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Lot Essay
Executed in 1939, Personnages et automobile is one of the historic works on paper in which Matta honed his skills and developed the unique, highly instinctive and personalised iconography that was to have such an impact on a new generation of Surrealists and, during the following years, the avant garde of New York. The picture shows a car journey, but that everyday event has been viewed through an hallucinatory prism, emerging as a combination of alien machinery, of cosmic symbols, of vivid colours and of meat-like organs within the fabric of the vehicle. This has all been rendered in the vivid colours of the crayons which were Matta's favoured medium during this important early period.
The ownership history of this picture adds to its historic nature, as it was in the collection of Matta's fellow artist Gordon Onslow-Ford. A British artist, Onslow-Ford was instrumental not only in encouraging his Chilean friend to devote himself to his art and abandon his architectural vocation - Matta was working with Le Corbusier when they met - but also, as one of the only English speakers of the Surrealist movement, to introduce the concepts of André Breton and his followers to a new audience in the United States; Onslow-Ford would finally settle there, buying a swathe of forestry in Inverness, California, where he co-founded the Lucid Art Foundation which owns this work.
Matta and Onslow-Ford had met in 1937; after an evening discussing various ideas, Matta had invited him back to his apartment, where he had shown him some of his drawings, created, like Personnages et automobile, in crayon on paper. In these works, Matta combined some aspects of his architectural training, in creating an alien yet coherent internal logic in his compositions, with his own unique perspective. For Onslow-Ford, these works were an epiphany. While Matta had originally considered them a mere pastime, Onslow-Ford's reaction and further encouragement had a huge impact on him; likewise, it was because of this encounter that Onslow-Ford became involved with the Surrealists and in particular with André Breton.
Personnages et automobile was created at the Château de Chemilleu, overlooking the Rhone, which Onslow-Ford rented in 1939 and where he retreated with Matta, Yves Tanguy, Kay Sage and André Breton in part to avoid the increasing political sniping within the Surrealist group in Paris. There, the artists spent a great time in each others' company, cross-germinating their ideas. At the time, Onslow-Ford himself described Personnages et automobile:
'There, the lines float on the white paper. They are an architect's drawing representing a terrestrial event considered as a cosmic phenomenon.
'Whoever wishes to travel beyond dreams in interior worlds needs a vehicle to transport him, whether it be the eagle Garuda, a tiger or a boat. The vehicle of Matta is one of those cars which, when he was a child in Chile, must have seemed to him to be exotic vehicles come from some distant land...
'This automobile excursion is presented as an eternal Cosmic whole' (G. Onslow-Ford, 'Notes sur Matta et la peinture (1937-1941)', pp. 27-35, Matta, exh.cat., Paris, 1985, p. 32).
Looking at Personnages et automobile, the impact of Matta's work and Onslow-Ford's influence appears clear in the resemblance between this and the mature pictures of Arshile Gorky. Indeed Gorky had attended, alongside Robert Motherwell and perhaps Jackson Pollock, the lecture that Onslow-Ford gave at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1940, introducing the Surreal revolution and the idea of art as a vehicle for societal and conceptual change to the United States, and providing some of the vital sparks and impetus for release that would lead to the development of Abstract Expressionism.
The ownership history of this picture adds to its historic nature, as it was in the collection of Matta's fellow artist Gordon Onslow-Ford. A British artist, Onslow-Ford was instrumental not only in encouraging his Chilean friend to devote himself to his art and abandon his architectural vocation - Matta was working with Le Corbusier when they met - but also, as one of the only English speakers of the Surrealist movement, to introduce the concepts of André Breton and his followers to a new audience in the United States; Onslow-Ford would finally settle there, buying a swathe of forestry in Inverness, California, where he co-founded the Lucid Art Foundation which owns this work.
Matta and Onslow-Ford had met in 1937; after an evening discussing various ideas, Matta had invited him back to his apartment, where he had shown him some of his drawings, created, like Personnages et automobile, in crayon on paper. In these works, Matta combined some aspects of his architectural training, in creating an alien yet coherent internal logic in his compositions, with his own unique perspective. For Onslow-Ford, these works were an epiphany. While Matta had originally considered them a mere pastime, Onslow-Ford's reaction and further encouragement had a huge impact on him; likewise, it was because of this encounter that Onslow-Ford became involved with the Surrealists and in particular with André Breton.
Personnages et automobile was created at the Château de Chemilleu, overlooking the Rhone, which Onslow-Ford rented in 1939 and where he retreated with Matta, Yves Tanguy, Kay Sage and André Breton in part to avoid the increasing political sniping within the Surrealist group in Paris. There, the artists spent a great time in each others' company, cross-germinating their ideas. At the time, Onslow-Ford himself described Personnages et automobile:
'There, the lines float on the white paper. They are an architect's drawing representing a terrestrial event considered as a cosmic phenomenon.
'Whoever wishes to travel beyond dreams in interior worlds needs a vehicle to transport him, whether it be the eagle Garuda, a tiger or a boat. The vehicle of Matta is one of those cars which, when he was a child in Chile, must have seemed to him to be exotic vehicles come from some distant land...
'This automobile excursion is presented as an eternal Cosmic whole' (G. Onslow-Ford, 'Notes sur Matta et la peinture (1937-1941)', pp. 27-35, Matta, exh.cat., Paris, 1985, p. 32).
Looking at Personnages et automobile, the impact of Matta's work and Onslow-Ford's influence appears clear in the resemblance between this and the mature pictures of Arshile Gorky. Indeed Gorky had attended, alongside Robert Motherwell and perhaps Jackson Pollock, the lecture that Onslow-Ford gave at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1940, introducing the Surreal revolution and the idea of art as a vehicle for societal and conceptual change to the United States, and providing some of the vital sparks and impetus for release that would lead to the development of Abstract Expressionism.