"[Matta’s] paintings are not the transcription of seen or dreamed realities, but the recreations of anemic and spiritual states. The invisible becomes visible, or more precisely, incarnated."
As many of the European Surrealists fled the continent at the outbreak of the second world war, Matta, one of the youngest of the group, found in New York a fertile ground for artistic rebirth – situated at the nexus of the Europeans in exile and the burgeoning New York School. His richly atmospheric psychological morphologies of these years, marked by acidic fields of color and a dematerialization of the linear geometry, had obsessed earlier modern artists. His “absolute irreverence, witty iconoclasm, predilection for plays on words, as well as his interest in alchemy and the occult” led him to quickly become a darling of New York’s critics and collectors during the war years, while at the same time growing estranged from the original Surrealist group (Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile, New York, 1995, p. 318). Describing Matta’s appearance in New York in 1940, Julien Levy recalled “He was chock full of premature optimism and impatient disappointment; believing ardently in almost everything and in absolutely nothing, as he believed ardently and painfully in himself. For me he was easily the most fertile and the most untrustworthy of the younger surrealists” (quoted in ibid., p. 109).
"The central figure of that moment, the intersection, the connection and inspiration, was Matta. Through him, Surrealist painting penetrated an unexplored region and, simultaneously, fertilized the art of the young North Americans. To ignore or minimize his influence, as has on occasion been attempted, is, in addition to being nonsense, scandalous."
Matta remained acutely attuned to news of the war from the safety of New York; as it continued to wage through the 1940s, his preoccupations as an artist began to shift from the interior drama of the mind to the external reality of the atrocities of war, and of the twofold powers of technology as a source of at once violation and innovation. In a groundbreaking exhibition at Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1946, he unveiled a series of monumental canvases that broke dramatically from the psychological morphology. Here totemic, anthropomorphic figures are rendered in bilious yellows and jarring reds; they scream, weep, embrace, explode, and enact unspeakable tenderness and violence upon one another in an atmosphere of exactingly rendered infinite space; cascading silvery architectural forms dematerialize into pure energy around them. Many of these magnificent works now reside in institutional collections.
Matta Works from this Series in Major Institutional Collections
Argumouth and its companions relate closely to the twentieth century’s most famous rendering of war and suffering, Picasso’s Guernica of 1937. From a technical perspective, both works harness fractured, eroticized forms and perspectival complexity, while, critically, their treatment of the physical and mental devastation of war and the role of human innovation and technology therein echo one another.
Like Picasso, Matta lived through the early years of the Spanish Civil War and was deeply affected by the atrocities against civilians that took place. The loss of his close friend, the poet Federico García Lorca, at the hands of Franco’s forces in 1936 devastated Matta, and was the genesis for one of his most celebrated psychological morphologies, the monumental Earth is a Man of 1941, now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago (see fig. 1). There, primordial forms rendered in ethereal glazes collide and explode in a roiling, volcanic atmosphere; forces of light and dark tangle in this “interior landscape,” reflecting the complexity of the human spirit and the plasticity of the mind. Six years later, in the aftermath of the war, Matta would expand both the size of his canvas and the scale of his project from personal to political.
The cycle of paintings in the Pierre Matisse exhibition, Argumouth among them, marked the first explicit introduction of the figure into Matta’s paintings and as such proved to be a lightning rod among both the Surrealists and the New York School. Described as “cartoonish” by Clement Greenberg but praised as “stimulus of energy sweep and modernity” in Joseph Cornell’s diaries, this exhibition was profoundly impactful in its moment.
As Mary Schneider Enriquez states, “He incorporated the figure in his paintings at the moment when the American art world was beginning to champion a version of the emerging expressionistic abstraction that Matta had practiced previously, albeit under the guise of Surrealism” (Exh. Cat., Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, “Roberto Matta: International Provocateur,” Matta: Making the Invisible Visible, 1994, p. 36). However for Matta this series was a natural next direction; his concerns with the fluidity and complexity of the human spirit, its twin capacities for love and violence, here are writ large (quite literally) as Matta expands both the size of the canvas and the scale of his project from personal to societal.
I tried to use, not my personal morphology, but a social morphology. Using the totemic images in a situation which was more historical: the torture chambers and so on. I tried to pass from the intimate imagery, forms of vertebrae and unknown animals, very little known flowers, to cultural expressions, totemic things, civilizations... the formation of cultures in confrontation with social landscapes.
Argumouth and its companions also relate both in scale and in structure to the socially-oriented didactic project of Mexican Muralism (see fig. 2). Its primary proponents Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros all spent time in New York between the 1930s-40s, and each had a profound impact on New York-based artists both in terms of their socially utopian politics and in the graphic, geometric sensibility of their aesthetic principles. Like Matta, they borrow heavily from the visual vocabularies of pre-Columbian Latin American civilizations; but where this gesture is imbued with nationalistic pride for the muralists, for Matta it represents a more oblique attempt to capture an “other” as a mirror for the self—an iconography to explore taboos and dangerous appetites.
Argumouth is populated by three totemic figures, whose sinewy limbs bear marked formal similarity to the animal-human hybrids found in Cauca bronze adornments (see fig. 3) yet their mechanical hands and featureless faces render them futuristic, alien and threatening. They gather around a collection of vibrantly colored, whirling mechanical elements, some of which seem to hang languidly in the air, and others of which seem to zip out of the surface of the painting. The pendant figures at right and left seem to engage in dialogue, their arms extended towards one another in gestures that may read as violent or as conversational. At the center, an eroticized feminine figure faces the viewer directly; she clasps her eyeless face and emits a silent scream towards the viewer. Architectonically beautiful yet deeply imbued with the horror and anxiety of its time, Argumouth is a paragon of Matta’s post-war production.