Matta-Duchamp

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 )