The Periodical "Integral"

The first issue of the periodical Integral came out on the 1^st of March, 1925.⁶¹ Its twelve issues represent a separate chapter in the history of the Romanian avant-garde in the arts. It not only had a coherent programme, but also a consistent approach centred on a synthesis of arts dominated by Constructivism, which by this time had become an international trend.⁶² (Fig. 11.) Integral may be contrasted with the periodical Contimporanul, which was characterised by an eclecticism derived from many sources, notwithstanding its radical tone. This prevents its unambiguous classification as the representative of any ideological or stylistic trend. Integral, on the other hand, was clearly Constructivist. This was also demonstrated by its typographic design, which showed a resemblance to ideas of the Bauhaus and the Soviet avant-garde.⁶³ Contimporanul laid stress on literature, while Integral paid more attention to the visual arts, publishing very varied illustrations in its pages, besides theoretical studies and manifestoes.

The new, synthetic style was not only given a clear definition in terms of theory, but there were also attempts to put the theory into practice: an Integral workshop was set up in the headquarters at 79 Calea Victoriei (under the direction of Maxy, Victor Brauner and Corneliu Michăilescu),⁶⁴ where, in the spirit of the Bauhaus, stage scenery, costumes, posters for the theatre and cinema, furniture, carpets and ceramics were all made. This activity ran parallel to that of the Academy of Applied Arts, which was originally led by Andrei Vespremie, subsequently by Maxy, and in which Mattis Teutsch was also later involved.⁶⁵

In 1924 Maxy took over the management of the Academy and avowedly modelled it on the Bauhaus in Dessau directed by Walter Gropius, which was also to be the model of the later Integral workshop.⁶⁶ (Fig. 12.) In January 1925, Contimporanul greeted the efforts of the Academy, remarking that " … it realises the ambition of the artist isolated from the world to return to the centre of existence and to undertake the responsibility for the development of an ideal."⁶⁷ The Academy had an exhibition room entitled the Permanent art deco Salon for the Modern Interior, where, however, seasonal exhibitions were also held. (Fig. 13.)

On the occasion of the opening of an exhibition on the 24^th of October, 1926, the catalogue gave a brief account of the contemporary state of Romanian applied arts,⁶⁸ then characterised by indifference on the part of the authorities and a tendency to bad taste. Romania’s absence from the 1925 International Exhibition of Applied Arts in Paris was regretted.⁶⁹ The harmonisation of the requirements of interior design and modern architecture was promulgated as an urgent task. The Academy also undertook the task of art education and of providing the public with advice in matters of taste.⁷⁰ Mattis Teutsch took part in the section ’Painting, Drawing and Ornament’.⁷¹ The Academy continued to operate until 1928, and in 1929 Maxy established an applied arts studio.⁷² In the same year he was awarded a gold medal at the Barcelona International Exhibition.⁷³

Young artists had every reason to consider Constantin Brâncusi, to whom they gave separate coverage in the second issue of the periodical, to be the great forerunner of the Modernist movement and, within it, Romanian Constructivism.⁷⁴ Reproductions of his works were published, together with a remarkable portrait by M. H. Maxy, who used several of the artist’s works in an ingenious montage based on simultaneous associations. It is also conceivable that the ellipsoid lines and oval forms in Brâncusi’s works found a response in Mattis Teutsch’s painting between 1922 and 1924, a period that shows the transition to Constructivism.⁷⁵

Between the 15^th and the 30^th April, 1925, Mattis Teutsch organised an exhibition in the Visconti Gallery in Paris. Integral wrote the following report on it: "Our friend, Mattis Teutsch, has just opened his exhibition of paintings and sculptures in the Visconti Gallery at 26 rue de Seine. We are convinced that our colleague will receive there the appreciation he is denied at home. We salute the first exhibition in Paris of the art of one of the outstanding representatives of the new spirit in art, of which we are going to give a more detailed account in our next issue".⁷⁶ Unfortunately, however, there was no follow-up to this piece.

