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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a certificate of authenticity signed by Germana Matta Ferrari and dated 7 October 2010.
"Imagine the breaking down and reconverting of the essential substances of the world. Imagine these substances rendered explosively, powerfully reacting on, but not modifying, each other. Imagine a painter of thirty who has invented an idiom so outside the run of experience that this seems the only line along which to approach his work."(1) So began Rosamund Frost, in her review of Matta's first major exhibition in the United States, held at Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1942. A dynamic and precocious figure on the New York scene from the time of his arrival in late 1939, Matta responded instinctively to the catastrophe of the Second World War, introducing an extraordinary and devastatingly surreal imagery of war into his landscapes of the early 1940s. "When I arrived in the United States, I started talking about the earth," Matta recounted. "In these pictures I tried to show not landscape which is 'scenery'--a scene of the earth--but the earth as something terrific, burning, changing, transforming, growing. The earth not just seen with the naked eye but with the morphological eye."(2) The visionary projection of these haunting, morphological landscapes were a revelation to the New York art world, and for many artists of the emerging New York School--Pollock, Rothko and Gorky, in particular--the encounter with Matta's works would be profoundly influential.
Matta's piercing, volcanic images of this period, including the present Untitled, reflect the intensity of his experience of the Mexican landscape during the summer of 1941. In the company of his wife, Anne, Robert Motherwell, and Barbara Weis, the daughter of collectors Bernard and Becky Weis, Matta spent three crucial months in Taxco, paying visits to exiled Surrealists Gordon Onslow Ford and Wolfgang Paalen and plunging himself into the indigenous landscape. The chance eruption of the Parícutin volcano during his stay provided a decisive stimulus to his studies of the "terrifying power of the earth," furthering new comparisons between his person and the incendiary forces of nature. "In works made after his return to New York," curators Elizabeth A. T. Smith and Colette Dartnall note, "the powerful impact of landscape resonated with him, and volcanic imagery began to appear in his work, indicating cataclysmic emotions and ideas pouring from his inner self." Preeminently in the allusive imagery of the works from 1941-42, Smith and Dartnell suggest, Matta explored "his idea of an inner fire, manifesting itself as flames, eruptions, and swirling lavalike forms to express the interrelatedness of man and landscape."(3)
In the present work, Matta channels the explosive animus of the landscape through a metamorphic architecture of membranous, organic forms and angular geometries. Similar in feeling to the monumental canvas The Hanged Man (1942), for which it may have been a preparatory study, Untitled renders abstracted silhouettes of the female anatomy in lambent transparencies of grey cast within a vaporous, embryonic space. Free association to the tarot card of the same name "induced in Matta's mind an image of the foetus 'hanging' in the abdomen of his pregnant wife," William Rubin has explained with regard to The Hanging Man, and the brilliant, cellular mass floating near the center of the present canvas may also reference the promise of new life.(4) Here as well, Matta capitalized on the creative possibilities of accident: dripped pigment mixes with liquid color in the lower left quadrant of the painting, the resulting milky passages intimating a suggestively germinal or primordial space. The distillation of combustible, volcanic energy within the fertile human body epitomizes the artist's belief in the essential oneness of man and nature, here dramatically imaged through shadowy, developmental forms and tongue-like flames emanating from the central image. "These poetic symbols were part of a new and very personal morphology that appeared to reach further back into the unconscious than the Surrealist imagery derived from dream activity, back to the more latent sources of psychic life," Rubin later reflected. "Hence, it could be considered an iconography of human consciousness as it might exist before being hatched into the recognizable forms and constituents of quotidian experience."(5)
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park.
1) R. Frost, "Matta, Furious Scientist," ARTNews XLI, no. 5, April 15-30, 1942, 27.
2) Matta, quoted in N. Miller, "Interview with Matta," in Matta: The First Decade, Waltham, Mass.: Rose Art Museum, 1982, 12.
3) E. A. T. Smith and C. Dartnall, "'Crushed Jewels, Air, Even Laughter': Matta in the 1940s," in Matta in America: Paintings and Drawings of the 1940s, Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001, 17. 4) W. Rubin, Matta, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1957, 4.
