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This painting is part of the series Compoziţii (Compositions), which contributed decisively to Hans Mattis-Teutsch’s international fame at the beginning of the 1920s (Almási 2001, 29). The work reflects the tendency towards the abstract visible in his creative work in that period, marked by the artist’s involvement in the expressionist group Der Sturm in Berlin (Mesea 2009, 23–24). The rhythmic character of his works has made certain art historians characterise his style as “musical expressionism” (Gassner 2001, 45; Mesea 2009, 24). The natural motifs present in his work before the 1920s are turned in this series into abstract forms. The paintings in this series, which were very well received both by the general public and by art specialists in the interwar period, were not exhibited during the first part of the communist period, because avant-garde art was considered “decadent” and “bourgeois” by the new regime (Popica 2015, 3). Nevertheless, the Art Museum in Braşov (which at the time was a section of the Braşov Regional Museum) purchased certain paintings in this series (including the one described here) in the years 1967–1968, in the context of a relative liberalisation of the cultural policies of the communist regime. None of these works was exhibited as part of the museum’s permanent collection, which shows that Mattis-Teutsch’s recuperation during this liberalisation period was limited.

Ce pot învăţa în timp de o zi (What I can learn in a day) is a three-page essay written in March 1927, when Emil Cioran was sixteen years old. The manuscript reflects the sources of Emil Cioran’s intellectual formation and the way the experiences of his youth shaped his personality. The text is written by hand in black ink. On the first page of the document there is a comment by his brother Aurel Cioran with the question: “Has he published it [the manuscript]?” and his answer: “Probably, not.”
The essay offers an insight into Cioran’s inner world as a student of Gheorghe Lazăr High School in Sibiu, Romania. The text gives us a picture of the everyday concerns of the teenage Emil Cioran. Although for the young Emil Cioran, born in Răşinari, a traditional village in the Carpathian Mountains, Sibiu offered the first experience of a cosmopolitan cultural milieu, the bourgeois character of the Transylvanian town made him at the same time feel restricted. Starting from this feeling he questions himself about his capacity to overcome the routine of everyday life and the moral values of a petty-bourgeois social milieu. One of the limits that the teenage Cioran has to face is that of the severe programme of the high school. This makes him to compare the school with a “boring refrain” and with “bad prose” (Manuscript, 3). Consequently, his interest in school is pale in comparison with independent reading. He ends his essay by highlighting the contrasts and paradoxes of his everyday life, a topic which he was to develop later in many of his mature essays.

Oleskandr Bohomazov's “Sawyers” refers to a triptych the artist worked in 1926-1929, but did not complete. As Elena Kashuba-Volvach notes in her essay for the catalogue Alexander Bogomazov, 1880-1930, the most famous piece “Sharpening the Saws” is held at the National Museum of Ukrainian Art in Kyiv, along with “Sawyers at Work.” The second painting in the cycle is not displayed publicly because of significant paint damage. The third piece “Rolling the Logs” was never completed, although Bohomazov did leave behind a number of pencil drawings and compositional sketches that indicate how the final painting and the project as a whole were meant to appear when finished.

Bohomazov worked on these paintings from 1926 to 1929, when “political considerations were becoming the main criteria for judging art in Ukraine and throughout the USSR,” as Kashuba-Volvach notes. This observation makes it even more remarkable that Bohomazov’s work on this triptych marked his return to painting. He took a lengthy hiatus following the October Revolution and Civil War, prompted in part by his ongoing battle with tuberculosis. During this time, Bohomazov concentrated mostly on teaching at the Kyiv Art Institute and his research into the foundations of painting. These endeavors ultimately dovetailed, leading Bohomazov to draft a teaching manual Experiencing Elements of Art. The desire to test the theories outlined therein inspired Bohomazov to once again pick up the brush.

Socialist Realism would not become official aesthetic dogma until 1934, but one can see how Bohomazov’s choice of subject and setting could come across as “formalist” to Soviet censors. As Simon Hewitt argues in his essay for the same catalogue, Bohomazov's triptych portrays labor in the countryside that features neither peasants nor city workers. Though his sawyers are conscientious and hard-working, they “work in a rhythmic tandem unchanged for centuries.” This work went against the emergent grain of a Soviet aesthetic that showcased cheerful peasants, industrious factory workers, electrification and industrialization.  The “silent subversiveness” of the work is reinforced by its “abrasive color-scheme.” The futurists and the avant-garde “thrived on bright palettes,” but the “orangey-pink contrasts” used by Bohomazov in this work also made him a pioneer of color.

The work belongs to Hans Mattis-Teutsch’s constructivist period. According to the art historian Gheorghe Vida, constructivism was assimilated by Mattis-Teutsch at the time of his involvement in the Romanian avant-garde during the 1920s and at the beginning of the 1930s (Vida 2009, 80). During this period, Mattis-Teutsch collaborated closely with groups of avant-garde artists formed around the cultural publications Contimporanul, Integral and Alge, sharing the artistic vision of these groups, as well as their socialist views. His artistic vision marked by constructivism was theorised in his work Kunstideologie. Stabilität und Aktivität im Kunstwerk published in interwar Germany (Mattis-Teutsch 1931). This vision, which sees art as a “messenger” of the “new man” in the “technological era without traditions,” is marked by the mobility and rhythm of modern life (Mattis-Teutsch 1977, 76–79). The work and rhythms specific to modern man are also central themes in this painting from the end of the 1920s, and the title of the work is a direct reference to the relationship between intellectuals and the proletariat in Marxist ideology. As with all the works of Hans Mattis-Teutsch created during the interwar period, this item could not be displayed during the 1950s due to the fact that the avant-garde techniques were in contradiction with socialist realism.