Issue No. 9 of Integral contains the programme of the Academy of Applied Arts, which by then had been operating for three years, and was to be found at 17 Câmpineanu Street.⁷⁷ The exhibition of the Academy was also announced here, together with Maxy’s important mission statement on Neoclassicism.⁷⁸ This issue contained a reproduction of one of Mattis Teutsch’s linocuts next to the article Open-Air Exercises by Stephan Roll.⁷⁹ (Fig. 14.) The work shows a change in Mattis Teutsch’s approach, displaying the geometricised canon that was to become typical of him, and which was later elaborated in the illustrations of Kunstideologie (1931). For the most part, the book consists of pictures fitted into a semiotic system and a very compact text, which is only vaguely related to the theories developed by the representatives of the Romanian avant-garde, being rather the fruit of the artist’s personal experience and his idiosyncratic thought.

Although Mattis Teutsch continued to be featured in Integral with his reproductions, his name was no longer included in the list of editors. His last contribution to the periodical was a linocut entitled Forma [Form] showing a single silhouette in the geometrical-constructive style to which he was attached at that time,⁸⁰ and which was to become the basis for his depictions of miners made in Nagybánya between 1927 and 1929.⁸¹

In spite of his less obvious presence and rare appearances, Mattis Teutsch’s relationship with Integral was much closer than that with either Contimporanul or Punct, if only because his Constructivist approach chimed well with Bauhaus principles.⁸² Moreover his international artistic reputation gave the periodical a broader European ethos, and saved it from degenerating into provincialism.

We are indebted to the poet Sasa Pană, editor of the periodical Unu (One), for a vivid description of Mattis Teutsch at this time: "I saw Mattis Teutsch only once, and only once did we shake hands. I think it was around 1928, but it must have been in Maxy’s art deco studio (the first one in Romania) in Câmpineanu Street. […] I can see him as if through a mist – perhaps it was the fug of smoke from his pipe – sitting in an armchair, a well-built man and rather quiet. On that Sunday he made a short detour to Bucharest. In the evening he had to catch a train home to Brassó. He seem to be little involved in the noisy chatter of Felix Aderca, Roll, Brunea and Sanda Movilă. As I recall, he was having a ’private’ talk with Ion Călugăru."⁸³

The second exhibition of the New Art Group opened in the rooms of the Academy of Applied Arts in Câmpineanu Street in Bucharest on the 1^st of April, 1929.⁸⁴ Six of the main initiators of the Romanian avant-garde came together for this show. (Fig. 15.) With the exception of Mattis Teutsch, all the other members of the group explained their artistic credo in the pages of the catalogue. The texts constitute a remarkable documentation of their respective stages of development in 1929.

Mattis Teutsch’s new approach is also reflected in the works he exhibited under the auspices of the group, and in paintings inspired by the active spheres of life, for example, work and sport (Bányászok/Miners, A strandon/On the Beach, Sí/Skiing, Játszók/Players). Such works revealed a powerful new typology of the human body, which was subsequently to capture the attention of every reviewer. In fact this interest of Mattis Teutsch’s probably dates to his studies in Paris, where he had intensively studied anatomy with Charles Rich (and subsequently with Schadow in Berlin for half a year in 1907), at the same time becoming well versed in the artistic canons of different eras.⁸⁵

The problems that revolved around the creation of a new type of human being’ were precisely, if laconically, defined by the artist in October 1929, on the occasion of the opening of an exhibition in Kolozsvár: "In my pictures and sculptures, I show the search for a certain type of man in new dimensions. My works are elaborated within the context of an artistic feeling for statistics, rhythmics, dynamics and a moving perspective".⁸⁶ (Fig. 16.) On the same occasion, the artist gave one of his rare interviews to the newspaper Ellenzék [Opposition]: "Man thinks and lives with conceptualised images, and is thus analogous to the painter, simply because of his natural endowments; […] In my painting I intend to depict, not the individual with his physiognomy, but man himself as a consistent phenomenon, in his deeper and more enduring form."⁸⁷

Returning to the Bucharest exhibition, it is noteworthy that the critics paid it a good deal of attention. Extracts from the commentaries illustrate Mattis Teutsch’s reception. According to the writer Felix Aderca: "Milita Petrascu, Marcel Iancu, M. H. Maxy, Corneliu Mihăilescu, Mattis Teutsch, Victor Brauner and L Brătăsanu appear as a compact group. They are the artists who fight the hardest for their artistic approach. Although it was coined to frighten people out of complacency, the term ‘art nouveau’ should, in fact, be the name that any artist should use for his work, insofar as he is different in principle from craftsmen and decorators, who only work according to patterns."⁸⁸

