November 25, 2002
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren, known as Matta, whose sometimes
nightmarish,
hallucinatory
paintings made him a premier Surrealist
and major artist of the mid-20th century, died on Saturday in Tarquinia,
Italy. He was 90 or 91.
In later years he split his time among Paris, London, Milan and Tarquinia. Born
in Chile, he spent much of his life in France and, beginning in 1939, nearly
a decade in the United States, where he influenced the development of the New
York School. The French saw him as a central member and the last great survivor
of the circle around André
Breton. His reputation in Europe and
South America was always greater than it was in the United States.
Like Breton and other Surrealists, Matta embraced the idea of automatic
drawing, or working as spontaneously as possible and as much as possible
without forethought, which was purported to be a way of tapping the unconscious.
He described his own paintings as "the subconscious in its burning, liquid
state; a conscious daytime substitution of the phenomenon of dreams."His
early Surrealist works, from the late 1930's and early 40's, were meant to suggest
primordial upheaval: he painted gelatinous landscapes and cosmic spaces filled
with eerie organic shapes in off-key, fluorescent
colors.
After World War II, these sorts of images gave way to a different but no less
fantastical variety: he populated canvases with robotic, mutant creatures that
sometimes seemed to be responses to the war. Painting figures when abstraction
was increasingly in vogue drew criticism in the United States, but he said the
figures were necessary to express man's inhumanity to man. "He sought to
send a message to other artists to inspire them also to deal directly with these
kinds of difficult issues," Elizabeth Smith, a curator of a recent Matta
retrospective, said.
Matta, an articulate, energetic, famously difficult man, gave his birth date
as 11/11/11, although it was also said that he was born in 1912. He came from
a prestigious family of Basque origin that included diplomats and a former president.
He rebelled against his strict Roman Catholic upbringing once he became a student
at Universidad Católica in Santiago,
studying with Hernán
Gazmuri, a painter whose anticlerical
beliefs deeply affected Matta.
In 1935 he left Chile for Paris, where so many ambitious young artists went
to make their careers. For a while he worked in the architectural studio of
Le Corbusier.
He also traveled, and at his aunt's house in Madrid he met the poets Federico
García Lorca and Pablo
Neruda. García Lorca's assassination in the Spanish
Civil War greatly disturbed Matta, and he responded by composing a fantastical
film script (no film was ever produced) that announced his leftist sensibilities.
Later, during the 60's, Matta became an ardent, outspoken supporter of Chile's
Socialist president, Salvador
Allende Gossens; when the dictator Augusto
Pinochet took charge of the country, Matta became persona non grata there.
He learned that Pinochet had put him on a "hit list" and for a while
surrounded himself with bodyguards. It was then that he decided to become a
French citizen.
He had been blacklisted as a communist in the United States during the 1950's,
and although that did not prevent him from visiting the country, he had difficulty
obtaining an entry visa as late as the 1980's.
It was through a letter of introduction from García Lorca that Matta
met Salvador
Dali and Breton in Paris and joined the group of Surrealists. Breton liked
his drawings — Matta was a refined and elegant draftsman with a gift for
imaginary architecture — and invited him to exhibit with the group. In
1939, like Breton and others, he moved with his wife to New York City, into
a community of expatriates.
He was one of the only Surrealists who spoke English, so he especially helped
to translate Surrealist ideas to American artists. During the next decade Matta
made a big impact on, and even instructed, some of the painters who became associated
with Abstract Expressionism, including Pollock,
Rothko, William
Baziotes, Robert
Motherwell and especially Arshile
Gorky.
But Matta never felt entirely at home in the United States, partly because his
work, after he began to paint figures, moved in one direction while American
art began to move in another, and so in 1948 he returned to Paris. Notoriously
fickle, the Surrealists around Breton spurned him at first, accusing him of
causing Gorky's suicide because Matta
had had an affair with Gorky's wife. He was reinstated to the Surrealist ranks
only in 1959, by which time the movement had pretty much run its course.
It is sometimes said that after Matta left New York, he recycled his earlier
art and turned out pictures to satisfy the market, but
this was not fair. During the late 70's and early 80's, he explored fresh
themes in large paintings, often with a lighter, more varied palette than before.
His later works were rarely exhibited in American museums, however, and it was
his art of the late 30's through the 50's that continued to be best known in
the United States. Matta retrospectives were held at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York in 1957 and the Pompidou
Center in Paris in 1985, and recently a show of his work of the 1940's traveled
around the United States.
About his early paintings, Duchamp
once 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. Martica
Salwin, the Matta expert, described inscapes as "visualizing the psyche,
which means not just looking at one thing in one time, one point of time and
space." Inscapes encompassed, she said, "the past, present and future
all mixed into one."
In his private life a notorious
womanizer and (some relatives say) erratic
father, Matta left an unusually complicated personal legacy. With his first
wife, Anne Alpert, he had twin sons in 1943, both of whom became artists: Sebastian,
who died in 1977, and Gordon Matta-Clark, who died in 1978. Matta's second wife,
Patricia, married the dealer Pierre Matisse after divorcing Matta and died in
the early 1950's. With Angela Faranda he had a son, Pablo Echaurren, an artist
in Italy. With Malitte Pope he had a daughter in 1955, Federica Matta, also
an artist, and a son in 1960, Ramuntcho, a musician and record producer; they
live in Paris. He is also survived by his wife, Germana Ferrari Matta, and their
daughter, Alisée, born in 1970.
Germana Ferrari
Matta has been preparing the complete catalog of Matta's work, only the first
volume of which has been published.
Art, Matta once said, is necessary for everyone because it "awakes in you
and shakes in you energies that otherwise might transform themselves into violence
and could be very dangerous." True art is the imagination unfettered, he
believed. "You may need this imagination," he added, "at the
critical moments in your life."
Copyright
2002 New York Times Company (Registration required)
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