Matta (1911-2002)

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Phillip Johnson and Associates, New York
The Seagram Collection, New York
Sale: Christie's, New York, Latin American Sale, May 28, 2003, lot 21, illustrated in color

New York, The Pierre Matisse Gallery, Roberto Matta Echaurren: Paintings and Oil Pencils, March 31-April 21, 1942,  no. 10
Waltham, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Matta: The First Decades, May 9-June 20, 1982, n.n.
Washington D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Crosscurrents of Modernism: Four Latin American Pioneers, June 10-September 7, 1992, no. 84, p. 263, illustrated in color
Roslyn Harbor, The Nassau County Museum of Art, Latin Viewpoints: Into the Mainstream, August 17-November 3, 1996, p. 57, illustrated in color
New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, Pierre Matisse and His Artists, February 14-May 19, 2002, no. 39, p. 103, illustrated in color 

 

Germana Ferrari-Matta, Matta: Entretiens Morphologiques Notebook Nº 1 - 1936-1944, London, 1987, p. 115, illustrated

(This condition report has been provided courtesy of Simon Parkes Conservation, Inc.) This picture is in beautiful condition. There is essentially only one retouch which addresses a small paint loss in the upper left hand quadrant. The abrasions to some of the small areas of the picture are intentional and have been created by the artist. The paint layer is stable and the picture should be hung as is.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Matta Echaurren's Endless Nudes

Endless Nudes, a rare early work by Chilean-born Matta Echaurren, was exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in April 1942 in a one person show that caused ripples of excitement because of the new and unorthodox approach to painting it announced.   Matta, the youngest member of the Paris-based Surrealist group, had arrived in the United States with his American wife Anne in November 1939 after the outbreak of war in Europe.  Within a few months his work had been shown at the New School and at the Julian Levy Gallery which distributed a broadside purporting to present a "debate in art circles" over the controversial artist. Art News critic Rosamund Frost singled him out in a group show as "the young man people are keeping an eye on," and his presence in New York was noted by collector and future dealer, Sidney Janis, in his 1941 article, "The School of Paris comes to New York."[i]  Calling him "an irrepressible young artist of talent and temperament" Janis described his work as "X-rayographs in which his inner perceptions register as a slow dissolve." 
The impact of Matta's 1942 exhibition at Pierre Matisse has reverberated through the years in part because it signaled a new artistic direction and a maturation of the artist's style. The fact that many of the paintings that hung on the gallery walls now hang in prominent museums testifies to the historic significance of the works shown.  Among them were The Earth is a Man (Chicago Art Institute), Invasion of the Night (San Francisco Museum), Years of Fear (Guggenheim Museum) and Here Sir Fire Eat (Museum of Modern Art), all painted in 1941 or early 1942. Rosamund Frost reviewed the show at Matisse as follows:

 "Imagine a white hot furnace.  Imagine the breaking down and reconverting of the essential substances of the world.  Imagine these substances rendered explosively, powerfully reacting on but not modifying each other.  Imagine a painter of thirty who has invented an idiom so outside the run of experience that this seems the only line along which to approach his work."[ii]
This was not the language of art reviews of the day, but these were paintings for which there were no ready terms in a period dominated by social realism and cubist-derived abstraction. Clearly, as viewers confronted the undulating transparent layers and unearthly color of Endless Nudes, there was an awareness that a new and exciting vision was being put forth in an innovative pictorial language. Although Matta was identified with the exiled Surrealists who had regrouped in New York, his vision did not conform to the general conception of surrealist art.  Indeed he already had formulated his own objectives when he became the movement's youngest recruit in Paris in 1938.  "Psychological Morphology" was the term he invented for his attempt to visualize the psyche in a constant state of transformation.  He explained it to Surrealist leader Andre Breton as follows: "I call psychological morphology the graphic mark of the transformations resulting from the emission of energies and their absorption in the object from its first appearance to its final form in the geodesical psychological milieu."[iii]   In later years he explained that what he had been trying to show at the time was "human energy as a system in expansion in the cosmos," or what his close friend from early years, Gordon Onslow Ford, described as a fusion of inner and outer worlds. 
Having moved sideways into painting from architecture Matta was not encumbered by academic training and approached painting in an unorthodox way to produce previously unseen effects.  According to Onslow Ford, he dabbed pigment on the canvas with his fingers and then used a sponge or turpentine soaked cloth to spread the paint in thin layers, then wiped off the excess and in places scraped small areas with a palette knife.[iv] This explains why we see no mark of a brush nor any trace of the artist's hand in Endless Nudes. Instead  there is an all-over swelling and heaving motion of the diaphanous layers which occasionally part to allow jewel-like bits of denser pigment to show through like glimpses of the earth's interior fires. 
A crucial experience underlying  Endless Nudes and other paintings of 1941-42 was a trip Matta made to Mexico in the summer of 1941 with his wife Anne and a young American painter, Robert Motherwell.  Matta's native Chile is a land of geysers and volcanoes and the city of his boyhood, Santiago, lies on a geological fault.  He must have felt some reverberation of this early environment in the volcanic Mexican landscape as the ensuing paintings are filled with evocations of volcanic eruptions. He later recollected "My work began to take the form of volcanoes.  I saw everything in flames, but from a metaphysical point of view.  I was speaking from beyond the volcano.  The light was not a surface, but an interior fire...I painted that which burned in me and the best image of my body was the volcano."[v]  The conflating of human body and landscape, explicit in the title The Earth is a Man, casts light also on the theme of Endless Nudes, a painting in which bodies and landscape are fused and volcanic eruption and ejaculation can be seen as one and the same. There are no identifying details, but the horizontal axis of the composition and its division into light and dark sections that mirror earth / sky separations imply landscape, while the undulating voluptuous curves and vague suggestions of bent limbs might be construed as bodies.  Carried further, the dark / light divisions might be seen as male and female, united by the central black vertical.
An early influence on Matta was P.D. Ouspensky's Tertium Organum, in which the writer refers to "The great transparent reality that surrounds us every day."  It can be argued that Matta's ultimate aim was to render this transparency, to go beyond what Ouspensky called "the prison house of sight" in order to reveal a fundamental interconnectedness transcending time and space.  In meeting this challenge there were few helpful precedents in painting , but there was at the time one accessible artwork that may have provided some clues, or at least inspiration, namely Thomas Wilfred's Clavilux.  James Thrall Soby, a MoMA curator (1943-49) and a collector who bought several Mattas, mentioned the artist's fascination with Wilfred's color organ which was installed in its own space, the Art Institute of Light, in the Grand Central Palace, where public Lumia recitals were given weekly from 1933 to 1943.[vi]  Looking at the dematerialized scrims of color in a Matta painting of this time was not unlike watching the screen of one of Wilfred's consoles across which colors drifted in an ever-changing interplay. However, while Wilfred thought of himself as composing with color, Matta had then, as he continued to have for the rest of his life, the underlying motive of  showing the interrelatedness of all phenomena in an ever-changing cosmos.
Some of New York's younger artists were attracted by Matta's contagious enthusiasm and a small group that included William Baziotes, Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock met in his studio during the winter of 1942 to experiment with various modes of spontaneous creation including automatism.  The sessions did not last long since the Americans were less interested in the visionary aspects of Matta's work than in finding new modes of plastic invention.  However in a 1967 interview Motherwell said that it had always seemed to him that these sessions were the beginnings of what became known as Abstract Expressionism.[vii]  William Rubin, who curated a Matta exhibition at MoMA in 1957 wrote: "During the war years Matta's art provided a model for younger Americans who were seeking a new myth...some of them admired above all the freedom of his compositions from the vestiges of cubist underpinning."[viii]
Certainly  Endless Nudes and other Matta paintings of 1941-42  marked a breakthrough in the all-over activation of the picture plane, in the eliding of one form into another, and in freedom from stylistic and pictorial programs, all eventually to become hallmarks of Abstract Expressionism.  But by the time Abstract Expressionism emerged as a new artistic development, Matta's work had taken a startlingly different turn and the artist himself had returned to Europe.
Quite apart from its historical significance the wonder of Endless Nudes lies in its on-going capacity to seduce the eye and to keep it traveling over the upheavals of  the ambiguous spaces, seeking to penetrate the diaphanous veils of color. The interplay of cool greys, astringent yellow, viridian green, and luminous drifts of white generates a ceaseless motion while flashes of pink, red and rose madder draw the attention to fixed points that serve as punctuation in the overall flux.   With this painting Matta freed himself from his more literal attempts to move beyond "the prison house of sight" and opened new horizons for his own art and that of others.

Critic and art historian Martica Sawin has published a number of essays on Matta who also figures significantly in her book, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (MIT Press, 1995)

[i] Decision  2, no. 5-6 (November-December, 1941.

[ii] "Matta Furious Scientist," Art News 41(April 15-30, 1942), p. 27.

[iii] This definition of psychological morphology is excerpted from a typescript of Matta's original French statement provided to the author by Gordon Onslow Ford together with his English translation.

[iv] Ramuntcho Matta confirms that his father told him this was the way the early works were painted.  He also mentioned that transparent effects were obtained using a thin wash of white.

[v] Germana Ferrari, Matta: Entretiens Morphologiques, Notebook No. 1, 1936-1944 (London: Sistan, 1987), p. 108.

[vi] "Matta Echaurren," Magazine of Art 40 (March 1947), 102-106.  Soby knew Matta and purchased his Rain, 1940, and Here Sir Fire Eat, 1942.  For more about Thomas Wilfred, see Michael Betancourt, Thomas Wilfred's Clavilux, Borgo Press, 2006.

[vii] Sidney Simon, "Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School: interview with Robert Motherwell," Art International (summer 1967).

[viii] William Rubin, "Matta aux Etats Unis: une note personnelle," in Matta,  Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985.