5) Rubin, "A Personal Note on Matta in America," in Matta in America, 34.
"Imagine the breaking down and reconverting of the essential substances of the world. Imagine these substances rendered explosively, powerfully reacting on, but not modifying, each other. Imagine a painter of thirty who has invented an idiom so outside the run of experience that this seems the only line along which to approach his work."(1) So began Rosamund Frost, in her review of Matta's first major exhibition in the United States, held at Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1942. A dynamic and precocious figure on the New York scene from the time of his arrival in late 1939, Matta responded instinctively to the catastrophe of the Second World War, introducing an extraordinary and devastatingly surreal imagery of war into his landscapes of the early 1940s. "When I arrived in the United States, I started talking about the earth," Matta recounted. "In these pictures I tried to show not landscape which is 'scenery'--a scene of the earth--but the earth as something terrific, burning, changing, transforming, growing. The earth not just seen with the naked eye but with the morphological eye."(2) The visionary projection of these haunting, morphological landscapes were a revelation to the New York art world, and for many artists of the emerging New York School--Pollock, Rothko and Gorky, in particular--the encounter with Matta's works would be profoundly influential.
Matta's piercing, volcanic images of this period, including the present Untitled, reflect the intensity of his experience of the Mexican landscape during the summer of 1941. In the company of his wife, Anne, Robert Motherwell, and Barbara Weis, the daughter of collectors Bernard and Becky Weis, Matta spent three crucial months in Taxco, paying visits to exiled Surrealists Gordon Onslow Ford and Wolfgang Paalen and plunging himself into the indigenous landscape. The chance eruption of the Parícutin volcano during his stay provided a decisive stimulus to his studies of the "terrifying power of the earth," furthering new comparisons between his person and the incendiary forces of nature. "In works made after his return to New York," curators Elizabeth A. T. Smith and Colette Dartnall note, "the powerful impact of landscape resonated with him, and volcanic imagery began to appear in his work, indicating cataclysmic emotions and ideas pouring from his inner self." Preeminently in the allusive imagery of the works from 1941-42, Smith and Dartnell suggest, Matta explored "his idea of an inner fire, manifesting itself as flames, eruptions, and swirling lavalike forms to express the interrelatedness of man and landscape."(3)
In the present work, Matta channels the explosive animus of the landscape through a metamorphic architecture of membranous, organic forms and angular geometries. Similar in feeling to the monumental canvas The Hanged Man (1942), for which it may have been a preparatory study, Untitled renders abstracted silhouettes of the female anatomy in lambent transparencies of grey cast within a vaporous, embryonic space. Free association to the tarot card of the same name "induced in Matta's mind an image of the foetus 'hanging' in the abdomen of his pregnant wife," William Rubin has explained with regard to The Hanging Man, and the brilliant, cellular mass floating near the center of the present canvas may also reference the promise of new life.(4) Here as well, Matta capitalized on the creative possibilities of accident: dripped pigment mixes with liquid color in the lower left quadrant of the painting, the resulting milky passages intimating a suggestively germinal or primordial space. The distillation of combustible, volcanic energy within the fertile human body epitomizes the artist's belief in the essential oneness of man and nature, here dramatically imaged through shadowy, developmental forms and tongue-like flames emanating from the central image. "These poetic symbols were part of a new and very personal morphology that appeared to reach further back into the unconscious than the Surrealist imagery derived from dream activity, back to the more latent sources of psychic life," Rubin later reflected. "Hence, it could be considered an iconography of human consciousness as it might exist before being hatched into the recognizable forms and constituents of quotidian experience."(5)
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park.
1) R. Frost, "Matta, Furious Scientist," ARTNews XLI, no. 5, April 15-30, 1942, 27.
2) Matta, quoted in N. Miller, "Interview with Matta," in Matta: The First Decade, Waltham, Mass.: Rose Art Museum, 1982, 12.
3) E. A. T. Smith and C. Dartnall, "'Crushed Jewels, Air, Even Laughter': Matta in the 1940s," in Matta in America: Paintings and Drawings of the 1940s, Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001, 17. 4) W. Rubin, Matta, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1957, 4.
5) Rubin, "A Personal Note on Matta in America," in Matta in America, 34.