82. Boxer

Nowadays, sports are much more impregnated in everyday life and in the collective mind than art. Sports, in art, is the mirror of political and social nuances specific to the era in which the works of the genre were made, of life that unfolds regardless of the local or international vicissitudes of a particular period (wars, political authoritarianism, recession, etc.). After the establishment of the Soviet regime in Romania, the theme of sports in art was bent to the new political requirements, to create the "new man", obedient, of a supposedly egalitarian society, while the artists chose this option to fulfil the partisan tasks imposed on them. In the exhibition album "The Sports Club of the Arts", art critic Erwin Kessler noted that boxing was a favourite sport of the avant-garde, quickly evolving from an amateur sport with circus-like qualities to a social phenomenon capable of attracting the masses. Lucian Popescu, Moți Spakow or Gogea Mitu are some famous figures of the time, who made boxing enter literature, plastic arts, cinema. So, although made in the early 1950s, this work is a reverberation of the precepts to which the artist adhered throughout the interwar period, but subservient to the new party tasks. In the same album, Erwin Kessler notes how the character's physical features recall both cinematic figures of the time and "party activists of the moment, with a face evoking the limping hardness of a desk side, their bare hands inviting to combat an opponent who is invisible but obviously unable to wrinkle" the boxing activist's tight gear. A worldwide artist, Mattis-Teutsch, in addition to collaborating with leading avant-garde magazines and groups, actively exhibited alongside the most important names of the time, personalities who, like the artist, proliferated the spiritual primacy of art, a concept with which Kandinsky revolutionized modern art confined to rendering immediate, everyday reality. In 1921 he exhibited twice with Der Sturm - with Paul Klee, and in the group exhibition marking 100 issues of the magazine of the same name, with Boccioni, Braque, Itten, Kandinsky, Klee, Picabia.

Dimensions

width 80 cm, height 100 cm, custom 100 × 80 cm

Description

oil on canvas, signed bottom left, in monogram, "MT"

Research information

The artwork was part of the exhibition "Sports Club of Arts, Sport in Romanian art from 1900 to the present", Museum of Recent Art, Bucharest, 2021 and is reproduced in the exhibition catalogue at p. 114.

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