Matta (1911-2002)

oil on canvas

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
B.C. Holland, Chicago
Galeria Galatea, Turin
Harry Spiro, New York
James Goodman Gallery, New York (1999)

Turin, Galeria Galatea, Matta, November 22-December 6, 1958
Waltham, Massachusetts, Brandeis University, Rose Art Museum, Matta - The First Decade,  May 9-June 20, 1982, n.n.
Washington D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Crosscurrents of Modernism: Four Latin American Pioneers, 1992, no. 77, p. 257, illustrated in color
New York, Andre Emmerich, Matta Paintings and Drawings, 1937-1959, February 20-March 22, 1997, n.n.
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Matta, 1999, p. 89, illustrated in color
Buenos Aires, Malba-Colección Costantini, Arte en América Latina, September 21-November 25, 2001, n.n.
Buenos Aires, Malba-Colección Costantini, Visiones, February 23-May 26, 2003, n.n.
Buenos Aires, Malba-Colección Costantini, Arte Latinoamericano del Siglo XX, August 26, 2003-February 5, 2004

Aracy Amaral, Roberto Amigo, Patricia Artundo, Rita Eder and Andrea Giunta, Pintura Latinoamericana, Breve Panorama de la Modernidad Figurativa en la Primera Mitad del Siglo XX, Buenos Aires, Grupo Velox, 1999, p. 349, illustrated in color
Eduardo F. Costantini, Augustín Arteaga and Marcelo E. Pacheco, Malba-Colección Costantini, Mexico, Landucci Editores, 2001, p. 25 and p. 198, illustrated in color 

Periods of great anxiety and tension have often been marked by the emergence of visionary painters. Amid the uneasy revelations of our scientific age many familiar social, spiritual and artistic concepts seem exhausted, and a widespread feeling persists that their elaboration can no longer substitute for fresh ideas. It is in this context that the Surrealist and allied painters of the last thirty years have sought to discover a new picture of ourselves and of our universe which might help to resolve the contemporary conflict of values. The unique vision of Matta is the most recent and, in its cosmic focus, the most far reaching that this manner of paintings has proposed.          

William Rubin 1

Roberto Matta journeyed to Europe in 1935 where he began work in the studio of modernist architect Le Corbusier. The young Chilean joined the Surrealist group in Paris in 1937 at the urging of André Breton who found Matta’s drawings intriguing.

In the summer of 1938 while in the village of Trévignon in Brittany with his colleague Gordon Onslow Ford, Matta began to paint. At first using his fingers and dragging paint across the surface, Matta developed a style of painting which tried to visualize the vivid images of the subconscious mind. Matta’s earliest paintings date from 1938, when, as Gordon Onslow Ford reminisced, “he squeezed little dollops of yellow, red, green and blue along the edge of a palette knife--then, without hesitation, he made a rapid gesture on a white canvas and, as he did not wish to clean the brushes, he worked the paint with his fingers, one finger for yellow, one for red, etc.” 2

Surrealism was dedicated to making a liaison between the waking state and the world of dreams. Matta called this world Psychological Morphology or Inscape. The term Psychological Morphology describes an adventure into an alternative reality with its own space-time. As did Tanguy, Ernst and Miró,  Matta experimented with, and ultimately developed, his own form of automatism, the automatic drawing or painting achieved by the unconscious movement of the artist’s hand, pencil, or brush working faster than the mind can think.

On the eve of the second world war, a group of Surrealists including painter Yves Tanguy, Kay Sage, poet André Breton, painter Gordon Onslow-Ford, Matta, his American wife Ann Clark and Esteban Francés spent the summer of 1939 in the French town of Chemillieu where Gertrude Stein had rented a house nearby.

This summer at Chemilleu was a magic one, with all the artists working in a community in the different rooms set up as ateliers in the chateau. On the outside world, Hitler invaded Poland. They would not spend another summer in France together as a group.

On his return to Paris, Matta stayed with Pablo Neruda at la Roche-Guyon.  By October, 1939, in the shadow of war and fearing reprisals from the Nazis as they had signed anti-Nazis manifestos, Matta left Europe with his wife and landed in New York, where they joined Yves Tanguy and Kate Sage who had preceded them. Other artists, such as Max Ernst, André Breton, Jacques Lipchitz and Kurt Seligmann, were soon to follow.

New York in the 1940’s was a hotbed of artistic activity with the influx of the European artists in exile interacting with the local artistic community. As a younger member of the Surrealist group who spoke English, Matta rapidly became a very active part of the New York art scene, becoming a mentor to American artists such as Robert Motherwell,  Arshile Gorky, William Baziotes and Jackson Pollack, who were interested in the Surrealist precepts of Automatism. Gordon Onslow-Ford, also in New York, organized a series of lectures on Surrealism at the New School of Social Research and invited Matta to participate. Onslow-Ford remembered, “What caught on was the technical aspect of automatism, the idea that one could paint freely without schooling or preconceived plan, but the poetic aspect of automatism, the subject matter of the painting was minimized or ignored. This influence of automatism led to Action Painting, in which the action was fought out between the painter, the paint and the canvas”. Matta’s manner of energetic abstract Surrealism changed the work of many of the artists around him, especially that of Arshile Gorky, whose work was to resemble so closely that of his mentor.

Matta began to exhibit in New York at the Julian Levy Gallery and Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery and was included the Pierre Matisse Gallery’s époque making exhibition Surrealism in Exile in 1942.

1. Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, New York, Vol.25, 1957

2. Germana Ferrari Matta et al. Matta-Entretiens Morphologiques. London; Sistan Ltd. 1987. p. 24-25.

3. Elizabeth A. Smith et al. Matta in America – paintings and Drawings of the 1940’s. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art. 2001, p.14.