Matta-Duchamp

Dawn Adès
Norman Rosenthal
MATTA / DUCHAMP
galerie gmurzynska

CONTENTS
( 7 )
Introduction
Krystyna Gmurzynska
Mathias Rastorfer
( 11 )
Passages between
Matta and Duchamp
Dawn Adès
( 71 )
Excerpt from an interwiew with Sidney Simon:
“Concerning the Beginnings
of the New York School: 1939-1943”
Robert Motherwell
( 73 )
Remembering Matta
– the first artist of infinite matter?
(or maybe just of “the infinite”)
Norman Rosenthal

It is an honor and pleasure to be working with the Matta
estate as our collaboration finds a rewarding first beginning
with this show and publication, exploring the relationship
between Marcel Duchamp and Roberto Matta.
Our thanks go therefore first and foremost to Germana
and Alisée Matta for entrusting us with this privilege
and responsibility.
Next we are immensely grateful for the thoroughly researched
and principal contribution to this publication by
Prof. Dawn Adès, presented here for the first time. Her
writing adds new insight into Matta’s work and also coincides
with a broader art historical re-evaluation of the
influence of Duchamp on the work of 20th century artists,
notably via the exhibition “Dalí/Duchamp” which
was staged at the Royal Academy in London in 2017-
18 and was curated by Dawn Adès along with art historian
William Jeffett. We are profoundly thankful for
Prof. Adès’ scholarship and support.
It was upon the recommendation of Norman Rosenthal
that Prof. Adès agreed to write on Matta and Duchamp.
( 7 )

A close friend of Matta, Rosenthal focuses in his text on
this relationship, his conversations with Matta and Matta’s
lasting influence on today’s artists and beyond. We are
truly grateful for his insight.
Tasks like Matta / Duchamp are based on the assistance
and work of likeminded people. We therefore thank here
Giovanna Caccia, a trusted friend of Germana and Alisée,
as well as Antoine Monnier of the Association Marcel
Duchamp, for their help and confidence in our collaboration.
No project like this is possible without important
loans and for this we thank Shoshana and Wayne Blank,
together with the other lenders to this exhibition.
On the gallery side, we want to thank our team of art historians
for their long hours of research and our librarians
for their tireless work.
William Rubin, influential director of the painting and
sculpture department at MoMA from 1968 to 1988, wrote
about Matta while still at MoMA in 1985:
“I have, myself, never stopped looking at Matta’s work.
For me, he was and remains one of the relatively few truly
inventive and independent painters of the twentieth
century – indeed, one of a small number whose art has
changed my life.”
( 8 )

With this in mind we hope that our publication and exhibition
will contribute to a new awareness of the fascinating
universe of Matta.
Krystyna Gmurzynska and Mathias Rastorfer
( 9 )

Passages between Matta and Duchamp
Matta made no secret of his admiration for Marcel
Duchamp, which began even before he became an artist
himself, and lasted for the rest of his life. His response
to Duchamp was unusual and personal. Rather than
the readymades, it was Duchamp’s paintings, and the
Large Glass, La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires,
même (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even)
(1915-23), that had a profound effect on him. “Ce ne
fut pas le caractère iconoclaste des ready-mades … qui
fascina Matta, mais la nouvelle notion de “passage” selon
Duchamp.” 1 He paradoxically found in Duchamp’s
concept of “passage” in painting, and in his rejection
of the retinal, liberation for his own painting practice.
An interest in the new physics, and a natural bent
for metaphor and analogy had provided Matta with a
strong base from which to appreciate Duchamp’s sophisticated
and brilliant syntheses of science and sex.
The two men were particularly close during the period
1. Romy Golan “Matta, Duchamp et le mythe: un nouveau paradigme
pour la dernière phase du surréalisme” Matta Centre Pompidou Paris 1985
p.38
( 11 )

Phototype of a party gathering many members of the surrealist
group at art dealer Pierre Matisse in New York, 1945. On the
photograph from left to right: André Breton, Esteban Frances, Suzanne

Césaire, Jackie Matisse, Denis de Rougemont, Elisa Breton, Sonia Sekula,
Mrs. Nicolas Calas, Yves Tanguy, Nicolas Calas, Marcel Duchamp,
Patricia Matta, Roberto Matta, Teeny Matisse and Aimé Césaire.

of exile in New York during the 2 nd world war, when
they met weekly, and were both involved in the surrealist
review VVV, published in New York (1942-44).
During this period Matta made a series of oil paintings
dubbed the “suite duchampienne” 2 , which had titles
such as The Bachelors, twenty years after, an homage to
Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors,
even (1915-23), on which in 1944 Matta published an
essay jointly with Duchamp’s American patron and collector
Katharine Dreier. This text, if in somewhat convoluted
prose, outlined a concept of the image, as Matta
felt Duchamp had reinvented it, and to which he was to
adhere. They had other interests in common. Neither of
them could resist puns, and they shared a deep respect
for the eccentric writer Raymond Roussel, whose play
Impressions of Africa had generated some of the ideas
for the Large Glass. Matta also shared Duchamp’s
interest in Alfred Jarry and ‘Pataphysics, “the science
of imaginary solutions”, defining himself in the catalogue
for his exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery
in 1942 as a pataphysician. Their respective relationships
to the surrealist movement were, however, rather
different. Duchamp was a courted but remote affiliate,
whose connections with Breton went back to Dada; he
refused to join the movement, being absolutely opposed
2. Romy Golan ibid
( 14 )

to groups, but helped with publications, with reviews,
and with the great surrealist exhibitions, indeed inventing
the exhibition as environment. Matta became an
enthusiastic member of the surrealist group in 1937,
exhibited with them and was deeply involved in the
notion of the Grands transparents in André Breton’s
Prolegomena to a 3rd Surrealist Manifesto or not (VVV
no 1). In New York he also helped the transmission of
surrealist ideas and practices to the young painters of
the American avant-garde, who become known as the
Abstract Expressionists.
Matta came across Duchamp’s work for the first
time in an issue of Cahiers d’art while travelling round
Europe in 1936. He had arrived in London in the autumn,
too late for the International Surrealist Exhibition,
which took place in June/July 1936. But London
was still gripped by surrealism and the bookshop/gallery
Zwemmer’s was a good source for surrealist periodicals
and books. Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia’s essay on
Duchamp, “Coeurs volants”, in the special edition of
Cahiers d’art 1936 devoted to the object, was a revelation.
This “article très illustré, ecrit par une dame qui
s’appelait Gabrielle Buffet sur un monsieur qui n’avait
pas du tout un nom d’artiste puisqu’il s’appelait Marcel
Duchamp, parlait de peinture, du passage d’un état
a un autre. C’etait un defi, une revelation, il etait donc
( 15 )

possible de peindre le changement.” 3 (highly illustrated
article, written by a lady called Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia
about a gentleman whose name was not at all that of an
artist as he was called Marcel Duchamp, spoke of painting,
of the passage from one state to another. This was
a challenge, a revelation, it was thus possible to paint
change.”)
Matta credits this essay with his discovery of “passage”,
the possibility that one could paint the change
from one state to another, whether psychological or
physical: a revelation with fundamental repercussions
for his development as a painter. However, in fact Gabrielle
Buffet-Picabia’s text doesn’t mention “passage”,
focussing rather on the readymades, assisted readymades,
the optical machines and Duchamp’s very recent
enterprise, the Rotoreliefs. Although the article was indeed
strikingly illustrated with several works in colour,
the only paintings reproduced were the Nude Descending
a staircase, the second version of the Chocolate
Grinder, and the Large Glass, The Bride stripped bare
by her bachelors, even. Neither the idea of movement
in the Nude, nor the implied movement in the Chocolate
Grinder, really involves “passage”. It is true that
Buffet-Picabia, in her brilliant account of Duchamp’s
3. G. Ferrari Entretiens Morphologiques, Notebook no 1 1936-1944 Sistan
London 1987 p 36
( 16 )

“experimental genius”, adds to her description of the
mechanical function of the apparatuses on the Glass
their character as personages with both physiological
and psychological features: “Chaque rouage, chaque
mouvement correspond aussi à une structure psychologique
et physiologique des personages. La Mariée
est un moteur complexe…” [“All the wheels, each motion
correspond also to the psychological and physiological
structure of the personages. The Bride is a complex
motor…”] Stunning though the article was, there
was nothing that made “passage” a key concept. It is
much more likely that what struck Matta so forcefully
was the appearance of Duchamp’s painting Le Passage
de la vierge a la mariée (The passage from Virgin to
Bride) in another surrealist publication, which would
also have been available at Zwemmer’s, the magazine
Minotaure. This extraordinary painting, Le Passage de
la vierge a la mariée, with its erotically suggestive title,
was prominently reproduced and must be the origin of
Matta’s fascination with “passage” as change from one
state to another. This issue of Minotaure contained André
Breton’s essay on Duchamp’s Large Glass, “Phare
de la mariée” (“Lighthouse of the Bride”), in which
Breton described the Glass as “a mechanistic, cynical
interpretation of the phenomenon of love: the passage
of a woman from the state of virginity to the state
of non-virginity adopted as the theme of a basically
( 17 )

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)
Nu descendant un escalier, December 1937
Pochoir-colored reproduction and French 5-centimes stamp on paper
34.0 x 19.7 cm Signed and dated on the stamp “Dec 37 / M.
Duchamp” Cat. rais. no. 458

non-sentimental speculation which would almost seem
to have been engaged in by a visitor from outer space
making a conscientious effort to visualize this kind of
operation.” 4 “Passage” was the subject of a dialogue
Matta recalled with Duchamp, in Paris in September
1939, just before he left France for New York. Hitherto
“passage” had been understood in purely pictorial
terms as a device adopted by Cézanne, for example
in the way he used brushstrokes to make transitions
between objects on the flat canvas surface, which had
strongly influenced Picasso’s and Braque’s early cubism.
Duchamp, now moving away from cubism, introduced
the idea of both anatomical and psychological change.
“Débarrasé de la signification essentiellement picturale
que lui donnaient Cézanne et les cubistes, le “passage”
désignait pour Duchamp la transition psychique d’un
état d’esprit a un autre…” 5 [“Relieved of the essentially
pictorial significance Cézanne and the cubists gave it,
“passage” indicated for Duchamp the psychic transition
from one state of mind to another”]. Also significant
for Matta was the freedom Duchamp showed in Le
Passage de la vierge a la mariée, and in other paintings
of 1912 such as The King and Queen surrounded by
4. Minotaure no 6 winter 1935; André Breton Surrealism and Painting
trans. Simon Watson-TaylorIcon Editions 1972 p 94
5. Golan op cit
( 19 )

