• Roberto Matta (1911-2002) – by Valery Oisteanu

    Date posted: April 27, 2006 Author: jolanta
    Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Echaurren, known as Matta, whose hallucinatory paintings made him a major surrealist, died on Saturday November 23, 2002 in Tarquinia, Italy.

    Roberto Matta (1911-2002)

    by Valery Oisteanu

    Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Echaurren, known as Matta, whose hallucinatory paintings made him a major surrealist, died on Saturday November 23, 2002 in Tarquinia, Italy. He was 91years old.

    Matta was born 11/11/11 in Santiago de Chile of European descent (Spanish and Basque). He began to write at age 3. He recorded his life in a sketchbook, calling it his "Auto-elasto-infra-biography." Here is a passage from it: "1914-1918, Memory of the lights of Valparaiso at night, a giant tortoise I ride upon, my black dog Siki. Memory of traveling to Europe with my parents, dressed like an angel, wearing glass slippers at a children’s party, learning to swim in the Pacific Ocean at a temperature of 12 degrees c. at Vina del Mar…."

    He studies architecture at the fine art department of Catholic University in Santiago and receiveed his diploma in 1931. Finally, in 1934, he cuts his "umbilical cord" from his family, Jesuits and Chile and went to Paris where he was interested in new architecture. While working for Le Corbusier, he met with Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and also Duchamp, Magritte and Moore. He traveled extensively, and at his aunt’s house in Madrid he met Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda and Salvador Dali. Garcia Lorca’s assassination in the Spanish Civil War greatly disturbed Matta, and he responded by composing a fantastical film script that revealed his leftist sensibilities. His great revelation though, while working at the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1937, was "Guernica" by Picasso. He decided then to devote himself entirely to art.

    Matta’s showed his first drawings to his friend, Gordon Onslow-Ford, and inspired the latter to follow in his footstep artistically. He met Andre Breton the same year, through Salvador Dali, and was soon brought into the surrealist group. The year 1938 found him at the Cafe Deux Magots where the surrealists gave him affection and educated him in the verb "to be." Breton bought his first two drawings, and his first completed oil painting was reproduced in the legendary magazine Minotaure.

    Soon after the induction, Matta left for the United States on the same boat as Yves Tanguy, settling in New York for almost a decade. He was repeatedly exhibited during his stay in the New World and became a natural ambassador for surrealism. He was one of the only surrealists who spoke English, so he in particular helped to translate surrealist ideas to American artists. During the next decade Matta instructed and influenced some of the painters who became associated with abstract expressionism, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, and especially Arshile Gorky.

    Matta’s first exhibitions in Manhattan were at the Julien Levy Gallery. He was a prolific painter whose art explored new boundaries of light and imagination. Matta called his paintings of the 1940s "psychological morphologies" to describe his large abstract canvases, full of semi-abstract shapes floating in a gaseous space the kind of cosmic landscapes that the painter likened to the vision gained by shutting eyes tight against the light.

    About Matta’s early artwork Duchamp wrote, "His first contribution to surrealist painting, and the most important, was the discovery of regions of space until then unknown in the field of art." Matta talked about "inscapes, morphologies of the psyche, maps of the mind." Inscapes encompassed the past, present and future all mixed into one. Matta’s images of cosmic creation were true to surrealist ideals, although his imaginative use of color and sense of humor made his work difficult to classify. The poet and surrealist Patrick Waldberg, once wrote: "And finally, there was Matta … whose equal surrealism was never to find again."

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