The most professional and complete account of this exhibition was given by the reviewer Ionel Jianu. After commenting on Victor Brauner’s ‘pantheistic primitivism’, on ‘Picasso’s influence’ in M. H. Maxy’s painting, on the ‘effective tonality’ of Marcel Iancu’s colours and on the ’range of foreign influences from Juan Gris to Segonzac’, which characterised the style of Corneliu Mihăilescu, Ionel Jianu briefly dealt with Mattis Teutsch’s works: "Mattis Teutsch is a painter rich in decorative effects. The clear, synthetic and expressive forms of his pictures reveal a well-ordered intelligence and a highly developed sense of plasticity. His decorative panel paintings are especially likely to be successful, because in this genre he displays a firmness of line and an all-embracing approach. Mattis Teutsch’s wooden sculptures are similarly organic entities formed with a single impulse and possessing the charm of the individual line, which is then more fully developed in the formulation of its curving shapes."⁸⁹

The poet and journalist, Stephan Roll, a close colleague of the exhibiting artists from the avant-garde periodicals, remarked that, in contrast to the earlier more polarised reactions (e.g. the response to the 1924 exhibition of Contimporanul), both the public and the critics on this occasion spoke approvingly of Modernism. But Roll himself had a very superficial view of Mattis Teutsch: "In his large panel paintings Mattis Teutsch is decorative; he explores the curving lines of silhouettes, [producing] a kind of ceremonial posture, which is sometimes uninterestingly coloured in a way that fails to complement either the liveliness or gracefulness of the objects. The panel paintings are somehow becalmed, unable to represent the particular sculptural problem Mr. Teutsch would have liked to address. His wooden statuettes fulfil the stylistic requirements of trivial objets d’art and are skilfully carved."⁹⁰ However, Roll was right about the chromatic asceticism which characterised Mattis Teutsch’s painting of this period. It was a time when the artist simplified the colour scale, employing tones which resembled the frescos of the trecento.

This decisive transformation in Mattis Teutsch’s approach was subjected to a strikingly understanding analysis by ‘i.v.’ (probably the journalist J. Valerian) on the occasion of the exhibition of the Art Nouveau Group. In his opinion, Maxy, Marcel Iancu and Mattis Teutsch were the true founders of this movement: "It can be seen, however, that the sneers and jibes, the ridicule and abuse, have not only failed to deter this group of young artists, but have actually attracted Milita Petrascu, Cornelia Mihailescu and Victor Brauner to it." "From decorative, colourful impressions similar to the exuberantly ruffled display of a cockerel’s tail-feathers, Mattis Teutsch has switched to panel paintings; in these, he would like to achieve the stylisation of the type of modern man, on the analogy of the stylisation that once existed in Egyptian depictions; but apart from the fact that he elongates the body (and this has anyway already been done, albeit in a different manner, by the fashionable Doumergue), and gradually thickens the legs (which gives the impression of Charleston trousers), his silhouettes would be as much at home in a poster as in a painting (the skier, for example, would make a superb advertisement for Switzerland). His sculptures display similar features, generally giving the impression of ornamental trivia. Undoubtedly, they do not lack charm or decorativity, but they are moving away from sculpture. However they are made with interesting materials, such as pear and maple wood."⁹¹

Mattis Teutsch’s individual exhibition was opened in the hall of the Hasefer art bookshop in Bucharest on the 17^th of November, 1929. (Fig. 17.) A journalist using the initials N. B. as a signature remarked that "the works of this artist are so close to our contemporary souls, that as soon as we come into contact with them, it is impossible not to understand them."⁹² This demonstrates that the public had at last begun to appreciate his works, just as they were learning to appreciate modernist works generally. The same review also gives a summary of the topics and style of the works on display:⁹³ "In both his paintings and his sculptures, Mattis Teutsch strives for an artistic view which evokes in us a feeling of calmness and perfect harmony […] The composition of the human body follows the new proportions – it is the prototype of the typical man of our age. Characteristic of this artist are the warm, light colours and ‘expressive’ effects in the painting, and the simplified but harmoniously conceived forms of the wooden sculptures. Mattis Teutsch’s works open up new horizons for us; with their help, we can begin to espy, albeit dimly, the beautiful element in the rhythm of our age."⁹⁴