Swift Nudes, to revolutionise the cubist language of interlocking
and overlapping planes to create new forms,
inventions, which are neither abstract nor figurative.
In The King and Queen surrounded by Swift Nudes a
multiplication of small shapes sweep round two towering
forms distantly recalling chess pieces but also the
magnetic poles round which electrons buzz. The title
refers to the metaphors physicists used at the time to
describe electrons (“swift” and “nude”) 6 . In Le Passage
de la vierge a la mariée the painted forms have
analogies with both human anatomies and mechanical
forms, while the title makes the physical as well
as metaphysical transition “from one state to another”
clear. Matta, fascinated by “the passage from one state
to another”, doesn’t distinguish between the physical,
emotional and psychological possibilities, deliberately
keeping them open. This was to become one of the key
ideas, fuelling his explorations in morphology, as he set
about generating “a new dynamic imagery of energy,
transition and growth, that draws on psychoanalysis
and physics” 7 .
Surrealism’s engagement with intellectual and political
concerns as well as poetry and the visual arts
6. See Linda Dalrymple Henderson Duchamp in Context Princeton University
Press p. 19
7. Gavin Parkinson Surrealism, Art and Modern Science Yale University
Press 2008, p. 152
( 20 )

has long been acknowledged, but the surrealists’ interest
in science has only been belatedly recognised.
A recent study placed surrealism “at the crossroads of
physics, philosophy, psychoanalysis and politics” 8 , the
movement thus straddling the conventionally separate
realms of science and the humanities. Matta was one
of those who engaged with modern physics even if in
“a less theoretical and more intuitive way” than some
of his colleagues 9 . One of his early memories when he
was a student in Santiago was attending a seminar on
relativity: “I don’t know why but the word relativity
immediately interested me. To understand the fact that
there is no immobile point in the universe which could
serve to measure distance and the speed of light was
fascinating.” 10 Matta intuited the import of the theoretical
conclusions of the physicists about space/time for
his own purposes, and was convinced of the parallels
between the transformations of our concepts and understanding
of space and those in others fields such as
philosophy and psychology. As he said: “Peindre le moment
de changement, le changement lui-même, je me
suis consacré a ce problème sans interruption depuis et
j’ai vu se developer ce problème aujourd’hui en scienc-
8. Parkinson p. 4
9. Parkinson p. 151
10. G. Ferrari Entretiens Morpologiques, Notebook no 1 1936-1944 Sistan
London 1987 p. 32
( 21 )

es, en mathématiques, en philosophie, la morphologie
de la forme, la rélativité, c’est tout le même problème.”
[To paint the moment of change, change itself, I have
devoted myself ceaselessly to this problem and I have
watched this problem develop in science, in mathematics,
in philosophy, the morphology of form, relativity,
it’s all the same problem.” 11 ]. Matta had also absorbed
the surrealists’ interest in alchemy, whose later connections
with magic tarnished its credentials as a precedent
to modern scientific discoveries. Nonetheless, scientists
did recognise that alchemical “transmutation”
was a parallel to what they preferred to call “transformation”,
and Rutherford called his book on radioactivity
The Newer Alchemy (1934). 12
From 1937, when he began seriously to commit
himself as an artist, his drawings and paintings show
an impulsive energy and dynamism. Throughout his
life he sought confirmation in the physical and mental
worlds, in nature and the imagination, of the links between
inner and outer realities.
This emphasis on morphology, on the potential of
forms to shift and change, and the relationship with the
11. Matta Centre Pompidou Paris 1985 p. 266
12. Henderson p. 23. Scholars have, somewhat controversially, emphasised
the rôle of alchemy in the work of both Matta and Duchamp, see eg
Golan (op. cit) and Arturo Schwarz The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp
Thames & Hudson 1997.
( 22 )

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)
Mariée, October 1937
Pochoir-colored reproduction and a French 5-centimes stamp on paper
34.0 x 19.7 cm 13.39 x 7.76 inches
Signed and dated on the stamp “Oct 37 / M. Duchamp”
Cat. rais. no. 456

new ideas in non-Euclidean geometry and in physics
about space and space-time, is one of the key factors in
Matta’s experiments in drawings and then in painting.
The syntheses Matta was able to make in his mind between
the absence of a fixed position in the new space/
time universe, the potential mobility of form and the
unknown forces of the unconscious with all their power
and uncertainty inform not only the extraordinary
drawings of 1937/8, but in many ways the whole development
of his painting. And as he often said, at the
core of his investigation, and what he perceived as a
solution, was the idea of “passage”.
‘Painting always has one foot in architecture,
one foot in dream.’ 13
*
Matta arrived in Europe from his native Chile in
1933, having, as he put it, “cut the Gordian knot” of
his Jesuit teaching, his bourgeois family and his country.
14 This liberation can be sensed in the exuberance
13. Quoted by Melville in his preface to Matta’s 1951 ICA exhibition.
Matta also said: “L’architecture a un pied dans le rêve et l’autre dans la
réalite”, [Architecture has one foot in dream and the other in reality] Ferrari
p. 99
14. Ferrari p. 14
( 24 )

of his drawings and the energy with which he began to
explore Europe. He had initially joined the merchant
navy, spending six months as a crew member on a ship
sailing between Liverpool and Fort-de-France, Martinique,
before settling in France. He quickly reacted
against encounters with wealthy Latin American relations
in Paris and set off alone and on foot round Europe,
spending the summer 1934 in Italy, everywhere
visiting museums and making notes and sketches. Later
that year in Paris he joined Le Corbusier’s studio
as a trainee - he had graduated as an architect from
the Catholic University in Santiago. The practice was
not, according to Matta, very busy, and the studio was
unheated. Le Corbusier would turn up at 5 in the afternoon
and look round, while his cousin Jeanneret was
normally present. There was, Matta said, no teaching, he
and his colleagues educating themselves. Matta claimed
they made drawings for La Ville radieuse, but this must
be a mistake as the unrealized project for Corbusier’s
Radiant City had already been published in 1933. It
is more likely that they were working on other related
ideal city plans. Perhaps the reason Matta remembered
La Ville radieuse was because, unlike the radial geometry
of other plans for a Contemporary City, this utopian
project was based on the idea of uniting humans and
their environment, its design based on the shape of the
human body, which Matta’s own final project for his ar-
( 25 )

chitectural diploma in Chile echoed. Matta may in fact
already have seen the Corb publication; he had chosen
for his graduation project an imaginary collection of
buildings for the Valley of Josaphat – the biblical place
where God was to gather together all nations. Matta
designed residences for the different delegations each
in a different genre, church, temple, mosque etc., with
one villa in the style of Le Corbusier and Gropius. To
“add architectural interest” to the plans he based them
on a series of drawings of nudes he had made while at
the Art School: feet and hands were toilets or kitchens,
head or breasts bedroom, legs the staircases. This
produced such a variety of plans that the professors
regarded it (with justice) as the work of a “great imagination.”
A couple of striking plans that have survived from
his time with Le Corbusier, architectural projects for a
house on the Côte d’Azur, also but in a more allusive
way posit the relationship between architecture and the
body, using photomontage. Photographic fragments of
sea- and landscapes are cut into biomorphic shapes,
contrasting with the airy frontal plans of the villa, while
a photo of the statue of Michaelangelo’s David stands to
the side as a model of the ideal body, contrasting with
tiny photographs of gesturing figures culled from historical
paintings. The fragments of the seascapes with
their great waves were especially significant for Mat-
( 26 )

ta, as he explains: “le va-et-vient des vagues ressemble
au va-et-vient des formes.” [The to-and-fro of waves
resembles the to-and-fro of rorms]. The morphology
of shells and cathedrals, he implies, are like the movements
of waves in that they reveal the process of their
formation. “I believe”, he went on, “that my true formation
is linked to the long beaches and huge waves
of my childhood.” 15 [Je crois que ma vraie formation
est liée à ces longues plages et aux énormes vagues de
mon enfance.] In the photomontage for the architectural
projects there is a very effective interplay between
the scattered fragments and the geometry of the plan,
which both contrasts with and seems to sway with the
movements of the bodies and the waves. He then went
on to link this early fascination with shifting morphologies
to his recollection of the lecture on relativity. While
these commentaries on his earliest works are of course
inflected by his well-known later interest in the new
physics there is no reason to doubt his incipient grasp
of something of considerable significance to his later
paintings.
He was not kept very busy at the architectural practice
and continued to spend a lot of time travelling. Occasionally
this was on behalf of the Corbusier studio, as
15. G. Ferrari Entretiens Morpologiques, Notebook no 1 1936-1944 Sistan
London 1987 p. 32
( 27 )

when he visited the Soviet Union in 1936 to carry some
new plans for an air conditioning unit and windows
for the Centrosoyouz (the Central Union of Soviet Cooperatives).
The number of places he passed through,
and the major figures in the literary and artistic worlds
whom he met during this itinerant time is astonishing:
in 1935 Madrid, where he met Federico García Lorca,
who gave him a copy of his poem Llanto por Ignacio
Sánchez Mejías and an introductory note for Salvador
Dalí; in 1936 Berlin for the Olympic Games (still “politically
unconscious”, as he said); Helsinki where he
met Alvar Aalto; Lisbon where he was “adopted” by the
Chilean poet and activist Gabriela Mistral, who introduced
him to the radical cultural programmes of Revolutionary
Mexico, thereby wakening his political consciousness;
London where he mixed not only with the
constructivists Gropius and Moholy-Nagy but with the
surrealists Magritte, Roland Penrose and Henry Moore.
Matta made a sufficient impression on Magritte for the
Belgian artist to write to his friends the Scutenaires:
“Matta is a young man from South America… He
is making paintings a thousand times more interesting
than those of Miró. He has lots of ideas.” 16 This is not
only remarkable as a signal of the extraordinary impact
Matta had on those who encountered him, but also
16. Matta Paris p. 266
( 28 )

ecause it contradicts the accepted history of Matta’s
development as a painter. Matta himself, as well as his
friend Gordon Onslow Ford, dated his first oil paintings
from the spring of 1938. The most likely explanation
is that Magritte saw not oil paintings but drawings in
pastel, pencil or crayon. The drawings from 1936/7
that have survived are very original elaborations of the
architectural ideas and of the new discoveries Matta
made in the context of surrealism, notably the photographs
of mathematical objects in Cahiers d’art.
The stretched parallel lines of the pencil marks –
there are rarely any areas of flat colour – resemble the
strange shapes of the mathematical objects as photographed
by Man Ray in Cahiers d’art, many with
strings or incised lines on their curved surfaces. Matta
referred to Monod-Herzen’s Principes de morphologie
générale in his discussion of these “3-dimensional
models of equations and formulas”, pointing out that as
an architect he lived with “geometries and volumes.” 17
The mathematical objects that so fascinated him were
invented to demonstrate the discovery of non-Euclidean
geometries in the 19 th century, which mathematically
transformed conceptions of space. “By the end
of the nineteenth century, all manner of geometries
were available for a great variety of spaces, extending,
17. Ferrari p. 36
( 29 )

