Matta (1911-2002)

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Sale: Christie's, London, Contemporary Art, June 29 1995, lot 11, illustrated in color
Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Ramis Barquet Gallery, New York

Monterrey, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Matta: Surrealism and Beyond, September 1997-May 1998, p. 29, illustrated in color

This painting is in beautiful condition. The paint layer is clean and lightly varnished, probably by the artist himself. There are a group of small retouches in the upper right corner and two tiny retouches in the lower right. The picture is in beautiful state and should be hung as is. (This condition report has been provided courtesy of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.)
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By 1944 Matta had been in the United States for almost 5 years. Into those years he crammed a whole lifetime. When he arrived, fleeing World War II, he came as the youngest of the Surrealists. As one of the few who spoke English, both he and Gordon Onslow Ford taught the precepts of surrealism to a younger generation of American artists, with a young Robert Motherwell as his acolyte and fostering what would become the school of New York.  Through the influx of talent from Europe, New York became the center of the art world, a melting pot and furnace for new invention, dethroning Paris and changing the course of art history.

Children's Fear's of Idols II is one of a series of paintings where Matta turned the normal depiction of three dimensional space on its head – rather than drawing and delineating space with dark lines over a light background, he scratched the white lines depicting receding space out of the black background, showing the colored base of the canvas under the black paint. He added splashes of color and areas of white impasto to push and pull the pictorial space. Children's Fears of Idols II is closely related in technique and spatial complexity to the monumental The Vertigo of Eros in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Painted at the end of World War II with the liberation of Paris, it reflects the tension and almost jagged reality that the news of the war brought. The disclosure of the concentration camps and the devastation left behind by the advancing and retreating armies slowly filtered across the Atlantic.  Perhaps in a more hopeful vein, it is interesting to note that Matta at this time was also going through a period of transition – his American wife Anne Clark had given birth to twins in 1943.