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Lot Essay
This work is sold a certificate of authenticity signed by Germana Matta Ferrari and dated 24 September 2009.
A key figure in the history of art, Matta and his work represent a high point in the global development of Surrealism. Taken as a whole, his body of work and the high estimation of many of his colleagues support his legacy as a major artist with an expansive scope and an impressive depth of ideas. This untitled work, dated around 1965 to 1966, belies his growing interest in the possibilities of a landscape-like setting, which he developed extensively throughout this decade.
The young artist, trained first as an architect, left Chile in 1933 for Paris, where he worked in the studio of Le Corbusier. On a visit to Madrid, he met both Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda, who introduced him to Salvador Dali and André Breton. After seeing some of Matta's works, Breton invited him to join the Surrealists in 1937. Deeply inspired by Duchamp's ideas about process, chance, coincidence, and movement, Matta began to develop his signature imagery that blended the microscopic organism and the monumental landscape.
Matta was deeply inspired by the writings of Freud, and was interested in dream interpretation and in the possibility of recording the workings of the subconscious mind. Indeed, throughout his lifetime, the artist developed two important concepts related to his works. These his Psychological Morphologies and his Innerscapes. The ideas behind his psychological morphologies were recorded in his text from 1938, which came about when Breton asked him to write down his ideas.
The concept of a psychological-time medium in which the objects are transforming, leads to compare it with a Euclidian space caught in a rotative and pulsatile transformation in which the object, with each risk of interpenetration may oscillate from point-volume to moment-eternity, from attraction-repulsion to past-future, from light-shadow to matter-movement. The fourth dimension would be the diagram of the risks encountered during the complete duration of the transformations.(1)
Escaping WWII with some of the other Surrealists in 1939, Matta left Paris for New York. Almost immediately, he met some of the major figures in the American art scene. He began holding informal salons in his home with the goal of giving American artists the opportunity to experiment with the unconscious mind and with the possibilities of automatism. Among those gathered in his studio were Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and William Baziotes. The series of exercises through which Matta led them mark an important moment in the development of American art, as one historian has noted:
Though the artists [at Matta's salons] grew somewhat impatient with the intellectual content Matta insisted on finding in this activity and his polemical and dogmatic approach, they did like the process otherwise and the art that came out of it. Also, the organicism of the activity made sense to them. Although the informal group dispersed, Matta had wrought a kind of alchemy. It was, to some American artists, as if Matta had validated abstraction, paving the way toward the large canvases of abstract expressionism.(2)
Although he had only just arrived in New York, his work was selected to be included in a Spring Salon exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century gallery, and was positively received by the press.
In the mid 1940s, Matta made another important trip to Mexico (with Robert Motherwell). During this trip, Matta recalls being particularly influenced by the Mexican landscape:
We spent the whole summer in Taxco, met everyday in a bar opposite the cathedral. It was by chance that my work began to take the form of volcanoes. I saw everything in flames, but from a metaphysical point of view. I was speaking from beyond the volcano... I painted that which burned in me and the best image of my body was the volcano.(3)
Seeing the volcano as a metaphor for the body was an important connection, as the artist continued to relate the ideas of body-mind-landscape throughout his oeuvre. Matta fused interest in the psychic state with natural elements of the landscape, juxtaposing a barren vision of an indefinable landscape with abstract form of the artist's own psychological state. This introspective mental state draws its visual forms from organic materials such as clouds, rocks, water, microscopic organisms, and other natural phenomena. From the inspirational form of the volcano, the artist continued to work with the idea of embers, flaming liquids and flying sparks, as seen in the middleground and background of this painting. He adapts the visual language that he had already been using for many years to evoke the inner workings of the mind, but now adding a visible element of landscape. Matta presents us with a stage-like setting to explore the dramatic and marvelous workings of the psyche.
Multiple indiscernible mechanical objects are created and launched by a hulking automaton as electric sparks fly through the steam-laden air. Levers, buttons and switches are carefully placed among the shadows of exhaust, glowing orange coals, and other curious bits of vivid color. Pigments in the canvas range from tinges of acid yellow to rich emerald green, from scarlet to ochre and, in the foreground, from a bright teal to a flat, somber gray. A series of etchings in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York) from the same year also echo an interest in volcanic emanations, celestial bodies and their motions, and the trails of light left by these shifts in space.
Both the colors and the lines in this work express the ideas that evolved from his 1938 statement and from his close observation of the Mexican landscape in the mid 1940s. In the foreground, a steamy bubbling surface alludes to the movement of molecules of hot liquid as it appears to melt into itself. In the distance, sparks of hot coals fly into the air, mimicking the action of fireworks in the night sky. The concepts of both "rotative" and "pulsatile" are illustrated through this use of light and movement, as is the idea of things evolving from microscopic to universal, from a grain of sand to a monumental, imagined landscape.
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Associate Curator, El Museo del Barrio, New York.
1) P. Petoit, trans., Matta, "Psychological Morphologies," notes taken from J-P. Domecq "Ni peintre, ni pote ni philosophe ni Matta" Matta, Paris, Museé National d'Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou 1985, p. 67.
2) M. V. Dearborn, Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2004, p. 218.
