Krisztina Passuth
The Landscape Visions of
János Mattis Teutsch

The Works of János Mattis Teutsch and Der Blaue Reiter in the Hungarian
National Gallery of Budapest, March 14, 2001-24 June, 2001.
Mattis Teutsch and Der Blaue Reiter. Catalogue. Budapest/Miskolc,
MissionArt Gallery, 2001, 484 pp. Also in Hungarian and in German.

Other than those few who take a close interest in painting, no one would have recognized the name of Mattis Teutsch about fifty years ago, although he was still alive and working at that time. Death came to him in 1960. Today he is among the most sought-after painters of Eastern-European origin, whose works feature at prestigious international exhibitions, auctions and small gallerys' shows. Comprehensive criticism of the oeuvre was first published in 1968 in Romanian, and in 1969 in Hungarian, the latter by Zoltán Banner.
Nevertheless, the true rediscovery had to wait until the 1980s. That came with the publication of Júlia Szabó's book, and when spiritual art, a tendency in which Mattis Teutsch would rightly have deserved a prominent place, attracted international attention. Nevertheless, Mattis Teutsch's works, although initially considered for selection, were omitted from the first extremely important exhibitions which the Los Angeles County Museum organized in 1986 under the title The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985. Obviously, numerous considerations could have played a part in the decision, as they invariably do in every exhibition. Still, his omission was explained at the time by pointing out that he had had no concrete, historical connection with any other artist of the so-called spiritual school. He never exhibited with the German group Der Blaue Reiter, he never met Kandinsky, and he did not know Kupka or Malevich or Mondrian.
For most of his adult life he taught in a vocational school in Brassó (Kronstadt - Bras¸ov), Transylvania, and it was also there that he spent the most valuable years of his life as an artist. This was something of a handicap when it came to keeping in touch with the art world or joining an already existing intellectual circle.
János Mattis Teutsch was born in 1884 in Brassó, a beautiful and important town of medieval origin, largely inhabited by Saxons. Formerly part of Hungary, the town was ceded to Romania in 1920. Mattis Teutsch felt equally at home in several cultures and wrote and published in three languages. Joining the latest art movements of three countries he exhibited his works in Brassó, Bucharest, Budapest and Berlin, in addition to Dusseldorf, Paris, and many more places. Regardless of all this, his personality was neither truly avant-garde nor decidedly dynamic. Save for a few brief spells, he worked in Brassó during his entire, rather long working life. This confined location determined the range of opportunities available to him, and also drew the circle within which he had to realize his ideas. For a long time this versatile artist tried to develop his talents in his own hometown, and the conditions for this were rather good even as late as the first half of the 1920s.
In reality he belonged to the first great generation of the avant-garde movement, whose members turned all the previously accepted rules of painting and sculpture upside down during the 1910s. Mattis Teutsch himself was not of the revolutionary or anarchist type-quite the contrary, his were the gentle ways of a school teacher, working in his hometown most of the time and sending his works to various exhibitions in Berlin, Vienna, Paris and Bucharest from Brassó. If one was to compare his career to Kandinsky's, for example, who left Russia behind and set up his base in Munich, Weimar or Paris with equal ease, the difference immediately springs to mind. Kandisky's "cosmopolitanism" and Mattis Teutsch's local patriotism alike became crucial factors in their respective careers. As his poems, lyrical and abounding in vivid and graphic descriptions, reveal, Mattis Teutsch's art and life philosophy is closely related to Kandinsky's pictures, visionary descriptions and mythical worldview. Nevertheless, the two artists' paths never crossed: the similarities between their compositions never led to the establishment of personal contact and friendship; the distance between them remained, and even increased with the passing of the years. The same applies to the other painters with whom Mattis Teutsch might have established close co-operation under more favourable conditions (as Kandinsky and Paul Klee did in the Bauhaus).
Another career diametrically opposite to his was László Moholy-Nagy's, who left Hungary in 1919 at the age of twenty-four, never to return except for shorter visits. He accepted everything that his host countries could offer to him and left behind an extraordinarily rich oeuvre despite his relatively short life. Regardless of all the difficulties, new opportunities opened up in succession for Moholy-Nagy, while for Mattis Teutsch the range of opportunities were gradually closing down, especially after 1950.
