Roberto Matta, the Surrealist Who Painted the Mind

Feature image: Roberto Matta, Untitled (Psychological Morphology) (detail), 1939, © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris via Art Institute of Chicago

Roberto Matta was born Roberto Antonio Sebastián Matta Echaurren in Santiago, Chile, on 11 November 1911, into a family of Spanish, Basque, and French descent. He studied architecture and interior design at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. His route from Santiago to Paris is recorded inconsistently. The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza places his move to Paris in 1931, the Praemium Imperiale gives 1933, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection dates his apprenticeship with Le Corbusier to 1934. All agree that he spent the mid-1930s drafting in Le Corbusier's studio on the rue de Sèvres.

In 1934, Matta traveled to Spain, where he met the poet Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí, and he passed through Scandinavia to see Alvar Aalto's work and through London, where he worked briefly alongside Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy. In 1937, he collaborated with Josep Lluís Sert and Luis Lacasa on the Spanish Republic's pavilion for the Paris Exposition Internationale. That same year he met André Breton, left Le Corbusier's studio, and gave up architecture for painting.

Breton welcomed Matta into the Surrealist circle, and his drawings soon appeared in Minotaure and in the group's Paris exhibitions. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection dates his first Surrealist exhibition to 1937, while the Museo Thyssen dates it to the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme of 1938. In 1938, while staying in Trévignon, Brittany, he made his first oil paintings, a series he called psychological morphologies and later inscapes. According to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Matta defined a psychological morphology as a graphic record of an idea before optical images give it shape, and he set the method against Dalí's paranoiac-critical technique, which distorts recognizable images. Breton came to regard the series as a model of pure psychic automatism. Roberto Matta's Psychological Morphology (1939), which entered the Reina Sofía's collection in 1999, is one of the canvases from that first series.

When war broke out in September 1939, Matta left Europe for New York, where he joined the other Surrealists in exile, among them Breton, Max Ernst, André Masson, and Yves Tanguy. The Julien Levy Gallery gave him his first solo exhibition of paintings in 1940. In the spring and summer of 1941, he traveled to Mexico with the young Robert Motherwell, meeting him daily in Taxco. The historian Irving Sandler wrote that over those three months Matta gave Motherwell "a ten-year education in Surrealism," and the Museo Thyssen notes that Matta's own canvases grew larger after he saw the Mexican muralists. Roberto Matta's Listen to Living (1941) dates from that year, and the Museum of Modern Art acquired it through its Inter-American Fund.

Back in New York, Matta tried to organize the city's younger painters around automatism. He first recruited Esteban Francés, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Motherwell, then asked William Baziotes for names from the Federal Art Project. Baziotes suggested Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Peter Busa, and Gerome Kamrowski. De Kooning declined, and Pollock liked the idea but refused to join a group, so Matta dropped the project. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection credits his painting with anticipating Abstract Expressionism's innovations and influencing Arshile Gorky and Motherwell. Roberto Matta's Untitled (1941), a graphite and colored crayon drawing now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dates to the same year as the Mexico trip. In 1942, the Pierre Matisse Gallery included him in Artists in Exile. 

In 1944, Matta met Marcel Duchamp, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection dates a turn toward mechanical forms and cinematic effects to that encounter. The Museum of Modern Art calls Roberto Matta's The Vertigo of Eros (1944) an inscape, one of a series of imaginary landscapes projected from the artist's psyche. The museum's label also notes that its French title, Le Vertige d'Eros, is a pun.

Roberto Matta's Xpace and the Ego (1945) is one of three major canvases he painted between 1944 and 1945, and it was shown at Pierre Matisse's New York gallery in March 1945. The Centre Pompidou, which bought it in 1983, describes a human figure confronting natural, moral, and political disasters, built from looping lines, drips, and the marks of a brush or rag on a canvas more than four and a half meters wide. The art historian William Rubin called Matta's paintings of these years "the only major artistic statement made by a new adherent to surrealism during its final phase."

