Matta-Duchamp

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
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