in turn, the range of surfaces developed to model such
spaces to include forms like doughnuts, tunnel interiors
and even a space like a Venetian blind.” 18
If the emphasis here has been on the forms in the
1937 drawings, it would be misleading to assume
therefore that these exist discretely, detached from the
space around them; their elastic morphologies, interactions
and pulsing rhythms already deny the old orders
of perspectival space in which objects are fixed and
presented according to a specific viewpoint.
Surrealism
It was with his drawings, in the autumn of 1937,
that Matta made his entry into the surrealist movement,
the context in which he met Duchamp. Dalí, whom he
went to see in Paris, armed with Lorca’s introduction,
advised him to go and see Breton, who had just opened
the Galerie Gradiva on the rue de Seine. Matta arrived
at the gallery, according to Patrick Waldberg, with a
lot of drawings, “at least thirty, speaking all the time,
Breton understanding nothing he said but liking them
and immediately buying a couple.” 19 [Patrick Waldberg
se souvient de Matta arrivant ‘avec plein de dessins, au
18. Parkinson p. 61
19. Matta Paris p. 267
( 30 )

moins une trentaine, parlant beaucoup et Breton, ne
comprenant rien à ce qu’il disait mais aimant beaucoup
et lui en achetant même deux tout de suite.’] Four
drawings of 1937 were included in the Exposition Internationale
du surréalisme (International Exhibition
of Surrealism) at the Galerie Beaux-Arts, (January-
February 1938). This exhibition was presented as a
whole environment, encasing the spectator in a dark,
cavern-like space, with the ceiling of 1200 coal sacks
devised by Duchamp, a reed-fringed pool, an unmade
bed, the smell of roasting coffee, an avenue of mannequins
and Dalí’s Rainy Taxi in the forecourt. Each
of the mannequins was dressed by a surrealist artist,
including Dalí, Duchamp and Tanguy. Matta had been
invited to dress one, and he had proposed making God.
His idea was to create the ferocious drunkard from
one of the surrealists’ favourite books, Lautréamont’s
Chants de Maldoror, but Breton admonished him: “My
friend, we never talk of God.” So in the end he showed
only drawings.
Each of the drawings’ titles was prefaced with “Scenario”:
Scenario no 1: Succion panique du soleil”, Scenario
no 2: Pulsions infusoires du soleil; Scenario no. 3:
La sperme du temps collé aux dechirures du jour; Scenario
no 4: Elasticité des intervalles. Unusual as titles
of surrealist works often are, and sometimes bearing
little relation to the work itself, these titles of Matta’s
( 31 )

stand out for their startling conjunctions of forces, emotions
and objects, and for the emphasis on action: suction,
pulsion, elasticity. They undoubtedly give an added
intensity to the stretched, twisted and thrusting forms
in the drawings, which used coloured pencils, sometimes
wax crayons and pastel. They convey the effect
of growth, movement and interpenetration; the forms
resemble plants, flowers, seeds as well as cosmic bodies.
“voir l’orgasme du ciel.
Voir le ciel comme un organe qui palpite.” 20
It is characteristic of Matta that the erotic is expressed
as a pervasive force, as it was by Duchamp.
Matta’s use of the term “scenario” introduces a cinematic
dimension which could be said to be present in
his drawings and paintings in varying degrees throughout
his life. But it and the drawings may be related to a
scenario Matta wrote in December 1936, with the premonitory
title “La terre est un homme”, Earth is a man.
He wrote it all in one night, in a state of shock having
heard belatedly of the death of Lorca.
Although what happens on the paper or canvas in
Matta’s drawings and paintings cannot be reduced to or
adequately captured in words, and as Onslow Ford said,
there was no existing model for his worlds of line, form
20. Ferrari p.61
( 32 )

and colour except what the painting itself could reveal,
Matta did talk with great speed and fluency about his
work and ideas. During this period of his early association
with the surrealists, and his first paintings, he
was absorbing and synthesising in his unique manner
theories about the new physics and psychoanalysis. His
first published text was born from the explosive encounter
of his thinking and training as an architect and
the challenge to the rational spearheaded by surrealism.
“Mathématique sensible – architecture du temps” (Sensitive
Mathematics – Architecture of time, 21 ) presents a
drawing, a project for the maquette of an apartment.
Different planes intersect the space which contains soft
pneumatic chairs resembling Henry Moore torsos, contrasting
with a “psychological ionic column”. The text,
though, is a wild crossing of sensation, sentiment, body,
building, furniture and space. “This furniture would
unload the body of its entire past at right angles to the
armchair, which, discarding the origins of the style of its
predecessors, would open up at the elbow and the neck,
assuming infinite motions in accordance with the organ
to be awakened and the intensity of life.” The erotic
takes on a new dimension: “…other objects ajar, comprising
sex organs of unprecedented form, the discovery
of which provokes desires more eruptive than those of
21. Minotaure no 11 Spring 1938 p. 43
( 33 )

man for woman, and leading to ecstasy.” The language
is already marked by the untranslatable puns that characterise
his later writings, as in the Dalí-like invocation
of the womb: “parois humides ou le sang battait tout
près de l’oeil avec le bruit de la mère”, where “mère” is
both mother and its homophone “mer”, sea.
Breton had peremptorily requested this text (“It is
very important that Matta write on architecture” he telegrammed
to his fellow Minotaure editors from Mexico
in early 1938), and Georges Hugnet was drafted in to
adapt Matta’s words for the page. According to Onslow
Ford, the genesis of one of Matta’s most significant texts
later the same year, “Psychological Morphology”, was
similarly fraught. “In the Autumn of 1938 Matta introduced
the term Psychological Morphology. When he
spoke of it at the Deux Magots, accompanied by much
arm-waving and with the assistance of objects to hand,
an impassive Breton professed not to understand. He
requested Matta to put his theories into writing. This
was difficult for Matta, not for lack of ideas, but because
it slowed him down. But he managed to produce
this text…At that time, words were too slow to catch
the fireworks of Matta’s imagination. Before an idea
could fully emerge, another was biting its tail.” 22
22. Gordon Onslow-Ford “Notes on Matta and Painting (1937-1941)”
Ferrari p. 24
( 34 )

The question of Matta’s writing and its relation to
his painting is interesting and probably changed over
time, though the quickfire images and ideas did not.
In his brief but perceptive preface to Matta’s 1951 exhibition
at the ICA in London, the English surrealist
and critic Robert Melville wrote: “He is not a theorist,
and his statements on art have always been oblique descriptions
of the paintings he happened to be working
on at the time. He has made some of the boldest and
most brilliant contributions of our age to the conception
of pictorial space as a psychological phenomenon.”
That the text on Psychological morphology was intimately
linked to the paintings of 1938/9, the extraordinary
breakthrough as he moved into painting in oils
under Onslow Ford’s encouragement in the Spring and
Summer of 1938, is not in doubt. The paintings of this
moment: Psychological Morphology, The Morphology
of Desire, and Inscape of the following year which he
painted during the summer 1939 which he, Onslow
Ford and their partners, Esteban Francés, Breton and
his wife and daughter Jacqueline and Aube, Tanguy and
Kay Sage, spent at the Château de Chemillieu, were
charting completely new ground in terms of the visual.
What Breton found so enchanting in the work of the
young artists Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, Onslow Ford and
Esteban Francés was a regeneration of the early principles
of surrealism – automatism. Breton welcomed the
( 35 )

eturn to automatism in his 1939 Minotaure essay “The
most recent tendencies in surrealist painting.” “The
young painters of today”, Breton wrote, “have opted
unequivocally for automatism” 23 . He even contrasts
their absolute commitment to automatism with what he
describes as the relative prudence of the first generation
of surrealist artists. Automatism had been the core of
the definition of Surrealism in the first Manifesto: “Pure
psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express,
either verbally, or in writing, or in any other way, the
true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in
the absence of any control exerted by reason, and outside
all aesthetic or moral concerns.” 24 This statement
was notably lacking in any guidance to the visual artists,
which left them free to experiment. Breton’s reservations
about the first generation of surrealist artists is
at first puzzling: the automatic drawings of Masson and
Tanguy, Ernst’s frottages, Man Ray’s rayograms, Miró’s
free colour, were diverse, original and striking responses
to a proposal originally geared to language. Perhaps
what was new about the young recruits in the late 30s
was the prominence of painting itself as the beneficiary
23. André Breton “Des tendances les plus récentes de la peinture surréaliste”
Minotaure Nos 12-13 May 1939 p. 17. Trans. Simon Watson-Taylor in
Breton Surrealism and Painting Icon Editions 1972 p. 148
24. André Breton Manifeste du Surréalisme Editions du Sagittaire Paris
1924 p.42. Author’s transl.
( 36 )

of automatism. Admittedly Paalen had introduced “Fumage”,
and Domínguez Decalcomania, but for the most
part it was a return to painting that was signalled as
well as a return to automatism, a relief for Breton, after
the disappointment of Dalí’s paranoiac critical method,
which Breton felt had degenerated to no more than a
visual puzzle, and the relatively conceptual character of
the surrealist object. And he was right - there had not
been any equivalent to Matta’s automatism; in his work
“nothing is directed, everything results from a desire to
enrich the faculty of divination, in which he is exceptionally
gifted, through the use of colour. Each of the
pictures painted by Matta during the last year has been
a marvellous game where all the elements of chance
come into play, a pearl which becomes a snowball as it
absorbs all the shimmering lights emanating from the
mind and the body.” 25
From the testimony of Onslow Ford, who was very
close to Matta at the time, there was a degree of automatism
in his practice without this becoming the raison
d’être of the work. His description of Matta’s first painting
in oil is legendary: invited to make a painting with
the canvas and paints in Onslow Ford’s studio, Matta
25. André Breton “The Most Recent Tendencies in Surrealist Painting”
Surrealism and Painting p. 146; “Des tendances les plus récentes de la peinture
surréaliste” Minotaure nos 12/13 May 1939 p. 16
( 37 )

declined, unwilling to mess up his friend’s brushes and
canvas. “However, I persuaded him, and 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 use the clean brushes, he worked the paint
with his fingers, one finger for yellow, one for red, etc.
In this way the colours were spread out, and the colours
were mixed on the canvas. This technique remained the
basis of his oil painting for many years – though he
substituted brushes for fingers.” 26 The automatism of
Matta’s painting was, it seems to me, subtly different
from the automatism of the first surrealist years.
Whereas with the first generation of surrealists the
question of the authenticity of the “automatism” was to
the fore, with for example Miró “admitting” that there
was a second stage to his paintings (such as Birth of the
World) which was ‘conscious’, while the first stage was
properly ‘unconscious’, Breton recognised that automatism
in the new generation of surrealist painters was
not necessarily so systematic in avoiding “conscious”
elements. In the case of Matta, who had nothing to unlearn,
and where the act of painting had begun with
the free application of paint, there seems to have been
26. Gordon Onslow-Ford “Notes on Matta and Painting (1937-1941)”
Ferrari 23
( 38 )

