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"I actually had no station, and I had no masters either. I am a child of the 20th century... I began with Kassák and his circle, with the group of the 'MA' - that is, with a revolutionary approach both in art and in my social views", wrote János Mattis Teutsch in his autobiography of 1932. He joined the circle of MA, the avant-garde periodical edited by Lajos Kassák, in 1916, and which embraced the Activist movement. Activism, in fact was the most dynamic approach to art and literature at the end of the 1910s. Mattis Teutsch's decorative-expressive style, which contained elements of Art Nouveau, actually developed in the circle of the German Expressionists, in particular, Der Sturm in Berlin, and Der Blaue Reiter in Munich. Mattis Teutsch was especially affected by the art of Vasili Kandinsky and Franz Marc. The picture shown here is characterized by these stylistic elements. In the realm of Activism, Mattis Teutsch's art demonstrated most purely the Expressionistic tendency that was approaching pure abstraction.
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