Landscape with Hills 1916

Janos Mattis-Teutsch made this woodcut, Landscape with Hills, and the colors just sing, don't they? The way he lays down these simple lines – yellow, green, blue – it’s like he’s building the world from scratch, one color at a time. Look at the texture of the paper, almost like rough linen, and how the colors sit on top, not quite blending, but vibrating against each other. There’s a real physicality to it; you can almost feel the grain of the wood and the pressure of the artist's hand. Notice that pink swoop on the left, sort of floating between the green and yellow hills. It's like a little punctuation mark, a moment of unexpected sweetness that just makes the whole thing hum. Mattis-Teutsch, like Kandinsky, was interested in the spiritual in art, and you can see that in the way he simplifies the landscape to its bare essentials, turning hills and sky into pure color and form. It’s a reminder that art isn't about copying the world, but about creating new ways of seeing it.