3) Matta quoted in Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School, Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995, p. 186
A key figure in the history of art, Matta and his work represent a high point in the global development of Surrealism. Taken as a whole, his body of work and the high estimation of many of his colleagues support his legacy as a major artist with an expansive scope and an impressive depth of ideas. This untitled work, dated around 1965 to 1966, belies his growing interest in the possibilities of a landscape-like setting, which he developed extensively throughout this decade.
The young artist, trained first as an architect, left Chile in 1933 for Paris, where he worked in the studio of Le Corbusier. On a visit to Madrid, he met both Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda, who introduced him to Salvador Dali and André Breton. After seeing some of Matta's works, Breton invited him to join the Surrealists in 1937. Deeply inspired by Duchamp's ideas about process, chance, coincidence, and movement, Matta began to develop his signature imagery that blended the microscopic organism and the monumental landscape.
Matta was deeply inspired by the writings of Freud, and was interested in dream interpretation and in the possibility of recording the workings of the subconscious mind. Indeed, throughout his lifetime, the artist developed two important concepts related to his works. These his Psychological Morphologies and his Innerscapes. The ideas behind his psychological morphologies were recorded in his text from 1938, which came about when Breton asked him to write down his ideas.
The concept of a psychological-time medium in which the objects are transforming, leads to compare it with a Euclidian space caught in a rotative and pulsatile transformation in which the object, with each risk of interpenetration may oscillate from point-volume to moment-eternity, from attraction-repulsion to past-future, from light-shadow to matter-movement. The fourth dimension would be the diagram of the risks encountered during the complete duration of the transformations.(1)
Escaping WWII with some of the other Surrealists in 1939, Matta left Paris for New York. Almost immediately, he met some of the major figures in the American art scene. He began holding informal salons in his home with the goal of giving American artists the opportunity to experiment with the unconscious mind and with the possibilities of automatism. Among those gathered in his studio were Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and William Baziotes. The series of exercises through which Matta led them mark an important moment in the development of American art, as one historian has noted:
Though the artists [at Matta's salons] grew somewhat impatient with the intellectual content Matta insisted on finding in this activity and his polemical and dogmatic approach, they did like the process otherwise and the art that came out of it. Also, the organicism of the activity made sense to them. Although the informal group dispersed, Matta had wrought a kind of alchemy. It was, to some American artists, as if Matta had validated abstraction, paving the way toward the large canvases of abstract expressionism.(2)
Although he had only just arrived in New York, his work was selected to be included in a Spring Salon exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century gallery, and was positively received by the press.
In the mid 1940s, Matta made another important trip to Mexico (with Robert Motherwell). During this trip, Matta recalls being particularly influenced by the Mexican landscape:
We spent the whole summer in Taxco, met everyday in a bar opposite the cathedral. It was by chance that my work began to take the form of volcanoes. I saw everything in flames, but from a metaphysical point of view. I was speaking from beyond the volcano... I painted that which burned in me and the best image of my body was the volcano.(3)
Seeing the volcano as a metaphor for the body was an important connection, as the artist continued to relate the ideas of body-mind-landscape throughout his oeuvre. Matta fused interest in the psychic state with natural elements of the landscape, juxtaposing a barren vision of an indefinable landscape with abstract form of the artist's own psychological state. This introspective mental state draws its visual forms from organic materials such as clouds, rocks, water, microscopic organisms, and other natural phenomena. From the inspirational form of the volcano, the artist continued to work with the idea of embers, flaming liquids and flying sparks, as seen in the middleground and background of this painting. He adapts the visual language that he had already been using for many years to evoke the inner workings of the mind, but now adding a visible element of landscape. Matta presents us with a stage-like setting to explore the dramatic and marvelous workings of the psyche.
Multiple indiscernible mechanical objects are created and launched by a hulking automaton as electric sparks fly through the steam-laden air. Levers, buttons and switches are carefully placed among the shadows of exhaust, glowing orange coals, and other curious bits of vivid color. Pigments in the canvas range from tinges of acid yellow to rich emerald green, from scarlet to ochre and, in the foreground, from a bright teal to a flat, somber gray. A series of etchings in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York) from the same year also echo an interest in volcanic emanations, celestial bodies and their motions, and the trails of light left by these shifts in space.
Both the colors and the lines in this work express the ideas that evolved from his 1938 statement and from his close observation of the Mexican landscape in the mid 1940s. In the foreground, a steamy bubbling surface alludes to the movement of molecules of hot liquid as it appears to melt into itself. In the distance, sparks of hot coals fly into the air, mimicking the action of fireworks in the night sky. The concepts of both "rotative" and "pulsatile" are illustrated through this use of light and movement, as is the idea of things evolving from microscopic to universal, from a grain of sand to a monumental, imagined landscape.
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Associate Curator, El Museo del Barrio, New York.
1) P. Petoit, trans., Matta, "Psychological Morphologies," notes taken from J-P. Domecq "Ni peintre, ni pote ni philosophe ni Matta" Matta, Paris, Museé National d'Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou 1985, p. 67.
2) M. V. Dearborn, Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2004, p. 218.
3) Matta quoted in Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School, Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995, p. 186