GoogObits: Matta, Chilean Artist of the Surrealist Movement, Is Dead

November 25, 2002

Matta, Chilean Artist of the Surrealist Movement, Is Dead

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.”

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