch), from the forward to the Brassó exhibition catalogue of 1927.

23 For a discussion of the symbolic dimensions to the colour blue for Mattis Teutsch, see Júlia Szabó, “Blaue Seele / Seelenblume: Zur Geschichte eines Motivs in Symbolismus und Expressionismus,” in Acta Historia Artium [Hungarica], 39, 1997; for a comprehensive treatment, see John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), esp. chap. 14, “Mood Indigo – From the Blue Flower to the Blue Rider.”

24 Both of the placards were printed in Brassó, with notes in three languages on them (Romanian, Hungarian, German). M. Szarvasy collection, New York.

25 Die Aufgabe des sozialen bildenden Künstlers ist, seine Wahrnehmungen, Erlebnisse, diese Synthese in einer konstruktiven realen Form zu gestalten.” “Die sozialistische, materialistische Weltanschauung bedingt eine optimistische, lebensbejahende, klare realistisch-konstructive Form.” (Mattis Teutsch) from “Betrachtungen über das Schaffen der bildenden Künstler im sozialistischen Zeitalter” (1959).

26 The literature on Mattis Teutsch makes frequent reference to a 1925 exhibition in Chicago. To date, I have been unable to find precise information in Chicago regarding it. Presumably, the exhibition was held in a private gallery, whether it was a one-man or a group show remains uncertain.

27 Paradoxically, when other members of the Bucharest-based avant-garde had returned to Romania from abroad during the mid-1920s – Janco, Maxy, and a host of others – they heightened contact with colleagues throughout Europe. Their frequent, close, and mutually reinforcing interaction was due in part to their activity as editors/publishers of advanced cultural journals – Contimporanul, Integral, Punct, and Unu, among them – which relied upon sister publications for information, copy, illustrations, and support from outside the country to underscore their own activities and to foster a positive reception for their art internationally as well as domestically.

28 The volume bearing the title Kunstideologie: Stabilität und Aktivität im Kunstwerk was published only in 1931 (Potsdam: Müller & J. Kiepenheuer) after many years of reworking. Although the precise beginnings of this album of images and accompanying text remains uncertain, a careful study of the book reveals its indebtedness – at least for the illustrative material – to Mattis Teutsch’s art of the mid- to late 1920s. A reprint with an introduction by Mihai Nadin and an afterward by Elisabeth Axmann was published in 1977 (Bucharest: Kriterion). In Hungarian Mûvészet May 1984, February 1985. See Majoros 1998 178. 181.

29 These ideas may well have been influenced by his Romanian contemporary, M. H. Maxy, with whom Mattis Teutsch exhibited and with whose works of the mid-1920s he was familiar. Maxy was also negotiating an effective reconciliation of geometry and expressionist effects, harnessed to a socialist outlook. Paradoxically, Mattis Teutsch had earlier proved resistant to the emphatic socialist/communist ideological charge of Lajos Kassák. During the time when Mattis Teutsch was an adherent of Kassák’s MA group in Budapest, he declined to participate actively in the revolutionary activities of Hungary’s avant-garde.

30 Not discussed in the present essay are the several large scale murals (and their preliminary designs) planned or executed during this period.

31 “Vertikale ist: Tätigkeit. Die vertikale Form ist Träger und Erreger der stützenden Sicherheit und Aktivität.” (Mattis Teutsch) from Kunstideologie 1931. “Alles, was unser Leben in unserem sozialistischen Zeitalter umgibt, seine in jeder Richtung schöpferischer Tätigkeit, die unser aller Dasein durch die Gleichwertigkeit der geistigen, Kopf und Hand erfordernden Arbeit erfüllt...” (from “Betrachtungen über das Schaffen der bildenden Künstler im sozialistischen Zeitalter” by Mattis Teutsch [1959]).

32 Mattis Teutsch, from the unpublished notes in his estate and quoted in Deac, op. cit., 82.

33 Ibid.

34 “Die Lösung des Menschen von der Erde: in Kunst. Die Verbindung des Menschen mit der Erde: in Kunst!” Ibid.

35 Mattis Teutsch had employed a red square for similar purposes in a work from several years before. Composition with Flag, a painting now in the Municipal Art Museum of Braºov, relies on a triangular structural foundation that fixes the abstractly attenuated figure firmly to the earth, his hips bracketed by a red square of Malevich’s utopian Suprematism, which, in turn, is surrounded by an orange-red sphere of El Lissitzky’s socialism. This “Russian” vocabulary of form and reference was also used by the Hungarian avant-garde in 1918 and 1919, when Mattis Teutsch was more closely associated with them.

36 Around 1930 Malevich, too, conjoined the red square with figural representations, often in scenes of peasant life.

37 Mattis Teutsch: 1959 op. cit.

38 The horizontality of the figure is significant; for Mattis Teutsch held that “Horizontal ist: Ruhe” (Kunstideologie). As such, the reclining female is the ideological complement to the standing figures (two males and a female?), who represent verticality, viz. activity or action (Tätigkeit).

39 The triangular void reinforces the verticality - Mattis Teutsch’s sign for “Tätigkeit” - of the elongated blue rectangle behind the figure. Significantly, it inverts the earth-pointing triangle at the centre of Physical Labourers and Intellectuals.

40 In this context, one might cite Bortnyik’s versions of Portrait of Alfréd Forbát and His Wife (1924, location unknown). Later version, Hungarian National Gallery.

41 There were surprisingly few (non-architectural) works of aluminum sculpture executed during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and rarely were they cast. Many artists employed nickel (or silver) plating to simulate the gloss, texture, and visual “feel” of aluminum. Among those who did experiment with this modern metal was Moholy-Nagy; but he, too, achieved the effects of cast aluminum by resorting to nickel plating.

42 There are a few examples of sculptures serving utilitarian functions, such as bases for tabletop lamps.


| Top |