no definitive transition point between the unplanned
and the elaborated, the unconscious and the conscious.
With The Earth is a Man, liquid layers of paint were
washed over the canvas, spread with rags and fingers,
leaving chance drips and streaks. Unlike many of the
first experiments in automatism, too, such as Masson’s
drawings or Ernst’s frottages, where an image emerged
as a “surprise”, the artist deliberately having suspended
conscious control, Matta seems always to have been
fermenting ideas which took shape in the process of
painting. And as Onslow Ford said, “This first gesture
in oil paint by Matta echoed all the way to New York
City during the 1940s”. 27
Matta’s statement “Psychological morphology” was
conceived as a kind of manifesto, setting out an original
argument in which he sharply distinguishes his ideas
from Dalí’s critical paranoia and also from so-called abstract
art which surrealism had always opposed. Underlying
his argument is rejection of the optical image which
is “only one of the possible forms of the object”. 28 In a
Note entitled “Inscape”, written in the summer of 1938
at Trévignon, where he was staying with Onslow Ford,
there is a more straightforward account of this idea: “I
want a morphology that does not stop at the silhouette,
27. Gordon Onslow Ford in Ferrari p. 23
28. Matta “Psychological Morphology” (1938) Ferrari p. 218
( 39 )

the skin of beings and of things. The image of a tree is
not the mass of greenery grouped round the trunk which
is detached with greater or lesser precision and grace
from the coloured background. This image is for us really
everything we know about the grain, the germination,
the swift unfolding of the buds, the shadow the tree can
cast, the infinitely sad image it presents when it is leafless
in winter, and more – everything the word “tree” calls up
in the field of our consciousness as emotive images…” 29
This calls to mind a 1939 Psychological Morphology
(1939) 30 , in which the thrusting, branching, form of a
tree on the left is outlined against a wonderfully glowing,
green-blue space punctuated by jewel-like knots of light.
The forms of the object are created by the adaptation
of its “internal energies” to the obstacles created by
the environment. The object may change as the result of
external pressures but remains itself, so “the morphology
of whirlwinds…indicates the graphic of unmixable
bodies such as patches of motor oil on wet roads; the
disposition of two Ripolin colours.”
By “graphic”, which he uses as a noun rather than
adjective, he means the drawing, the representation.
Psychological morphology is “the graphic of ideas”. That
is, what is known and felt in relation to an object and not
29. Ferrari 219 (French p. 72)
30. reproduced Ferrari p. 85
( 40 )

what is just seen. Matta uses the term “graphic” in opposition
to “plastique”, plastic, for which there is no useful
English equivalent in this context. “To call something
graphic is to say it is not, to use the more common French
term, plastique, which implies a modelling of form and
volume”. 31 “Les arts plastiques” are effectively work in
three dimensions, including sculpture. Matta probably
therefore intends simply depiction in two dimensions.
But certainly line becomes crucial as an independent element
in his paintings following the soft, glowing colours
and interpenetrations of space and volume in the Psychological
Morphologies (1939), Morphology of Desire
(1938), Inscape (1939), and other works of that time
such as the Fabulous Racetrack of Death (Instrument
very dangerous for the eye) (1939)
There are contradictions which co-exist: “The co-psychology
of contraries in the same idea-object remain
pulsating without deformation in a psychological morphology.”
32 Matta forces effects and things different in
kind to co-exist (“from point-volume to moment-eternity,
from attraction-repulsion to past-future, from lightshade
to matter-movement”) 33 . This is some ways easier
31. Briony Fer “Networks: Graphic Strategies from Matta to Matta-Clark”
Transmission: The Art of Matta and Gordon Matta-Clark San Diego
Museum of Art 2006 p.38
32. Ferrari p. 218
33. ibid.
( 41 )

to grasp by looking at the paintings with the extraordinary
variety of forms beating together, whose titles
indicate powerful feelings: La veille de la mort (morphologie
psychologique de l’angoisse), or Morphologie
psychologique de l’espoir, both of 1938.
*
New York: Les Grands transparents
Matta and his wife left France for New York in October
1939, on the same boat as Tanguy. After the German
occupation of Paris in June 1940, many of the
surrealists took refuge in the Americas; Breton and his
family reached New York in 1941, and Duchamp finally
got there in 1942. New York became the new centre
for Surrealism, and Matta was at the core of its revived
activities. He was also, together with Gordon Onslow
Ford who arrived in 1940, swiftly in dialogue with the
young American painters. Like others among the European
refugees, he gravitated to the New School for
Social Research, which had been founded in 1919 as
a progressive centre for higher education for adults by
a group of American intellectuals. Among the teachers
were distinguished names in the fields of the social
sciences, anthropology, politics and the arts. It was a
haven for scholars as well as artists and writers flee-
( 42 )

ing Nazism. Here he met the art historian and theorist
Meyer Schapiro, the artist and photographer Francis
Lee whose loft was a meeting place for the European
newcomers and the American artists, and the artists
themselves, including Pollock, Baziotes, Kamrowski,
Gorky, Motherwell, Kiesler and the critic Lionel Abel,
who was to become closely involved with the major surrealist
publication of its New York period, VVV. After the
war he and Matta edited a review of their own, Instead
(1948-49). The surrealists, above all through the idea
and the practice of automatism, had a considerable influence
on the American painters, although in the end
this led in a different direction. The encounter brings to
mind Matta’s description of things reacting to the forces
round them but not melding with them – like oil on a
wet pavement. Close as the relations were between Matta
and some of the younger artists, in particular Robert
Motherwell, there was never a question of a merger.
In hindsight Onslow Ford’s lectures at the New School
early in 1941, on de Chirico, Ernst, Magritte, Tanguy,
Brauner, Seligmannn, S.W. Hayter, Frances, Matta and
himself are one of the clues to this, in their insistent
readings of the iconography of the paintings. 34
34. Gordon Onslow Ford: Paintings and Works on Paper 1939-1951
Francis Naumann New York 2010, with Onslow Ford’s New School Lectures
January-March 1941 transcribed and edited by Martica Sawin pp 53-71.
( 43 )

By 1940 Matta had only been painting in oils for
a couple of years, and was basically self-taught, giving
him a freedom of which he took full advantage. Although
it’s possible to trace the influence of painters
whom Matta admired, such as Dalí and Tanguy, in the
earliest works, this is so transformed as to be almost
undetectable.
In The Earth is a Man, for example, as in earlier
paintings such as Prescience (1939), and others of the
psychological morphologies genre, the canvas is loosely
divided by a horizon line, with the lower part predominantly
a glowing yellow, the upper part predominantly
blue. This echoes paintings by Dalí, with whom, because
of his expulsion by the surrealists in 1939, Matta
was subsequently rarely linked. The landscape settings
of Dalí’s subjects in the 1930s often have a similar arrangement,
presenting an overwhelming impression of
a yellow/blue, sand/sky world. The horizon line, which
would seem to determine the pictorial space, was most
famously both posited and defied by Tanguy, whom Breton
considered the strongest influence on the young recruits
to surrealism. In his paintings of the late 1920s
and early 1930s, Tanguy increased the ambiguity of
horizon lines so that divisions between earth, sea and
sky were blurred. This no doubt fascinated Matta as he
sought ways of representing extended notions of space.
It is difficult to make cut and dried statements about
( 44 )

the changes in his treatment of space and of forms. The
co-existence of linear elements and the veils and cocoons
characteristic of the psychological morphologies predates
the uses of multiple perspectives with conflicting
vanishing points and shallower, interlocking spaces of
paintings like The Onyx of Electra. Similarly, the traditional
opposition between figurative and abstract is
simply by-passed by Matta. As Breton wrote in his 1944
text on Matta, he confounds: “those who are ready to
disqualify as ‘abstract’ any form which is not at present
perceptible to the eye (a century ago, the curve of an
electric light bulb’s filament would have seemed extravagantly
abstract).” 35
On arrival in New York Matta made efforts to find
new technologies appropriate to expressing the new ‘realities’.
“The need to call upon the most modern resources
simply expresses the aspiration to extend the field of
vision…” 36 For his first solo exhibition, in April 1940
at Julien Levy’s gallery, he bought flourescent mineral
paints and “a special lamp that burned with ‘black
light’ that activated the colours of the minerals.” 37 The
resulting paintings were intended to look one way in
35. André Breton “Preliminaires sur Matta” (1944) Matta Galerie René
Drouin 1947 n.p.
36. Ibid.
37. Julien Levy Memoir of an Art Gallery G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York
1977 p 250
( 45 )

ordinary daylight, and a different way when lit by the
‘black’ lamp. They were installed in a special box, with
a peephole and a switch to control the light. The experiment
seems not to have been sufficiently successful to
pursue, though the idea of a painting changing under
different lights perhaps still lies behind the almost fluorescent-seeming
hues of a painting like Le Vertige d’Eros,
while the overall black tones of a number of paintings in
the early 40s could similarly have been inspired by it. In
any case, Matta was to remain faithful to oil painting on
canvas while often pushing it to extremes of scale.
Paradoxically the most direct influence on Matta
in New York was Duchamp – paradoxical, because
Duchamp had renounced oil painting on canvas since
1918, and since abandoning his Large Glass unfinished
in 1923 had, it seemed, only rarely intervened as an
artist. Since 1936 he had been occupied preparing and
putting together his Boîtes – the “portable museum” of
almost all his works. (One of the series of Boîtes, series
C, was assembled by, among others, Matta’s second wife
Patricia). In New York Matta had no doubt at last seen
the Large Glass itself, newly restored by Duchamp, at
Katherine Dreier’s house, and the Glass, together with
Duchamp’s 1934 publication, with the same title, La
Mariée mise a nu par ses célibataires, même, known
as the Green Box Notes, pervade Matta’s thinking and
( 46 )

painting. (The title has an untranslatable pun: “même”
sounds like “m’aime”, loves me, which makes a great
deal more sense than the floating adverb même, even.)
The Green Box Notes, the earliest of which date from c.
1912, were intended to be seen in conjunction with The
Glass – they were two parts of a whole, and thus a key
weapon in Duchamp’s attack on the retinal. Duchamp
wanted to bring the mind, what he called the “grey
matter”, back into play, to restore some function to art
beyond the “purely retinal”, the appeal only to the eye.
Matta’s inveterate need to verbalise at the same time
as insisting on the unique power of painting to realise
the invisible has a kind of parallel with Duchamp – a
like-minded desire for a whole-ness of expression of an
idea or object (“idea-object”), in word and image. When
Matta says “Kill the optical” he has Duchamp’s rejection
of the purely retinal in mind.
Matta refers to Duchamp’s anti-retinal attitude in his
“Redefinitions towards a new dimension for painting”.
Here Matta mingles regular terms for pictorial considerations
(light, space, object) with his own: transfluence,
co-time, prescience. For “Object” he offers the arresting
sentence: “One must look at objects while one’s eye is
being gargled in the mouth of some chaste “Duchampian”
balcony.” 38 The enchantment of the eye must be
38. Ferrari 97
( 47 )

sterilised, the object seen from a Duchampian viewing
point (above) with the implication that just looking is
not enough.
Matta’s familiarity with not only the Glass itself
but with the Notes is frequently confirmed in his own
writings and speculations. For example, he compiles
a list of “Les Descriptions automatiques” (automatic
descriptions), which both quotes from Duchamp’s
“litanies of the chariot” and refers to images in the
Glass itself:
“Le pendu femelle
Densité excitante
Fracas
Litanie du chariot
Metal émancipé
Retard en verre…
Adage de spontanéité.” 39
This can be directly compared with Duchamp’s
chant-like “Litanies of the chariot”:
“Slow life
Vicious circle
Onanism
Horizontal ….”
The metal (or material) – of the chariot is “emancipated”,
and the “Adage of spontaneity = the bachelor
39. Ferrari p. 132
( 48 )

