Matta-Duchamp

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
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