Roberto Matta was a Chilean painter known for his unique blending of Surrealism with Abstract Expressionism. He was an international figure whose worldview represented a synthesis of European, American, and Latin American cultures.
Matta's long and prolific career was defined by a strong social conscience and an intense exploration of his internal and external worlds.
Background
Roberto Matta was born on November 11, 1911 in Santiago, Chile. The son of a Chilean father, Roberto Matta Tagle, and a Spanish mother, Mercedes Echaurren Herboso. He also had two brothers, Mario Matta Echaurren and Sergio Matta Echaurren.
Matta grew up in an upper middle-class family. His mother was well read and highly cultured, fostering Matta's interest in art, literature, and languages.
Education
Roberto Matta received a classical, Jesuit education at the Sacre Coeur Jesuit College. Then he studied architecture and interior design at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago and graduated in 1932.
In his final year of school, Matta devised an ambitious architectural project called the "League of Religions". Signalling an early interest in both biomorphism and fantastical spaces, his building designs were modeled after suggestively posed female bodies. Not long after this project, Matta left behind his privileged upbringing and conservative education to join the Merchant Marines. He settled in Paris, France, in 1935, becoming an apprentice in modernist architect Le Corbusier's studio.
Career
Roberto Matta stayed on to work with Le Corbusier in Paris from 1935 till 1937. During this time, Matta established close friendships with several members of the Latin American literary avant-garde. His relationships with Frederico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and Gabriela Mistral proved particularly influential. It was through Lorca that Matta was introduced to Surrealist artist Salvador Dali. Dali, in turn, encouraged the young artist to show some of his drawings to André Breton. Sensing an emerging talent and common spirit, Breton bought several of Matta's drawings and invited him to officially join the Surrealist group in 1937.
The same year, Matta worked with the architects designing the Spanish Republican pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition. Here, Matta saw Pablo Picasso's seminal work "Guernica" (1937). The work's mixture of formal abstraction and social consciousness had a lasting impact on the development of Matta's own personal style and artistic practice. Equally as influential was Marcel Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her bachelors, Even" (1915-1923), which Matta also encountered around this time. Matta transitioned from drawing to oil painting in 1938, while working in the Unitede Kingdom with the British artist Gordon Onslow Ford.
Matta was well established within the Surrealist group by the time that he was forced to flee Europe for America in the fall of 1939. When Matta arrived in New York City, he was the youngest and most outgoing of Surrealist emigres. These traits, combined with a shared interest in automatist art-making techniques, allowed Matta to quickly form relationships with several of the young New York School artists.
In 1940, Matta held his first solo exhibition in New York at Julien Levy Gallery. In 1941, he created his famous painting "Invasion of the Night". It gave an insight into his future works. In 1942, his works were displayed in ‘Artist in Exile’, an exhibition held at the Pierre Matisse Gallery.
Throughout the first half of the 1940s, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, William Baziotes, Peter Busa, Robert Motherwell, and others met frequently with Matta to learn about his personal ideas about Surrealism.
In the mid-1940s, Matta's work changed dramatically. Responding to the continuing horrors of the Second World War, Matta expanded his artistic interests beyond his exploration of the subconscious mind. Many of Matta's paintings from this period incorporate strangely menacing, machine-like contraptions and totemic human forms.
He enjoyed increased professional and creative success in the mid-1940s. Yet, his new use of figuration and narrative created a significant intellectual rift with both the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists.
Matta's life was further thrown into chaos in 1948, when his close friend, Arshile Gorky, committed suicide. Many in the New York Surrealist circle blamed Matta, who had been having an affair with Gorky's estranged wife. Breton publicly expelled Matta from the Surrealist group.
Ostracized by the artistic community in New York, Matta returned to Europe in 1948. He moved first to Italy, and then, beginning in 1955, kept residences in both Paris and Rome. The Surrealists eventually invited Matta to rejoin their group in 1959. He declined their offer, preferring instead to continue his artistic explorations on his own.
Matta traveled widely throughout Europe, Latin America, and Africa during the 1950s and 1960s. His paintings also became more narrative in the 1950s. They frequently featured totemic figures set within multi-planar environments filled with strange, science-fiction-like machines.
Beginning in the 1960s, Matta dedicated himself to political and social issues in Latin America. During this time, Matta also traveled multiple times to Chile.
He found great professional and spiritual fulfillment in his home nation until the rise of Pinochet's military dictatorship in 1973. Perhaps the zenith of Matta's engagement with Latin American cultural themes was his group of works produced in 1983, titled "El Mediterano y el Verbo Americas".
Matta was the subject of several significant exhibitions in the later half of his career. Most notably, he received retrospective shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1957, the National Gallery in Berlin in 1970, and the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1985. During these years, Matta broadened the scope of his artistic practice. He began adding clay to some of his paintings in the early 1960s, and over the next thirty years experimented extensively with printmaking, tapestry, ceramics, furniture making, and sculpture. Many of Matta's works from his final decades exhibit a lightening of tone and color, and a turn towards more timeless, mythological, and mystical subject matter.
In his last years, Matta split his time between France, England, and Italy, where he operated a studio, gallery, and pottery school. He continued to travel, work, and engage with contemporary political concerns until his death on November 23, 2002 in Civitavecchia, Italy. On his death, a three day national mourning was declared in Chile.
Matta grew up in a strictly Catholic, upper middle-class home.
Politics
During the 1950s and 1960s, Matta became more politically and socially engaged. Much of his work during the next two decades was created in explicit response to contemporary events like the Civil Rights movement and the wars in Vietnam and Algeria.
Beginning in the 1960s, Matta dedicated himself to political and social issues in Latin America. During this time, Matta also traveled multiple times to Chile. He strongly supported Salvador Allende's Socialist government, and the newly elected president even invited Matta to be Chile's cultural attache. The artist found great professional and spiritual fulfillment in his home nation until the rise of Pinochet's military dictatorship in 1973. Perhaps the zenith of Matta's engagement with Latin American cultural themes was his group of works produced in 1983, titled "El Mediterano y el Verbo Americas". In this series of poems and paintings, Matta created an analogy between the Latin American and European cultural renaissances. He presented the idea of "America" as verb - constantly moving, evolving, and changing.
Besides, he continued to engage with contemporary political concerns until his death.
Views
Quotations:
"I am interested only in the unknown and I work for my own astonishment."
Membership
He officially joined the Surrealist group in 1937, but was publicly expelled from the group in 1948.
Surrealist group
1937 - 1948
Connections
Matta was married four times. His first wife was Patricia Echaurren, an American. The couple had a son named Pablo. Patricia left him for Pierre Matisse, son of the famed artist Henri Matisse.
His second wife was American artist Anne Clark. They had twin sons, Sebastian and Gordon Matta-Clark. While Gordon grew up to be a well-known artist, Sebastian died early in life.
After his marriage to Anne Clark was annulled, Matta married for the third time. The marriage produced two children; Federica and Ramuntcho Matta. While Federica became a well known artist, Ramuntcho established himself as a director.
Matta’s fourth and last marriage was to Germana Ferrari, which lasted till his death. They had only one daughter named Alisée. She later became a well-known designer.
Moreover, Matta also had an affair with his close friend Arshile Gorky's estranged wife.