grinds his chocolate”. 40
Matta’s riffs on the enigmatic language of Duchamp’s
Notes, which conjure strange beings, actions and desires,
have parallels in some of his paintings from this
period, such as The Bachelors, twenty years after,
which specifically refers to the imagery of the Large
Glass itself. The Bachelors, Duchamp’s ‘Malic moulds’,
appear as recognisable lamps with electric filaments,
with lines spinning out expressing the dynamism of the
sexual encounter described by Duchamp in his Notes:
the Bride and the Bachelors are variously powered by
electric currents, by clockwork and by steam, analogies
for their sexual energy. For “Space” in “Redefinitions
towards a new dimension for painting”, Matta writes
“Horizon = an implacable line at the breathless height
of Sex,” and illustrates it with two naked figures, male
and female, the undulating horizon line crossing at the
point of sex. This recalls one of the Notes in the Green
Box on the “Malic moulds” (the Bachelors): “Each of
the 8 malic forms is built above and below a common
horizontal plane, the plane of sex cutting them at the
point of sex.” 41
The Pendu femelle is Duchamp’s term for the suspended
Bride in the upper half of the Glass, rendering
40. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp Ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer
Peterson Da Capo Press 1989 p. 56
41. ibid. p. 51
( 49 )

the Pendu, the Hanged Man of the Tarot cards, female.
With his painting Le Pendu, of 1942, Matta introduces
a personal, anguished note, apparently identifying
himself with the Hanged Man. The imagery of
the Large Glass undoubtedly has an otherworldly, futuristic
look, which derives not only from the curious
beings and objects but from the incompatible spatial
organisation of the upper (Bride’s) realm, and the lower
(Bachelors’). In the earthly, lower half of the Glass
Duchamp ‘rehabilitated’, as he put it, strictly linear,
one-point, classical perspective, while in the upper half
the forms apparently float in a perspective-less, aerial
space. However, Duchamp also speculated about possible
perspectives in that realm – one might be able to
discover the identity of the apparently abstract shapes
if only one knew where to stand: “The Pendu femelle is
the form in ordinary perspective of a Pendu femelle for
which one could perhaps try to discover the true form /
This comes from the fact that any form is the perspective
of another form according to a certain vanishing
point and a certain distance.” 42
This unfixing of the viewer, not least a challenge
to the comfortable certainties of traditional pictorial
space, appealed to Matta and must have confirmed his
commitment to finding visual expression for space-time.
42. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp p. 45
( 50 )

Breton had noted the young painters’ “deep yearning
to transcend the three-dimensional universe. Although
this particular question provided one of the leitmotifs
of cubism in its heroic period, there is no doubt that it
assumed a greatly heightened significance as a result
of Einstein’s introduction into physics of the concept
of the space-time continuum, The need for a suggestive
representation of the four-dimensional universe is particularly
evident in the work of Matta (landscapes with
several horizons)…” 43
Duchamp appreciated his indefatigable and inventive
treatment of space:
“His first and important contribution to Surrealist
painting was the discovery of regions of space hitherto
unexplored in the realm of art. Matta followed
the modern physicists in the search for his new space
which, although depicted on canvas, was not to be mistaken
for another three dimensional illusion. His first
“period” was characterized by the slow rendering of
an exploration, the fight with all the obstacles of oil
painting, a medium lending itself to centuries-old interpretations.
Later he succeeded in introducing in “his
space” descriptive and figurative elements which added
to the completion of his important achievement. Still a
43. Breton “The Most Recent Tendencies…” Surrealism and Painting
p. 149
( 51 )

young man, Matta is the most profound painter of his
generation.” 44
Matta’s painting developed fast during the early
1940s. Lightly indicated in Years of Fear (1941-2)
and in Locus Solus (1941-2) is a new interest in linear
structures that contrast with the organic turbulence of
paintings such as The Earth is a Man, which was the
culmination of the Psychological Morphologies. He creates
linear configurations with loops, conics and vanishing
points, spaces with multiple horizons, and transparent
screen-like planes. The lines can simultaneously
indicate representational systems such as perspective,
Herzian waves, weather formations, and any number of
metaphorical allusions. “In 1943 I passed, in my own
work, from a sort of burning fire, mineral lights kind of
thing, into a space that was described by geodesic lines
and waves…” 45
In L’Année 44 (1942), and Composition in Magenta:
The End of Everything (1943) rosy magenta and
black wash covers the canvas over which white lines
form geometrical shapes, rhomboids and curves, sometimes
resembling overlapping scales like the shutter of
44. Duchamp “Matta, Painter” from the Catalogue of the Collection of
the Société Anonyme, (1946) in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp ed. Sanouillet
and Peterson Da Capo Press, New York 1989 p.154
45. Interview 1966 with Peter Busa, Ferrari p 250
( 52 )

a camera. The sense of deep – even infinite - space continues
in the even more complex Le Vertige d’Éros (the
title one of Matta’s many puns: les verts tiges d’Éros, the
green shoots of Eros) and related works of 1943-4, such
as Eronisme, The Disputed Continent and La lumière
noire. (1943). Matta began by “laying down a ground
of large alternating areas of wine and yellow; over this,
when dry, he applied a black wash, which he then partly
rubbed away with rags to allow colour to emerge
from the ground. The more black he rubbed away, the
lighter became the final colour.” 46 The glowing golden
patches in Le Vertige d’Éros give the impression of light
received from a distance, but from different angles as if
from different suns. Some of the lines give a hint of recession,
but in terms of individual linear structures, not
according to a single vanishing point. The dark space is
not only horizonless but without gravity altogether. “To
be without connection to the gravity of the earth, isn’t
that a loss of identity as in death?” 47 Eros and Thanatos
are both invoked.
The title of Eronisme is reminiscent of a sentiment
of Duchamp’s with which Matta was in full accord –
“I believe in eroticism a lot, because it’s truly a rather
46. William Rubin Dada and Surrealist Art Thames & Hudson London
1969 p. 348
47. Ferrari p. 180
( 53 )

Roberto Matta (1911-2002)
Eronisme, 1943
Oil on canvas 60 x 80 cm 23.62 x 31.5 inches
Signed and dated on the reverse “MATTA 43”

widespread thing…” 48 What else does the neologism
suggest? Eros as an erroneous ism, perhaps? The painting
originally had an additional title, Le Jour est un
attentat. Matta’s comments on this indicate his line of
thinking about the problem of the ‘time’ dimension of
space/time. Irrational and emotional rather than scientific,
he suggests that if you want to measure time,
“the true measure is the day, not the day of twenty-four
hours, but the day as assault, as menace, as risk.” The
sprays of white lines converging on single points in
Eronisme are like shards of shattered glass as well as
multiple horizons.
As with the Psychological Morphologies, scale is
ambiguous, so that elements could be tiny or huge,
distances incalculable. Despite the crucial rôle of the
graphic lines in creating space, there is also the striking
appearance in Eronisme and in Le Vertige d’Éros of
floating, illusionistic, sculptural forms, like white pebbles
or an asteroid, which reflect the golden, fiery light
from below. Such pictorial illusionism marks emphatically
the gulf between Matta’s paintings and those of
the abstract expressionists.
The linear markings in Matta’s canvases occupy an
interesting position in relation to both the spatial am-
48. Quoted in Marcel Duchamp ed. Anne D’Harnoncourt and Kynaston
McShine MoMA 1973 p.309
( 55 )

Installation view, First Papers of Surrealism,
photographed by John Schiff, New York 1942

iguities of the Large Glass and the string installation
Duchamp devised for the 1942 First Papers of Surrealism
exhibition. This installation famously consisted
of ‘a mile of string’, a web of thin cords spun round
the paintings on screens, looped from the chandeliers
and mantelpieces. It is usually mentioned in terms of
frustrating the viewer, interrupting the paintings and
acting as a critique or negation of surrealism. However,
it also picks up a feature of surrealist painting common,
for example, to Matta and Tanguy: linear devices to indicate
space and spatial relations, as in Tanguy’s largest
painting, The Palace of Windowed Rocks, (1942),
which occupied the wall at one end of the exhibition
space. But whereas in The Palace of Windowed Rocks
the lines connect objects set in a deep landscape, creating
an illusion of continuous space, Matta’s defy any
consistent three-dimensional illusion. With his web of
strings Duchamp materialises drawing in space, 49 outside
a frame, and without creating an illusion of space.
It is interesting that in the 1942 exhibition catalogue
Duchamp’s Network of Stoppages (1914) and Matta’s
The Earth is a Man were reproduced on facing pages.
The 1942 exhibition catalogue included a section
entitled: “on the Survival of Certain Myths and
on Some Other Myths In Growth or Formation”. The
49. Fer p.38
( 57 )

myth of “The Philosophers’ Stone” was illustrated with
a Paracelsus engraving and Matta’s wax and pencil
drawing La Pierre Philosophale, Telesona du soleil et
de la lune (foyers de peur) 1942, and the new myth of
“Les Grands Transparents” was illustrated with one of
David Hare’s burnt photographs. However the idea, or
myth, of “Les Grands Transparents”, which most explicitly
reveals surrealism’s fascination with science fiction,
had already been introduced in VVV no 1, in Breton’s
“Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism
or Else”, illustrated with Matta’s coloured drawing Los
grandes transparentes. Breton ended the “Prolegomena”
with a section entitled “Les Grands transparents”,
in which he introduced the idea that “Man is perhaps
not the center, the focus of the universe. One may go
so far as to believe that there exist above him, on the
animal level, beings whose behaviour is as alien to
him as his own must be to the day-fly or the whale.” 50
[“L’homme n’est peut-être pas le centre, le point de
mire, de l’univers. On peut se laisser aller de croire qu’il
existe au-dessus de lui, dans l’échelle animale, des êtres
dont le comportement lui est aussi etranger que le sien
peut l‘être a l’éphémère ou la baleine.”] “Les grands
50. André Breton “Prolégomenes a un troisième manifeste du Surréalisme
ou non”, translated as “Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism
or Else” VVV no 1 p 25
( 58 )

transparents” is usually translated as “The Great Invisibles”,
though pictorially speaking this misses the
sense of transparency, of “seeing through” a layer or an
object like glass. Matta linked the development of the
idea of the “grands transparents” to his regular weekly
meetings with Duchamp, and it was for Matta haunted
by Duchamp’s Glass painting. Breton quoted William
James, who asked “Who knows whether, in nature, we
do not hold as small a place beside beings whose existence
we do not suspect as our cats and dogs living in our
houses at our sides?” [“Qui sait si, dans la nature, nous
ne tenons pas une aussi petite place auprès d’êtres par
nous insoupçonnés, que nos chats et nos chiens vivant
a nos côtes dans nos maisons?”] Matta’s conception,
though, was more abstract, less shaped by the idea of
“beings”. [“Pour moi], si on veut parler des fourmis, le
grand transparent serait plutot leur incroyable système
de communication, tout en ondes et en odeurs.
Le système d’ondes hertziennes, les ondes thermiques,
la forme que prend le vent dans un cyclone, les
rayons qui donnent de la lumière a l’interieur d’une
ampoule sont des grands transparents.” 51 [“[Breton]
compared them to ants, for which man, whose dimensions
they cannot imagine, is a Great Transparent One.
To me, with regard to ants, the Great Transparent One
51. Ferrari p. 120
( 59 )