Eugen Jebeleanu, who wrote about Mattis Teutsch several times,⁹⁵ gave a portrait of his personality in his essay entitled Saxon Painters from Brassó. Here also, he indicated a new period in the painter’s artistic development: "Some time earlier, in the midst of the upheaval of the Modernist movement [Mattis Teutsch] was an Expressionist. As such, he was successful in his Paris, Chicago and Berlin exhibitions and his work was appreciated. But when he saw that Expressionism had become a school .... and realised that dogma was concentrating and restricting [the artistic] impetus into a single idea, he did not hesitate to abandon this scene and go off in search of his own polar star of abstraction. Today we think he has found it. The silhouettes from Mattis Teutsch’s paintings and his statuettes convey some of the mysterious atmosphere of the peasant figures painted on the mausoleums of the Pharaohs. Mattis Teutsch always makes the legs of naked bodies longer than they are in reality; they are also always thinner, exhibiting an artificial, but wonderfully effective, disproportion with the rest of the body. Nature is excluded from this artist’s Weltanschauung."⁹⁶

It was probably on the basis of conversations with the artist that Jebeleanu wrote about Mattis Teutsch’s new, ‘neoclassical’ approach on the occasion of his one-man show in Brassó in 1930. "His idea is to create the man of our age with new proportions of forms; to reflect a moving perspective through human vision at different levels, and in different situations, all in the same picture. This is the standardisation or crystallisation of human forms in terms of lines. Not the crystallisation of the Cubists, involving rigid edges and geometric constructions, but a pure crystallisation: that is, a neoclassical one. For the century of machines, Mattis Teutsch has discovered, unaided, the ideal of contemporary man, which is given such fitting representation in his art. Observe also the women in Mattis Teutsch’s paintings: the slope of the shoulders is straight and clear, hands wind around curved hips, legs are drawn admirably long! This is the reed which Mattis Teutsch has used to make a pipe for his brilliant art."⁹⁷ Here, although wrapped in metaphors, we can recognise a complete aesthetics conceived in the true spirit of art deco.

Prior to the 1932 exhibition, Mattis Teutsch also took part in the autumn exhibition of the Curentul artistic românesc [‘Romanian Artistic Currents’] association, which is an indication of the pluralism of his contacts with Romanian art.⁹⁸ The association comprised artists belonging to different generations and schools. Mattis Teutsch participated only in the first exhibition in the company of Romanian artists who were then at the beginning of their careers, but who soon became important figures in the period between the two World Wars (Corneliu Baba, Alexandru Ciucurencu, Lucia Bălăcescu – Demetriade, Michaela Eleutheriade, Lucian Grigorescu, Gheorghe Labin, Alexandru Rhoebus, Margareta Sterian, Mac Constantinescu, Borgo Prund). Besides them, masters of the former generation, such as Stefan Dimitrescu, Gheorghe Petrascu, Camil Ressu, Jean Al. Steriadi and Dimitrie Paciurea also participated.⁹⁹

Mattis Teutsch had his final one-man show in Bucharest before the war in the same Hasefer hall in March 1932. (Fig. 19.) The exhibition was well publicised in the press beforehand. For example, in 1931 Lucian Boz had already published a long interview in Vremea about his visit to the Brassó studios. He recollected what he had seen in Mattis Teutsch’s studio in the following way: "Mattis Teutsch, with whom we are familiar from some of the exhibitions of Contimporanul and the Integral group, has a studio which gives every impression of Modernism. Formerly an Expressionist, Mattis Teutsch has recently been increasingly preoccupied with reproducing human forms in a meticulous linear style. Nature does not interest him, only man. There is a hermetic quality, both in his silhouette paintings and in his statuettes, which are perhaps similar in their ethereal and pure forms to the bodies depicted on the walls of pyramids. The legs of Teutsch’s statuettes are much longer than in reality, and all of them are distorted and twisted by the artist’s chisel. Whoever wants to understand his art must leave all his prejudices at the door of the studio and approach the work without preconceptions and with the same empathy as the artist himself possesses. The ’Egyptian’ orientation of this phase of Mattis Teutsch’s career is a conspicuous feature and at once supplies also a basis for interpretation of the artist’s intentions."¹⁰⁰