At the outset of his working life, his prospects looked different. Soon after he arrived in Budapest, he met the period's most dynamic and most important writer/editor, Lajos Kassák, who launched the Hungarian avant-garde movement's magazine, MA, in 1916. Kassák's circle mainly consisted of writers of left-wing convictions; the magazine was strongly opposed to the war and it did everything in its power to promote international co-operation with intellectuals of similar political views. Mattis Teutsch had no interest in politics; he was inspired by the harmony of poetry, pictures and colours. Nevertheless, Kassák discovered Mattis Teutsch's exceptional talent, individual perception, and innate affinity with the contemporary movements. In 1917, when he organized the first exhibition in the small rooms of the MA editorial office, Kassák's choice fell on Mattis Teutsch. One year later he arranged a second exhibition for the artist. In this way the hitherto completely unknown Mattis Teutsch was immediately accepted by the newly emerging Hungarian avant-garde scene, the socalled Activists movement.
Kassák, who at that time was preoccupied with establishing a circle of artists associated with the magazine, not only accepted Mattis Teutsch, but also had a very high opinion of his art, as the foreword of the catalogue that he himself published reveals. Kassák recognized in the young painter the very same qualities for which he would later draw much praise from posterity. "The purity of the intuitively perceived colours distilled through the ordering brain, and the composed rhythm of working lines cosmically transposed beyond the material frames. He surpasses even the most talented among the new generation of painters with his range of colours and the arrangement of psychologically interacting objects," Kassák wrote in his idiosyncratic expressionistic style in the October issue of MA. And although Kassák celebrated Mattis Teutsch for his wide range of colours, he regularly inserted his black-and-white linocuts in MA, and even published a separate Album with them, with the following comment: "His most pronounced experiments with forms achieve plasticity in his linocuts..." Although in this case one cannot endorse Kassák's usage of the term "plasticity", it is true that the artist produced the most dynamic graphical works in that period, and these always started out from, and developed, the characteristic movements of the organic forms, which were also effective in black and white.
Mattis Teutsch's works derive their unique significance from the fact that he self-evidently and gradually turned away from realistic representation and had moved towards a more universal, more abstract, "cosmical" approach before 1919-at a time, therefore, when abstract art had been completely unknown in Hungary. A comparison with Kandinsky, Malevich or Mondrian immediately makes it quite clear that Mattis Teutsch developed his abstract, synoptic style without any theoretical considerations. Almost imperceptibly, the compositions themselves became "abstract", or on some occasions alternated between figurative scenes and increasingly synoptic, impersonal images. For Mattis Teutsch, nature-the abstract silhouette of the trees-and people-again, faceless silhouettes-formed one great organic unity.
During the First World War he produced water-colours, in which he enhanced the white base of the paper. The canvases he used for his paintings of rhythmically curving systems of blue and green lines similarly constituted a white base. His true artistic power is revealed, however, in those compositions (usually on cardboard), in which the white colour, suggestive of paper, is replaced by yellows and greens to fill the space available. (Landscape, 1917, cat.no. P20; Hilly Landscape with Trees, 1916, cat. no. P21.) With their plasticity smoothed, the hills and the tree canopies lose their original features-the curving trunks of the trees and the yellow and green curving outlines of the landscape become homogeneous. The thick horizontals of the soil, arranged on top of each other, continue the peculiar lines of the tree branches reaching far into the foreground and arching from left to right (Bright Landscape, 1917, cat.no. P23) The subdued pastels are sometimes replaced by warm hues of greater intensity: the contentious yellows, reds and greens try to outdo each other in an attempt to assert themselves (Landscape, 1917, cat.no. P24) The silhouettes of the two trees in shades of red in the foreground merge into one almost inseparably. In Lilac Landscape (1917, cat.no. P28) it is not only plasticity of forms and three-dimensionality that are absent, the colours themselves are reduced: a pinkish-lilac, hardly offset by tiny patches of green, reigns supreme. The forms, which become increasingly detached from nature, completely fill the space available. In Composition (1919, cat.no. P43) the motifs seem like flames: the fine green silhouettes of tree trunks only occasionally break up the intershifting yellows and reds. The composition breaks free of the line of the horizon: as in Frantisek Kupka's abstract paintings, the colour patches flow freely and whimsically, with the result that the direct visual sensation, the image, increasingly turns into a vision. By around 1919 Mattis Teutsch uses only a loosely defined system of symbols (Composition, ca. 1919, cat.no. P48; Composition, ca. 1920, cat.no. P70): the trees and the outlines of hills become linear systems set in a circular motion.