would more likely be their incredible communications
system, made up entirely of waves and odours. The system
of Hertzian waves, thermal waves, the form the
wind assumes in a cyclone, the rays emitting light inside
a bulb are all Great Transparent Ones.”]
The image is not a thing.
It is an act…
*
Matta’s admiration for Duchamp culminated publicly
in the essay he published, together with Katharine
Dreier: “Duchamp’s Glass, La mariée mise à nu
par ses Célibataires, meme…An analytical reflection
by Katherine S. Dreier and Matta Echaurren”. 52 Preliminary
notes in a sketchbook dating from this period
reveal Matta struggling to formulate what are evidently
to him hugely significant ideas about the nature
of Duchamp’s importance, trying them out in French,
Spanish and English, rapid scribbles not always easy
to decipher. There are two main points in his argument
in the sketch book: firstly, that at the present time
52. Duchamp’s Glass, La mariée mise a nu par ses Célibataires, meme…
An analytical reflection by Katherine S. Dreier and Matta Echaurren Société
Anonyme and MoMA New York 1944 Ferrari Notebooks p. 182
( 60 )

there are momentous changes in human knowledge
that point in hitherto unexpected directions (“Nous
sommes à un de ces moments de l’histoire où la science
de l’homme clairvoie un changement de direction une
nouvelle vie, jusqu’alors caché 53 (We are at one of those
moments in history when the science (knowledge) of
man perceives a change of direction, a new life hitherto
hidden). That this change is to do with the nature
of our understanding of space is hinted at, and at one
point he links “non-Euclidean” with “non-Vincian”;
Leonardo da Vinci is the only other artist he mentions,
evidently here standing for the Renaissance tradition
of perspective in painting, in harmony with Euclidean
space, with static object and static spectator. Man will
be aided in his conception of a new space where the
operations of nature and of the mind rediscover their
myth. (“[conscience? du ?soi] qui doit aider l’homme
dans la conception de l’espace total où les operations de
la nature et de l’esprit retrouvent leur mythe.”) 54 The
second point argues that Duchamp was the first person
in history to paint the image in itself. 55 Matta’s notes
53. Matta, Unpublished sketchbook p. 105
54. ibid. p. 106
55. The writing of this passage is particularly hard to decipher:
“Duchamp c’est le premier ?esprit de l’histoire qui a peint l’image en soi, et
qu’en liberant ?interpellant de sens de la representation profonde de l’ force
( 61 )

were tidied up for the published text, where his crucial
conception of the “image in itself” (a phrase with
an unfortunately Heideggerian ring) is clarified. This is
not meant as a kind of philosophical absolute, but as a
contrast to the image as the representation of a “petrified
thing or object”.
“The image is not a thing.
It is an act which must be completed by the spectator.”
The first sentence is recognisably Matta’s, the second
envisages image and spectator, as, together, a dynamic
reality. The idea that the work “cannot be completed
except through the conscious participation of the onlooker”
was to be the leitmotiv of Duchamp’s later lecture
“The Creative Act” (1957). “All in all, the creative
act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator
brings the work in contact with the external world by
deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and
thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” 56 Plausibly
this was an idea discussed by Duchamp, Dreier
and Matta during their many meetings in New York in
the early 1940s. However, Duchamp is really concerned
with the spectator as posterity, as the historical factor
which determines the survival or disappearance of the
notre imagination par une operations incessament (necessairement?) produite
par ses tableaux a monte dans l’espace libre de spirit [en du]une raizon
poetique nous devoile le reel”. ibid p. 107
56. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp op cit pp 138-140
( 62 )

work – it does not imply the participation of the spectator
in any other sense, though this is sometimes how
it is now interpreted. Nor is Duchamp’s spectator quite
the same as Matta and Dreier’s.
“In order to be fully conscious of the phenomenon
which the image describes, we ourselves must first of all
fulfil the act of dynamic perception.
Marcel Duchamp was the first to paint the image
per se, to be completed by an act of consciousness of
the part of the spectator. Prior to this, the artist spoke
and the onlooker listened, for he was not called upon
to complete the work of art by his own conscious act. It
was statement – now it is a dialogue!” 57
Embedded here is a proposition that casts light on
the way Matta thought about his own paintings: “The
image is not a thing. It is an act…” Later he was to say to
his friend the painter Peter de Francia, “A picture is not a
canvas on a wall, it is the impact that hits the bull’s eye of
your mind. If art was only a representation of the “here
and there” hanging on a nail decorative craft would do
it, but there is in man the need to re-act in the endless
web on which we interplay with the world.” 58
Matta’s paintings are dynamic, full of energy, in a
57. Ferrari p 182
58. “Coïgitum, Conversation with Peter de Francia”, Matta Coïgitum
Arts Council of Great Britain Hayward 1977
( 63 )

very particular manner. It is as though he is enacting
the image – it is happening as he paints. Gordon Onslow
Ford perceptively wrote that “Matta paints with
the same assurance [as] a child before he starts to
copy.” That is, before the child is taught to represent,
copy, things in the world. This seems to me to catch the
unusual character of Matta’s gestures in drawing and in
painting. They are a form of automatism, but of an unusual
kind in that they are also the semi-conscious narration
of an imaginary world, “a place beyond dreams,
for which there was no model, and which could only be
revealed through painting…” 59 Just as a child (before it
has learnt to copy) draws events that are brought into
being as he or she makes the marks, often accompanying
them with a verbal account of the imaginary events
happening on the paper, Matta shows things, tells the
image. As he said himself: “Je ne suis pas un peintre,
je suis un montreur.” This is not at all to say that his
paintings look child-like, but that the assurance with
which he paints, as Onslow Ford said, is.
One of the things that dazzled Breton, apart from the
colour of his paintings, was the limitless associative brilliance
that arose visually from Matta’s automatism and
59. Gordon Onslow-Ford “Notes on Matta and Painting (1937-1941)”
Ferrari p. 24
( 64 )

was matched by his talk. The young New York recruit to
surrealism, Charles Duits, described its fascinating but
disconcerting effect; Matta arrived one day while Duits
was visiting Breton, and they started talking about the
Apple. “This was Matta’s triumph. The Apple! It was the
key to every enigma, the number of revelation, the first
arcana in the universal Tarot, all the better for being edible,
it was the fruit from the abyss, alluded to by the
Gnostics.
Breton, slightly taken aback by these opening gambits,
searched for ideas. There was certainly the Apple in
the bible…The Apple in the bible! Matta jumped for joy.
And the Apple of the Hesperides, and the Apple of Discord
responsible for the Trojan War, and William Tell’s Apple,
Newton’s and Cezanne’s…Cut an apple in two, and what
do you find? The Apple We Know, a representation of
the female pudenda…History, legend, science, religion,
sociology, all the activity of mankind, were brought into
play. Breton’s occasional objections furnished proof of
something or other, but, heedless, Matta went on and on,
while the apple got larger.
The apple dilated to universal dimensions while the
universe became concentrated into this object one could
hold in one’s hand…
This was evidently what Breton loved and feared in
Matta, this power to simplify, this metaphorical energy
in which he recognised the principle of poetry, but in
( 65 )

some way sidetracked, utilised for ends alien to itself,
explicatory ends that Matta confused or pretended for
fun to confuse with those of poetry.” 60 In the 1942 painting
The Apples we Know the motif of the apple cut open
and resembling the female sex is repeated in the multiple
planes, in the linear manner that had marked a change
in his work.
Different conceptions of automatism were leading
in very different directions; even if at first sight Matta’s
paintings were “abstract” they were full of allusions and
metaphors that were alien to the New York painters like
Pollock and Motherwell. “With Motherwell especially I
had a terrific incompatibility of ideas. I was very much
in this Surrealist revolution, and he became more and
more a collage man... Then we moved to the country.
The war was becoming a ferocious thing. I couldn’t ignore
it any more. I began to feel ‘society’ in a new way,
for the first time” 61 Perhaps this new awareness of the
2nd world war which brought with it a feeling for ‘society’
was among the factors that propelled Matta’s paintings
towards the figurative, the quite dramatic surgence
of distinct, recognisable beings from c. 1944 which
thenceforth are summoned up to act in various contexts
from the futuristic to the political. “Matta broke with
60. Ferrari p. 237
61. Interview 1966 with Peter Busa, Ferrari p 250
( 66 )

the summarily named ‘non-figurative’ line which had
been generally ascribed to him, halted the stars in their
courses, reclosed the great geodes, snapped his whip to
bring the whirlwinds to heel around him, and gave up
spreading – lavishing, as he had done hitherto – the
music of the spheres.” 62 The figures, part idol, part robot,
with headdresses and masks, reveal themselves, as
Breton said, as “man”. In The Heart Players (1945) an
androgynous figure with outstretched arms and empty
hands resembles Giacometti’s Invisible Object, of which
Matta at the time owned the plaster. His new figuration
gave Matta the opportunity to express his strong political
views, as he pillories or satirizes totalitarian and
reactionary powers, as in Les Roses sont belles (1951),
with its rows of helmeted figures in a sinister setting.
Post-war, Matta became actively involved in the political
events of the 1960s, in France, Cuba and then
Chile, and although these were of little or no interest
to Duchamp, Matta’s belief in the power of the image
to affect an audience was nonetheless indebted to his
interpretation of Duchamp’s position.
The confidence and scale of Matta’s paintings is already
astonishing, presaging his huge canvases of the
1970s. It was some years before Pollock and Clyfford
62. Breton “Preliminaires sur Matta 2” 9-10 July 1947
( 67 )

Roberto Matta
Les Roses sont belles, 1951
Oil on canvas 201 x 281 cm 79.13 x 110.63 inches

Still regularly painted big pictures. Être avec, for example,
(1945) is mural-like at fifteen feet wide. 63 The desire
physically and actively to engage the spectator, to
eliminate the static encounter between the viewer and
a picture hanging on the wall, was carried through into
installations, such as that at the ICA in London in 1951,
where the twelve paintings were hung continuously like
a long mural. Matta held to the belief, formulated in his
essay on Duchamp, that the image is an act, not a thing.
“Art is a verb, more than an absolute; to art at full
voltage frightens most people, awareness of reality is for
them as dangerous as a live-wire (Rrose Sélavy).” 64
Dawn Adès
63. In 1977 three giant canvases were exhibited at Matta Coïgitum at the
Hayward Gallery in London: “rarely seen”, as Joanna Drew noted in her preface,
because few art galleries “can provide the space in which to show them”.
64. Conversation with Peter de Francia Matta Coïgitum, op cit. p. 4
( 69 )

