Mattis-Teutsch, Hans (1884–1960)

Author(s):  
Erwin Kessler

Hans Mattis-Teutsch was a Romanian artist, born to a German-Hungarian family in Braşov, where he also died. Exemplary of the diverse modernity of Central Europe, he moved between Realism and other styles, including Jugendstil, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, constructive Abstraction, and Art Deco. His stay in Paris from 1905 to 1908 contributed to the development of his painting style, which was influenced by the fauves, cubo-futurists, and the polychrome sculptures of Paul Gauguin, in addition to the works of Constantin Brancusi, František Kupka, and the Expressionism of Der Blaue Reiter. His stay in Berlin in 1918 was crucial for his affiliation with Der Sturm; the 99th Sturm exhibition in 1921 featured him alongside Paul Klee. Like his contemporaries, Mattis-Teutsch extracted stylish, spiritual, and cosmic-theosophical visions from fantasized landscapes and depicted the inner workings of the human mind on his canvases. He later erected functional-decorative, rational, and humanistic edifices based on Socialist utopias. Mattis-Teutsch was a keystone of the Romanian, Hungarian, and German avant-garde. Though cosmopolitan, he lived mostly in his Transylvanian hometown of Braşov, exhibiting locally and working as a professor at the art college, nourishing a modern, progressive, provincial art-life. In 1946, he founded the first syndicate of "democratic" artists in Romania.

Author(s):  
Annie Bourneuf

Paul Klee was one of the most important and inventive figures in the development of Modernism in the visual arts. The Swiss-German artist's unusual oeuvre drew on the work of other modernist painters while also challenging foundational tenets of Modernism in painting. The son of a music teacher, Klee was a talented violinist. As an adolescent growing up in Berne, Switzerland, Klee was interested not only in the visual arts but also in poetry and music. After graduating from the Berne Gymnasium in 1898, Klee moved to Munich to study art at the academy. In 1906, Klee married the pianist Lily Stumpf; their only child was born the next year. Relatively isolated from avant-garde art, Klee undertook a prolonged artistic self-education, attempting to break down pictorial art into its elements—line, tone, color—and master them one by one. In 1911 and 1912, Klee became friendly with the artists of Der Blaue Reiter, including Vassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and August Macke, who accompanied Klee on a trip to Tunisia in 1914. Through these new connections, Klee became familiar with a broad spectrum of modernist art. In 1916, Klee, a German citizen, was drafted; he served as a clerk in Bavaria, far from the front. During the war, the Berlin dealer Herwarth Walden energetically promoted Klee's work. By 1920, many in the German avant-garde acknowledged Klee as a major artist, and Walter Gropius invited him to join the faculty of the newly established Bauhaus.


Author(s):  
Cynthia Canejo

Victor Brecheret was a modernist sculptor whose unique style incorporated the graceful design of Art Nouveau and Art Deco and the purity of the School of Paris. Working in São Paulo, one of the centers of the avant-garde during the earliest manifestations of modernism in Brazil, Brecheret participated in the Semana de Arte Moderna de 1922 [Week of Modern Art]—an arts festival organized by a group of modernists for the centennial celebration of Brazilian independence—which took place in the Teatro Municipal de São Paulo between 3 and 17 February, 1922. Brecheret became an important part of this intellectual group, which included the painters Anita Malfatti and Emiliano Di Cavalcanti; the poet, Menotti del Picchia; and the writers, Mario de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade. Brecheret was inspired to simplify his sculptural forms while visiting the Parisian ateliers of two noted sculptors: the Romanian, Constantin Brancusi, and the Frenchman, Aristide Maillol. As a modernist working on public monuments—such as the MonumentoàsBandeiras [Monument to the Pioneers], in Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, 1936–1956—Brecheret was able to unite his national tendencies with his international inclinations. In working with ideas from both Brazil and Europe, Brecheret assimilates national subjects with international styles to create works that are decidedly his own. Furthermore, in choosing unusual poses or unconventional designs, he gives traditional themes a unique character.


