Matta-Duchamp

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
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