“Yes. The first surrealist I met and the only one who
was close to my age was Matta. He was the most energetic,
enthusiastic, poetic, charming, brilliant young artist
that I’ve ever met. This would have been the spring
of 1941. We tend to forget, in thinking about this period,
that it was the end of the Depression. The war was
about to begin; it had already begun in Europe. Most
of the artists of my generation nearly had been on the
WPA, at $25 a week, or whatever it was. The WPA was
heavily socially oriented; and those few artists who were
attracted to modern art or abstract art had a rough time.
None had recognition. Most were poor, depressed, with
considerable feelings of hopelessness, but determined
nevertheless to carry on, in their respective aspirations.
For an enthusiastic person like Matta to appear –
this had an extremely important catalytic effect. (Matta
and I were both “foreigners” to the New York painting
scene. Matta came from a different world, while I, an
American, had never been forced to endure what my
colleagues had.)”
Robert Motherwell
Interview with Sidney Simon: “Concerning the Beginnings
of the New York School: 1939-1943” January 1967, pp. 158-159,
in Stephanie Terenzio (ed.): The Collected Writings of Robert
Motherwell, Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York 1992
( 71 )

Remembering Matta
– the first artist of infinite matter?
(or maybe just of “the infinite”)
It was the outstanding poet, writer, art critic and museum
curator Wieland Schmied (1929–2014) who first
personally introduced me to Matta. Wieland had been
working at the New National Gallery in Berlin in 1980.
With my colleagues and friends Christos M. Joachimides
and Nicholas Serota, I was then absorbed in researching
painters to include in the exhibition ‘A New Spirit in
Painting’, which was being organised at short notice at
the Royal Academy of Arts, London. It was to open on
15 January 1981. ‘A New Spirit’ featured 38 European
and North American painters – no women, which was
barely commented on at the time – whose work, as was
observed in the catalogue’s preface, was ‘full of expression
and devoid of mannerism’. This “spirit” was heralded
as a counter to the Minimalist art that was then
the principal current art making orthodoxy.
I’d always been aware of Matta’s work, but it was
Wieland who helped me recognise his singular genius
and who arranged for us to meet. Wieland himself was
an extraordinary figure: a poet, art historian and friend
( 73 )

of many European artists and poets of the avant-garde
of his generation, he was an outstanding scholar of Surrealism
and a particular expert, as well as friend, of the
still living Giorgio De Chirico. As a man of great culture
he knew a lot about the Neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920s
and was interested in post-war German and Austrian
literature. In 1974 he had organised an exhibition of
Matta at the Kestner-Gesellschaft Hannover. Much earlier
in 1939 André Breton had officially declared Matta
as the last ‘official Surrealist’. He was surely one of the
great painters of his time, a very complex individual
with an equally complicated relationship to the existing
art world – without doubt the reason he had been, and
still largely is, overlooked.
I have always been a great believer in the generational
continuity of artists at any moment in time. ‘A
New Spirit’ introduced many artists that we now take
for granted, but who, at the time, were barely known,
certainly in Great Britain and the United States, such
as Georg Baselitz, A.R.Penck, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar
Polke and Anselm Kiefer from Germany. Also included
were Mimmo Palladino and Sandro Chia who represented
the Italian so-called ‘Transavantguardia’. The
youngest artist in the exhibition was, in fact, Julian
Schnabel who was just then beginning to make waves
in New York. Our intention was to provide a bigger pic-
( 74 )

ture in order to make sense of an expressionistic and figurative
tendency among contemporary painters, while
also reframing an older generation, such as Balthus,
Francis Bacon, Jean Hélion and Willem de Kooning. Picasso,
who had been dead for a decade, was included in
the show with four of his last works of 1971 and ’72.
Although largely derided at the time, they now seemed
to anticipate brilliantly this ‘new expressionism’. Matta
himself was an essential component, even if not in fact
seriously regarded in the exhibition. However, as a living
artist who had migrated from his birthplace of Chile
to Europe and then from Europe on to North America
with the advent of the Second World War, he had been
and still was a vital bridge between the worlds of the
great Mexican Muralists, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism
into a vibrant present.
For ‘A New Spirit’ we hung Matta’s paintings next
to Sigmar Polke’s. Side by side, both artists’ works
revealed an extraordinary affinity in terms of their
extraterrestrial understanding of space. All painters,
in their different ways, are interested in space. For
Matta, however, this was not necessarily limited to
Earthly space, not, in other words, the spaces of an
artist that are the obsession of, say, David Hockney,
or even the once revolutionary inventions of Picasso’s
Cubism. Rather, Matta’s sense of space, was one that
( 75 )

seemed then and seems now, perhaps even more so, to
speak to, even more directly than Picasso’s Cubism,
the distorted space-time of Einstein and, later, the
gravitational field of the yet to be christened so-called
‘Black Hole’. Space, for Matta, meant space outside
this Earth – the interstellar. Breton, leader of the Surrealists,
as well as Le Corbusier, the architect of modernity,
for whom Matta briefly worked in the 1930s,
both quickly recognized his use of space as genuinely
revolutionary in its time – the moment he started to
paint as such in 1937/8.
This was because Matta did not regard the rectangular
frame of the painting as an open window, as
the fifteenth-century Italian architect and artist Leon
Battista Alberti, writing in his treatise on painting and
perspective, De Pictura, had instructed in 1435. Even
for Cubist painting this was still the fundament. Matta,
rather, regarded the rectangular frame of the canvas as
though it were but one facet of an infinite space into
which mankind could and should look – everything,
body and mind, was part of everything that was happening
around him in a perceived totality of the cosmos.
Like Alberti before him, who was, of course, an artist
and an architect, Matta had an extraordinary, even visionary,
scientific and poetic sensibility. His sense for
space was complex and forward looking.
( 76 )

Roberto Matta
La Banale de Venise, 1955
Oil on canvas 204.5 x 305.5 cm 80.51 x 120.28 inches

He was also a figurative painter but his figures
are like beings from another planet. Alien life forms.
However, he was not, as he has been negatively labelled,
a Sci-fi artist; he was rather an artist of a very
original even scientific and anticipatory imagination.
Painting’s unique quality is that it is able to describes
in pictorial form that which cannot easily be put into
words. After all, even scientists who are listening to
and looking at the universe are not literally seeing
or hearing but mediating their perceptions via representational
technologies. Matta’s paintings truly
visualise other worlds.
After our introduction by Wieland, I spent a lot of
time looking at art with and talking to Matta, who kept
a small but elegant house in Edward Square in London.
He was an extremely cultivated, intellectual man. He’d
already received an excellent architectural education
in Chile. He spoke fluent Spanish, French, English as
well as Italian. He was also extremely charismatic and
sociable, which meant that once he arrived in Paris in
1934 he quickly found himself in all the right circles
and as Breton wrote “he disposes of every charm” (Breton
Selected Writings 1978 p 229).
As I got to know him better so he revealed more
about his extraordinary life. Upon arrival in Europe,
( 78 )

in Paris he had worked for Le Corbusier. At that time,
he told me, there was little work so he would idle away
from the studio with the boss and his colleagues meeting
everyone from Picasso to Breton. One job he was
particular proud to have collaborated/assisted on was
the design and curation of the Spanish Pavilion at the
1937 Barcelona Exhintion, which featured Picasso’s
famous anti-war mural, Guernica, alongside works by
Julio González, Alexander Calder, Alberto Sánchez and
José Gutiérrez Solana. In fact, he told me that he had
helped Picasso in Paris cut out huge pieces of newspaper
which was the means by which the master designed
Guernica. Matta thus became Picasso’s assistant on this
defining masterpiece of its time – that must have been a
defining experience for him too.
Like many artist intellectuals of his generation, such
as for instance my late friend the German composer
Hans Werner Henze (1926–2012), Matta was committed
to Communist-Marxist ideas and, throughout his
life, often kept company with Fidel Castro. He would
tell me stories of how they would swim naked in the
Cuban ocean! He had also known Lorca back in the
1930s who, of course, was executed for his ideological
commitment at the time of the Spanish Civil War. For
Matta Communism was central to his sense of his own
personal history and politics.
( 79 )

Communism was Matta’s intellectual compass, but
there were other influences besides: he was also a Rabelaisian.
He adored and could quote at length the prose
of the French Renaissance humanist. What he loved
about Rabelais’ Pantaguel and Gargantua above all was
their delicious obscenities and carnival-like qualities A
kind of excess of losing yourself in excess, excrement
and ecstasy. I was only one of many who he encouraged
to read him. In the lineage of Rabelais, there was also
the dissident Surrealist Georges Bataille, who he was
friends with and titled paintings in homage to – L’Éros
Bataille, for example. He often also spoke of his admiration
for the searching mysticism of P.D. Ouspensky, a
Russian esoteric who travelled extensively in the East
and whose lectures in London in the 1920s and 30s
were attended by Aldous Huxley and T.S. Eliot.
As the title of his homage to Bataille suggests, he
loved linguistic puns based on (mis)translations between
languages, so in L’Éros Bataille the Surrealist’s
name is also intended to imply ‘battle’ – the battle for
Eros. If we triangulate Rabelais, Bataille and Ouspensky,
and perhaps place Freud in there somewhere, we get
the coordinates for a kind of grotesquery that tips into
the irrational: Matta loved thinking about the madness
of the irrationality of life within this crazy thing that is
referred to as the universe. Now, decades before these
( 80 )

things became common parlance, he translated the notion
of the mulitverse - he would surely have loved to
have conversed with Stephen Hawking - into his own
form of picture making with spectacular effect.
Like many of the Surrealists, he was interested in socalled
primitive art, or what the French now officially
call L’art premier. There is also a strong touch in his art
of Olmec and Toltec art, and MesoAmerican influences
in general, which was to inform his sense of texture
and palette. Today, looking at his early paintings, the
relation to Hieronymous Bosch also seems very evident
– while The Earth is a Man is perhaps a textual allusion
to The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503–1515)
both artists aside from the obvious excesses, display a
fascination with primary forms splitting and hatching
all manner of beings.
One of the artists he most clearly admired was Leonardo,
in particularly those visionary and diagrammatic
drawings he did of physical forces, as well as his mirrored
“secret” writing. Matta’s understanding of painting
as inherently alchemical as well as scientific is in
some ways akin to Kandinsky’s. We also can sense affinities
with the more abstracted floating architectural
cityscapes of Sant’Elia. Then there’s the post-human
scenography of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Matta’s
( 81 )