Nordlit ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 293
Author(s):  
Piotr Bernatowicz

Mieczysław Porębski, a distinguished Polish art historian of the 20th century, once expressed the demand for Polish art history to be researched simultaneously with foreign studies - as parallel fields. "We entered the research field of the old masters' art as partners in, so to say, a ‘furnished household', whereas in the field of contemporary art we are co-explorers, exploring a ‘virgin land'", as Porębski put it. The book by professor Piotr Piotrowski Awangarda w cieniu Jałty. Sztuka w Europie środkowo-wschodniej w latach 1945-89 (The Avant-Garde in the Shadow of Yalta. The Art in East-Central Europe, 1945-1989) fully accomplishes this demanding postulate which nowadays seems to be rather rarely remembered by Polish art historians. The explored area, the East-Central European countries, which emerged, as a result of the Yalta Conference, between the iron curtain and the border of The Soviet Union (including former Yugoslavia) appears at least as an ‘old maiden' land, where scientific penetration still seems to be necessary.


2021 ◽  
pp. 196-223
Author(s):  
Alexander Medvedev

This article examines Marina Tsvetaeva’s modernist perception of the personality and paintings of the greatest representative of the Russian avant-garde of the 20th century in the essay “Natalia Goncharova. Life and Work” (“Наталья Гончарова. Жизнь и творчество”, 1929). Goncharova’s paintings that Tsvetaeva describes in her essay are indicated. The principles of modernist poetics and ekphrasis are revealed (lyrical subjectivism, ontology, consonance, anagrammatic disclosure of the inner form of a word, mythologization, reader co-creation, dialogism). The similarity between Tsvetaeva’s understanding of painting and poetry is compared to the ontological understanding of art by Martin Heidegger. This can be explained by the tradition of ontological poetry (Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke), which is important for both. The ontology of Goncharova’s painting is also considered in the context of the ontology of animals in Russian philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century (Vasily Rozanov) and in the Tahitian Painting of Paul Gauguin. Special attention is paid to ekphrastic poetics (style, tropes, consonance), with the help of which Tsvetaeva authentically transfers the ontologism of Goncharov’s painting in its stylistic diversity (cubism, neo-primitivism, rayonism) to the verbal level. Tsvetaeva and Goncharova in the respective Russian and European context (Gauguin, Rozanov, Heidegger, Rilke) appear as exponents of the ontological turn in the culture of the first half of the 20th century.


Author(s):  
Sarah Archino

Walter Arensberg (April 4, 1878 to January 29, 1954) and his wife, Louise Stevens Arensberg (1879–1953), were influential patrons of the avant-garde, building a collection that included modernist art, early American Shaker furniture, and non-Western objects, primarily of African and pre-Columbian origin. They collected modern art by American and European artists, with a special concentration in work by Marcel Duchamp (who also served as their art advisor) and Constantin Brancusi. Their New York apartment, at 33 West 67th Street, hosted a frequent salon of artists, writers, and intellectuals from 1915–1921. These gatherings were a focal point for the activities and antics of New York Dada. Among Arensberg’s many friendships with artists and writers, his long association with Marcel Duchamp was perhaps most influential. When Duchamp arrived in New York in 1915, Walter Pach met him at the pier and brought him directly to the Arensberg’s apartment, where Duchamp lived during the summer of 1915. Later, Arensberg paid the rent for Duchamp’s studio, located in the same building. The Arensberg Collection would amass nearly forty works by Duchamp, including The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1921). When Arensberg was unable to purchase the artist’s infamous Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912), he commissioned a duplicate and eventually acquired the original as well.