Roberto Matta's Being With (1946) belongs to his last New York years. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes a maze of buildings seen from several angles, crowded with twisted figures, and groups it with the social morphologies of the mid to late 1940s, which it connects to his distress over a world devastated by the Second World War. The same years ended in scandal. Matta was having an affair with Agnes Magruder, Gorky's wife, and in 1948 Gorky took his own life. Breton expelled Matta from the Surrealist group for what was reported as moral turpitude, alongside Victor Brauner, and Matta left New York for Europe. Most sources date the expulsion to 1948, and the Praemium Imperiale gives 1947.

Matta settled in Rome in 1953 and spent the rest of his life between Italy and France. In 1949 he began developing what he called the open cube, a pictorial space that later framed his large cycles. In 1956 he painted a mural for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, and in 1957 the Museum of Modern Art gave him his first retrospective, which traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. His painting turned openly political in the same years. 

The Question (1957) was made in homage to Henri Alleg, the journalist tortured by French paratroopers in Algeria, whose account of the ordeal, La Question, was banned in France in March 1958. Matta reconciled with Breton around 1958, and Art in America dates his rehabilitation among the Surrealists to 1959. That year Pontus Hultén organized his retrospective at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and Matta described his aim in a line that turns on a French pun. "A structure of facts is a trompe l'œil," he said. "What I am looking for is rather a trompe l'être," a deception of being instead of the eye.

The 1960s carried his work further into politics. He made his first visit to Cuba in 1963. Roberto Matta's Burn, Baby, Burn (1965-66), nearly ten meters wide, takes its title from the rallying cry of the 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which acquired it in 2009, links the painting to his disillusionment with the wars in Algeria and Vietnam and compares it to Pablo Picasso's Guernica, a painting Matta admired.

Roberto Matta's Where Madness Dwells A. (1966) is one of the five canvases of the cycle The Dazzling Outcast, and it hangs today in the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. According to the museum, the cycle casts the artist as a dazzling outcast who unsettles viewers into awareness, and its imagery recalls a fetus's view of the womb. The cycle debuted at the Galerie Alexandre Iolas in Paris in 1966, where canvases A and B hung from the ceiling, forming a box with the three works on the walls. In May 1968, the twenty-one canvases of his cycle The Space of the Species, then on view at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, were moved to the Nord-Aviation factory for its striking workers. He took French nationality in 1969.

Matta celebrated Salvador Allende's election in September 1970 and lived in Chile during his government. During those years, he painted a mural measuring four by twenty-four meters, The First Goal of the Chilean People. After the 1973 coup, the military regime covered it with sixteen coats of paint. People rediscovered it in 2005, restored it in 2008, and it now hangs in the town hall of La Granja, outside Santiago.

Honors followed in his last decades. In 1990, Chile awarded him its National Prize for Art, along with a retrospective at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago; in 1995, the Japan Art Association gave him the Praemium Imperiale for painting. Roberto Matta's How a Consciousness Becomes a Universe (Perhaps) (1992), an oil on canvas just over three meters high and more than four and a half meters wide, dates from those years, when he divided his time between Paris and Tarquinia, north of Rome. Pace Gallery describes Matta as fascinated by the universe's fluctuating energy and as rejecting the notion of a single vantage point.

Matta died on 23 November 2002 in Civitavecchia, near Rome, at the age of 91. His children carried the work in new directions. His son Gordon Matta-Clark, who studied architecture at Cornell University, became known in the 1970s for cutting through abandoned buildings, in works such as Conical Intersect (1975) and Day's End (1975). Three of his children, Ramuntcho Matta, Federica Matta, and Pablo Echaurren, became artists; Ramuntcho also became a musician, and Echaurren a writer. The inscapes Matta began in Brittany in 1938 now hang at MoMA, the Pompidou, and the Art Institute of Chicago, recording the moment Surrealism's search for the unconscious crossed the Atlantic and became the starting point for a new American painting.

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