Futurism is not that of the more familiar Italian version
of Umberto Boccioni; it comes rather from the lineage of
Marcel Duchamp. Matta knew and respected Duchamp
not so much for the Readymade but rather his mystical
search for new dimensions as expressed in The Large
Glass – precisely the reason he painted an homage to it
later in 1943 titled The Bachelors Twenty Years After.
Duchamp may have been of an earlier generation and
he was inevitably an influence. While his anti-art is of a
different kind, there’s a sexual force buried within Matta
that is equally as perverse and extreme as Duchamp.
However, at the time of ‘A New Spirit’ Matta’s work
seemed like it no longer really fitted into the discourse.
It was regarded as being rather passé. In the 1940s and
‘50s he’d been collected and admired with maximum
seriousness in the United States but by the ‘70s and
‘80s there was little interest from a new generation –
something that William Rubin, writing in French was
to discuss in his essay for the great Pompidou. There
are many of interconnected reasons for this – above all
the advance of abstraction by the leading figures, in
the first instance of Abstract Expressionism that was to
define the centrality of the New York School.
In addition to his house in London, he had as his
major home a sprawling monastery near Tarquinia
( 82 )

in Central Italy where he did much work, as well as a
large maison behind the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Relatively
speaking, he had few friends in London – exceptions
were Joanna Drew, then Director of art at the Arts
Council and the painter Peter de Francia, himself a
Marxist, who taught at the Royal College of Art, where
Matta was temporarily Professor. In terms of contemporary
art at that time he now seemed far from the
New York centre of the discourse, even as he continued
to make extraordinary paintings that continued to be
appreciated in Europe – Italy and Spain especially – as
well as in Central and South America.
Because he also didn’t need to sell he also didn’t
look to sell – though when he did, he was fully aware of
the “value” of his art. As he became increasingly disillusioned
with what he saw as the skewing of certain art
historical narratives – including his own exclusion – to
suit the North American agenda of Clement Greenberg
and Leo Castelli – both great figures in different ways
in mediating the newly found hegemony of the New
York School from which he had almost self-consciously
distanced himself. it was his privilege that enabled
him to withdraw. In his slightly self-destructive way he
was very vocal about his antipathy to these new norms
– for him either devoid of “scientific” and existential
meaning or now with Pop art for him merely ironical-
( 83 )

ly celebratory of modern life By the late 1970s, after
the horrifying injustices of the Viet Nam war, Matta
became militantly anti-American, both in terms of art
and politics. One of his bête noire word was ‘Castelli’:
And Castelli for him was almost as bad as McCarthy,
the American anti-Communist par excellence. – both
causes for him of his now, as he perceived it, marginalization
from the cannon.
Castelli had, brilliantly of course, championed the
new American Pop. Matta particularly derided Pop Art
for its fetishising of advertising and the banalities of life
– all that Pepsi and Coca Cola – symbols of advanced
American capitalism – made himself, or so he said, sick.
If they do appear in his work it tends not to be as content
but punningly referred to in titles as social critique.
It is ironic that Clement Greenberg, the champion of the
new American Abstraction, dismissed Matta as a comic
book painter given that his major thesis on Kitsch
was not, as it has been characterised, merely elitist:
for Greenberg Kitsch advanced the causes of Fascism.
Even though Matta had an amazing sense of humour
and the absurd, he hated irony – he was almost incapable
of it, unlike Rauschenberg or Johns, indeed all the
Castelli artists of Pop. These Americans, unlike Matta,
had not experienced the rise of Fascism before the war
in the same way. Knowledge of the Holocaust had also
( 84 )

horrified Matta. This is one of the reasons intellectuals
of all fields were such supporters of Communism: It was
seen as the only possible bastion against Fascism. In a
more literal sense, North America had earlier embraced
him: in the wake of Fascism he fled Europe for New
York where he met many of the now far more famous
New York school painters, from Rothko to Still, Gorky
to Pollock. The aggressively anti-communist world of
McCarthy as he saw it had sent him away – he was of
course not an US citizen.
Long before Wieland introduced me to Matta, the
Royal Academy had mounted in 1978 a retrospective
exhibition of Robert Motherwell’s later paintings,
which the influential curator, Bryan Robertson, helped
me to stage. Robertson, earlier the great champion of
Abstract Expressionism in this country, subsequently
felt ‘A New Spirit’ betrayed the cause of American hegemony
by positing a return to figuration. Motherwell
had come to London for the opening. We spent time
together – there are photographs of us in the galleries
of the RA – and the subject of Matta arose. ‘The person
who turned us all on,’ Motherwell told me, ‘was Matta.’
‘He invented us all - it wasn’t Mondrian or Léger or
even Breton all of whom with many others were also
refugees in New York, but Matta – he, after all, was
fluent in English, unlike the others was a seriously live-
( 85 )

ly interlocutor. Motherwell famously talked of Matta
delivering a six-month intensive seminar on Surrealism
in six weeks. He would convene parties in various
lofts where the soon to become legendary but then still
provincially modernist artists would practice automatic
drawing with their eyes closed. Once, Matta did a small
portrait of myself and I recall vividly how he took two
pencils in one hand, examined me intently, closed his
eyes and whipped up a frenzied drawing in five seconds
that really did resemble me! As for Joseph Beuys
much later, for him art was essentially a form of visual
thinking. When he was in his studio he must have literally
entered into a trance, throughout his entire career
realizing seemingly self-generating images of amazing
spatial and linear elegance. Just before his death I visited
him in his studio in Paris, where there were – I think
six – vast extraordinary black dense charcoal drawings
on canvas – of astonishing spatial l power – that even
now stay in my mind as witness to his visions of the
universe he could magically summon.
Aside from the fact that it was Matta who introduced
Jackson Pollock to Peggy Guggenheim, paintings
such as Guardians of the Secret (1934) or even the famous
Mural (1943) wouldn’t have happened without
his presence in New York. Later Pollock’s defining drip
paintings’ complex layering of space have very clear af-
( 86 )

finities with Matta’s layered spaces. Arshile Gorky, the
Armenian painter who came to New York in 1920, had
been in essence an epigone copier – a perfectly reasonable
imitator of Picasso and later Matta with paintings
such as The Liver is the Cock’s Comb (1944). Like all
of Gorky’s later paintings they are highly dependent on
Matta’s visual language, even if in them in their fluidity
of execution Gorky did most certainly find a genuinely
beautiful free and tragic voice of his own.
Aside from in Chicago and to some degree in Florida,
he was and continues to be virtually unacknowledged
in North America. Many of his early paintings can be
found in collections in the Midwest. Chicago had a very
good relationship with Surrealism. American Surrealists
such as Joseph Cornell were focused in the world of
Chicago and there are echoes of Matta’s figuration even
in the imagists of the post-war period, such as H.C.
Westermann, Ed Paschke and the artists of The Hairy
Who. In 1985, William Rubin, Chief Curator of the Museum
of Modern Art and and a huge admirer of Matta,
whom he acknowledged as a true influence on himself
as well as on the New York school in general. By now
though he was arguably the most influential person in
modern art in New York, even more so than Clement
Greenberg. But he seems, nonetheless, to have been unable
to mount a Matta survey show at his own muse-
( 87 )

um, then still perceived as the high temple of modern
art. Instead it was to take place only in the Pompidou
Museum under its founding Director Dominique Bozo
who in close collaboration with Rubin who was to write
– but in French only of his understanding of Matta’s
continued significance as a great artist.
Later, perhaps a decade after ‘A New Spirit’, I introduced
Matta to a young and wildly ambitious artist
called Damien Hirst in his then famous Science restaurant
in Notting Hill. It seemed important that he
be known by younger artists. They seemed to get on
famously, perhaps because they were both social animals.
Hockney who also lived literally around the corner
when he was in London who has made his outstanding
career of painting based on literal observation
by the eye, was not interested in Matta. Hirst, like
Matta, however, has a secretive, complex, perhaps even
dark, side to him – a turn inwards that is simultaneously
a pushing outwards beyond the confines of seeming
and seeing actuality. Hirst’s Spot Paintings, which
he’d recently started working on at the time, might at
first sight seem banal and decorative but in reality they
are effective metaphors – like those of Matta - of the vibrating
particles that telescope between the micro and
the macro, urging us to reflect on the randomness of
the universe.
( 88 )

Matta, rather than talk of landscapes, referred to
his paintings as ‘inscapes’. This play of language links
Matta perhaps to the inward mysticism of Kandinsky,
which extends further back to the mystical worlds conjured
up Madame Blavatsky. On a compositional level,
a painting such as Kandinsky’s Composition V (1911)
is architecturally constructed. Matta was a painter,
he was a writer and he was, before anything else, an
architect and it was such that he always aggressively
escribed himself. Today, the scientists of Silicon Valley
often think of themselves as ‘architects’: in as much as
architecture is spatial and multi-sensory, Matta was indeed
a space explorer and architect avant la’lettre. If
properly presented, Matta could yet have a huge influence
on a contemporary art in that world of what was
once called new media and the web – i.e. the all-pervasive
network – which he constantly anticipates in all his
multi-dimensional paintings. His huge mural paintings
that can often extend up to 20 meters long, appear, like
Monet’s series ‘Water Lilies’, at one level as immersive
environments, enveloping fields. We peer into Monet’s
ponds and see an infinite micro-universe; we peer into
Matta’s paintings and it’s like looking into the endless
space of the cosmos through his mind’s eye. Today
knowledge of Matta’s work can help us make sense for
instance of the great surfing paintings of Julian Schnabel.
His monumental works speak to the jagged forms
( 89 )

of Richard Serra’s steel sculptures and equally the land
art of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. But in so many
senses, yet to be fully explored they go conceptually
and image-wise even further.
When I took Dawn Ades, the most noted historians
of Surrealism and the art of twentieth-century South
America, to lunch to discuss who could help get together
a book on Matta she said she would like to do it herself,
which is indeed a measure of Matta’s importance.
Bridging South America, Europe and North America,
he was the last of the Surrealists; certainly the artist
who pressed the button on the New York School. In
Matta there is perhaps at last the potential to rediscover
one of the greatest and most visionary artists of the
twentieth century.
Norman Rosenthal
London, 2018
( 90 )

Concept
Krystyna Gmurzynska, Mathias Rastorfer
Coordination
Alessandra Consonni
Essays by
Dawn Adès, Norman Rosenthal
Images
© association Atelier André Breton, www.andrebreton.fr
© John and Trude Schiff papers, courtesy Leo Baeck Institute
ISBN 978-3-905792-09-6
© galerie gmurzynska, 2018

Quotes:
“Still a young man, Matta is the most profound painter of his
generation.”
Marcel Duchamp: Matta, in: Collection of the Société Anonyme:
Museum of Modern Art 1920, Yale University Art Gallery, New
Haven 1944, p. 91–92.
“Duchamp has found the key whereby to liberate the images from
their common meaning and to represent the object by an image
which is pliable to the mechanism of sight and expands the consciousness.
He has broken the association between the object and
the onlooker, and in breaking down these limitations, frees the
spirit of man.”
Katherine S. Dreier and Matta Echaurren: Duchamp’s Glass: La
Mariée mise à nu par ses Célibataires, même...: An Analytical Reflection,
in: Entretiens Morphologiques: Notebook N° 1, 1936–1944
[Matta Notebooks 1], p. 182–183.
Originally published by Société Anonyme / Museum of Modern Art,
New York 1944.
“Matta became the only painter after Duchamp to explore wholly
new possibilities in illusionistic space”
William S. Rubin, Curator and Director of the painting and sculpture
department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from
1968 to 1988.
Dada & Surrealist Art, Abrams, New York 1985