Author(s):  
Lynn M. Somers-Davis

French Fauvism (c. 1904–1907) comprised a loosely formed group of painters whose mentor, Henri Matisse (1869–1954), argued for a new approach to painting, integrating the chromatic lessons of Neo-Impressionism, the symbolist evocation of sensation through color and form and the expressive nature of the artist. The style was not programmatically theorized until it was essentially over, and yet Fauvism fundamentally shifted the course of modern painting, anticipating Cubism, Orphism and abstract painting. Fauvism incorporated bold, brash colors, often applied directly from commercially produced tubes of paint; gestural and broken brush-work; lack of finish; and color used for expression rather than description, resulting in flattened and distorted perspectives that radically diverged from mimetic representation. While its pictorial advances shocked conservative critics and audiences of its time, Fauvism – like many early avant-garde movements – maintained an appreciation of historical painting and its iconographies (landscape, cityscape, still life, and portraiture). Similar to Expressionism, Fauvism differed significantly from the German schools Die Brücke (Dresden, 1905–13) and Der Blaue Reiter (Munich, 1911–14) in its stress on pleasing decorative and synthetic effects.


Author(s):  
Lynn M. Somers

Born in Paris in 1859 to a bourgeois family, painter and draughtsman Georges-Pierre Seurat enjoyed a brief but mature career as the leading French Neo-Impressionist. His invention of Divisionism (or "chromo-luminarism"), a painting technique grounded in science and the study of optics, challenged the spontaneity and fluidity of Impressionism, which by the 1880s had been largely subsumed by a capitalist gallery system. In 1886, at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, Seurat debuted his monumental Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande-Jatte (1884–1886), a "patient tapestry" of line and color that led the art critic and activist Félix Fénéon to coin the term néo-impressionisme. Equally shaped by the Renaissance frescoes of Piero della Francesca and the Baudelairean praise of the ephemerality of modern life, La Grande-Jatte symbolically closed a chapter in French painting. Seurat’s systematic aesthetic produced an indelible impact on fin de siècle artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, and later Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, and André Breton’s Surrealism, firmly establishing him as integral to the 20th-century avant-garde. Seurat’s oeuvre includes approximately 500 drawings and 6 major figure paintings, an astonishing output for a career that lasted only 11 years.


Author(s):  
Amy Kelly Hamlin

Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) is a term that was used by Nazi authorities to identify, censure, and confiscate art they considered inconsistent with their ideology. It was the cornerstone of an ambitious propaganda campaign that culminated in the exhibition Entartete Kunst, which took place in Munich in 1937. The majority of this so-called degenerate art was Avant-Garde in both form and subject. Abstract Art by German artists, including Max Beckmann, Max Eernst, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, and Franz Marc, was particularly vulnerable to Nazi attack; non-German artists such as Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian were also singled out. As a polarizing concept, Entartete Kunst stems from an essentially anti-modernist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic position. It was designed to legitimize the art of the Third Reich, which was rooted in traditional art forms and characterized by an idealized naturalism that promoted heroic virtues and racial purity.


Author(s):  
Anastasiia Dobrydneva

The subject of this research is the distinctions between two fundamental trends in art of the XX century – art deco and avant-garde, as well as determination of the nature of their interaction. The object of this research is the original texts of artisans and art monuments belonging to both fields. Special attention is given to characteristics of the specific features of art deco and avant-garde, identification of similarities and differences of the two simultaneously developing stylistic concepts. The author examines the key event for the history of interaction of these two trends, namely the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts held in Paris in 1925, and criticism that formed views on art of the era of modernism. The scientific novelty consists in examination of the two paramount trends for grasping history of culture of the XX century in the context of their interaction. Since 1966, art deco was not recognized as an in dependent style, but rather closely connected with modernism and patterned on avant-garde. The main conclusion of the conducted research consists in revelation of adaptive cultural mechanism that allowed art deco to overcome a number of problems, among which in underlines the relation to technological progress and mass society. The author highlights that both trends should be viewed in the context of cultural dialogue. First and foremost, they were united by orientation towards modernity and development of innovative language of art.


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