Matta-Duchamp

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-
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