Returning to the exhibition of March 1932, it is noteworthy that the young Eugen Ionescu also wrote about it. In that year the playwright published several art reviews in the short-lived periodical România literară, edited by the writer Liviu Rebreanu.¹⁰¹ It is worth quoting the part of the text devoted to Mattis Teutsch in full, bearing in mind the later reputation of the dramatist. Although there is a good deal of malice in it, the piece nevertheless demonstrates Ionescu’s well-attested critical insight: "Mattis Teutsch: This elegant artist, who produced surprisingly decorative lines six or seven years ago, now needs to refresh his inspiration.[He] indefatigably conceives the same unvarying curve, which demonstrates his inherent decorative sense, but at the same time represents a colossal failure of imagination. His painting is certainly inferior to his lovely and dynamic sculpture.’¹⁰²

The anonymous reviewer of Rampa also gave a thorough analysis of the exhibition, focussing on the fresco designs. "Mattis Teutsch is an ideological painter. Imbued with Worringer’s aesthetics and the theories of Herman Bahr and other German Expressionists, he strives to express the aesthetics of our age through his works. […] What primarily captures the attention is the attempt to represent forms in an abstract way; his paintings are decorative silhouettes, shadows with clear contours but without weight, displaying the characteristics of symbolic action. And this motif is repeated everywhere in the same way, in the painting, in the water-colours, in the wooden and metal sculptures, with a regularity amounting indeed to a mannerism.

"Almost all of Mattis Teutsch’s canvases are identical; naturally not from the point of view of their subject matter [....] but rather as regards their treatment, technique and composition. The same eurhythmic stylisation, the same undifferentiated colour patches with dry, decorative contours, and the same projection of contours onto the same background [this makes it sound as if Mattis Teutsch was exhibiting fresco designs]. There is no greater variety in the sculptures, either, a fact which definitely indicates a lack of inspiration. Even if Mattis Teutsch’s aesthetic theories are to be considered interesting, his art seems to be artificial, monotonous and contrived. […] The exhibition in ’Hasefer’ hall is an interesting example of the problem, revealing the dangers of extreme intellectualism in the creative process."¹⁰³ This review may be somewhat unjust; nevertheless the author has clearly analysed the dogmatic tendency of Mattis Teutsch’s art between 1930 and 1933 .

In October 1933 Mattis Teutsch exhibited his large fresco designs painted with tempera and oil on paper, together with his sculptures in the hall of the Redut in Brassó. Of the reviews in Romanian, let us quote one of the less well-known: "The painter Mattis Teutsch has been exhibiting in the hall of the Redut for two weeks. […] the idealisation of his figures, whose silhouettes seem to be about to break out of an invisible vault, the strength suggested by their poses and the energy that gives the works an eternal unending rhythm, all this endows his canvases with an antique mysticism. Although he is not a member of any Modernist school, his painting is a synthesis of the idealisation of spirit and substance. He does not follow nature, and so his art, with its single level of view and absence of a horizontal line, represents a challenge to the classical rules of perspective and light. His wooden and metal sculptures are generally stripped down to the same tall silhouettes, almost weightless and always long-legged, an idealised duality of spirit and substance, the meandering lines of which often remind us of Paciurea’s chimaeras. […] The exhibition closes on Sunday, 22 October. There are, however, some panel paintings featuring assembly lines, people at work etc., which every intellectual should see."¹⁰⁴

The exhibition of Mattis Teutsch and Jules Perahim (born: 1914) opened in the hall of the Astra Library in Brassó in March 1936, and represented the concluding phase of Mattis Teutsch’s relationship with the Romanian avant-garde. The cooperation is surprising, since Perahim had been part of the Surrealist groups around the periodicals Unu and Alge from 1930,¹⁰⁵ and his drawings recall those of Max Ernst. The joint exhibition of two artists with such different mentalities can perhaps only be explained by their friendship and shared political convictions. As can be learned from an article signed ’F.S’ and published in the Brassói Lapok,¹⁰⁶ the real sensation was the ’young Bucharest Daumier’, Jules Perahim, while Mattis Teutsch only exhibited some of his older wooden, bronze and aluminium sculptures.

Subsequent to this show, Mattis Teutsch only exhibited some works in Brassó, in an exhibition of German artists in 1937. From then until 1947, when he again appeared before the public, he practically went into ’internal exile’, withdrawing into a world of meditation and detaching himself from everyday reality. This seems to have been some kind of reaction against the extraordinarily vigorous activity during the 1920s and 1930s.

Notes
Figures