After 1920 Mattis Teutsch's style changed: the dynamism of his earlier, pantheistic landscape visions give way to calmer and more focused compositions (Composition, 1922, cat.no. P81). The white background returns: freed from any attraction the earth might exercise, a closed motif system is presented floating against a brighter background. Through these compositions, Mattis Teutsch crossed the boundary between the figurative and the abstract in art almost imperceptibly; for him this boundary had not been substantial from the very start. As his mature and honed down paintings of large format (Composition, 1923, cat.no. P124) show, he advanced from Der Blaue Reiter ideas. The same concept is manifest in his coloured small, either wood or terracotta, sculptures (Wooden Small Plastics, 1919, 1920, cat.no S12; Composition, cat.no. S13), the naive simplicity of which recalls the captivatingly simple furniture and primitive, folksy objects in Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter's home in Murnau.

By 1920 the international movement of Dada had reached its zenith in Berlin and already entered its final phase; metaphysical painting had already been born, and the first buds of Surrealism appeared. In Russia Suprematism had been established as a school, and Constructivism was taking shape in several compositions. The Bauhaus had been set up in Weimar, while the circle of purism, L'Esprit Nouveau, was already in the making in Paris, along with several other groups and movements. Most of the artists who were expressing the finest workings of the soul and the innate dynamism of landscapes, had already been put through the horrors of the First World War, and became less susceptible to the fine shivers of the soul. This explains why the artists' society and art critics alike responded to Mattis Teutsch's art less enthusiastically than his works would have deserved. This tendency had ceased to be a novelty-slightly different versions were known. The group that stood closest to Mattis Teutsch, Der Blaue Reiter, went out of existence after the First World War, and could not provide him with any kind of orientation. And as to the Budapest circle, MA, it substantially changed and broadened its earlier artistic principles. In this group Mattis Teutsch would not have been able to occupy the same prominent place, even had he moved to Vienna and maintained direct contacts with Kassák.
In the 1920s only two art communities remained for Mattis Teutsch: one was the Berlin magazine Der Sturm (edited by Herwarth Walden), and the other was the Contimporanul of Bucharest. Mattis Teutsch's linocuts were published in the pages of Der Sturm, and he even exhibited his works in their gallery. But Der Sturm itself no longer had that pivotal role on the art scene it used to earlier on, and in order to recover the magazine's former prestige, Herwarth Walden placed increasing emphasis on the publication of Constructivist compositions. Finally, both the magazine and the gallery lost influence and disappeared from the scene, and Walden went into exile in the Soviet Union. After the end of the 1920s Berlin no longer served as the centre of cultural life in Europe.
By that time János Mattis Teutsch was already in his hometown, Brassó, shifting his attention from the German avant-garde to the Romanian one. After joining the intellectual scene formed around one of the longest-running avant-garde magazines, Contimporanul, he contributed several of his works to its grand international exhibition in 1924. However, the Romanian avant-garde, despite the numerous magazines that sprung up in that period, such as 75HP, Punct, Integral, etc., had all but ran out of steam by the end of the 1920s, and Mattis Teutsch once again found himself in isolation. That was the time when he turned his attention again, and increasingly, to sculpture: his stylized wooden statues of fine, elongated figures and his reliefs, either painted or unpainted, reveal that he retained his old creative powers and ability for the aesthetic rendering of the figures' supple movement. At the same time, his pictures lost some of their earlier dynamism: his painting, along with his fresco designs of the 1930s, became rather dry and contrived.
His late compositions, which are distantly related to Surrealism, testify to incertitude and fatigue. Tacitly, these compositions tell of the artist's solitude at the end of a long and active life.
The discovery of Mattis Teutsch's oeuvre opened the eyes of art writers and critics, gallery-goers and collectors to the most beautiful works-especially those made in the 1910s and 1920s. Now this oeuvre has been put on display for the first time on such a scale in the Hungarian National Gallery, and in such a way, that the art group coming closest to Mattis Teutsch's artistic ideas-Der Blaue Reiter- is also present, at least through a number of important compositions: symbolically, by way of comparison, and in order to document the spiritual connection. And to follow up on the spirit of establishing the connection, in September 2001 the exhibition will be taken from Budapest to Munich, where it will be shown to the German public in the Haus der Kunst.
For these exhibitions, the MissionArt Gallery, Budapest, should be congratulated for their devoted organization, sponsorship and production of important catalogues in three languages.