János Mattis Teutsch

János Mattis Teutsch was a Hungarian-German-Romanian modernist painter, critic, and theorist. While his work was influenced by European avant-garde movements like Expressionism and Cubism, his experimental, often allegorical, and occasionally political oeuvre elides categorization.

Mattis Teutsch was born in Brasov, Romania in 1884 (in what was then Austria-Hungary) and grew up in a German and Hungarian family. (As such, his name is also spelled Johann Teutsch, Hans Mattis Teutsch, and Matisz Teutsch, among other spellings, and without diacritical marks). He studied at the National Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts in Budapest, Hungary, and at the Royal Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany.

Over the course of his life, Mattis Teutsch exhibited with several artistic movements and collectives, including MA in Budapest and Der Sturm in Berlin; he also exhibited in in Paris, Vienna, Bucharest and elsewhere in Europe as well as in Chicago, Illinois. Mattis Teutsch was influenced by the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group, which included Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, as well as Die Brücke (The Bridge), which included Ernest Ludwig Kirchner. He died in 1960.

Mattis Teutsch has been honored with a major monographic exhibition at Scene9 in Bucharest, Romania, and at the Lajos Kassák Museum in Budapest. He was exhibited in the context of Der Blaue Reiter at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, Hungary, and Munich Haus der Kunst in Germany. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin, Germany, and the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna Roma in Rome, Italy. Mattis Teutsch’s works are in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Muzeul de Artă, Brașov, Romania; the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary; the mumok in Vienna, Austria; and the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, Hungary.