Matta

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Matta ( Roberto Matta Echaurren) (b Santiago, Chile, 11 Nov. 1911; d Civitavecchia, Italy, 23 Nov. 2002). Chilean painter and sculptor, active mainly in Paris, but also in Italy and the USA. He trained as an architect but turned to painting in 1937 and in the same year joined the Surrealist movement. In 1939 he fled from Europe to New York, where with other émigrés including Breton, Ernst, Masson, and Tanguy he formed a strong and influential Surrealist presence. He played a particularly significant role in encouraging Gorky, Pollock, and other Abstract Expressionists to experiment with automatism; he, ‘more than any other of the Surrealists, made himself available to young New Yorkers. A keen intellectual and scintillating conversationalist, he was able to focus attention on issues, to crystallize and dramatize them verbally’ (Irving Sandler, Abstract Expressionism, 1970). From about 1944 he began to create his most characteristic works—large canvases bordering on abstraction that evoke fantastic subjective landscapes and take as their theme the precariousness of human existence in a world dominated by machines and hidden forces; he was described in his obituary in The Times as ‘a master visionary of the 20th century’. In 1948 he broke with the Surrealists and returned to Europe, but his work continued in a similar vein. He lived in Rome in the early 1950s, then mainly in Paris, although he travelled widely. In 1957 he began making sculpture.

Matta ( Roberto Matta Echaurren) (1911–2002). Chilean painter and sculptor who worked mainly in Paris, but also in Italy and the USA. He trained as an architect in his native Santiago and in Paris under Le Corbusier in 1934–5, but he turned to painting in 1937 and in the same year joined the Surrealist movement. In 1939 he fled from Europe to New York, where with other emigrés including Breton, Ernst, Masson, and Tanguy he formed a strong and influential Surrealist presence. Matta played a particularly significant role in encouraging Gorky, Pollock, and others to experiment with automatism; he, ‘more than any other of the Surrealists, made himself available to young New Yorkers. A keen intellectual and scintillating conversationalist, he was able to focus attention on issues, to crystallize and dramatize them verbally’ ( Irving Sandler, Abstract Expressionism, 1970). From about 1944 Matta began to create his most characteristic works—large canvases bordering on abstraction that evoke fantastic subjective landscapes and take as their theme the precariousness of human existence in a world dominated by machines and hidden forces. In 1948 he broke with the Surrealists and returned to Europe, but his work continued in a similar vein. He lived in Rome in the early 1950s, then mainly in Paris, although he travelled widely. In 1957 he began making sculpture.

Matta (Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren) , 1911?–2002, Chilean painter who left his native country for Paris (1935) and thereafter worked in Europe and the United States, b. Santiago. Matta was an exponent of surrealism in the group around André Breton in the late 1930s. His pictures present volatile forms engulfed in cosmic upheaval; their strange effects have been compared to science fiction. After the mid-1940s his canvases portray the interactions of various mutant creatures. He cultivated "accidents" of automatic drawing and spilled pigment in an attempt to spontaneously access the unconscious. From 1939 to 1948 Matta lived and worked in New York. There his ideas on abstraction profoundly influenced his friend Arshile Gorky and were important to such exponents of abstract expressionism as Pollock, Rothko, Baziotes, and Motherwell. It was thus that his concepts helped to develop a new and distinctive language of abstract painting in America. Matta's work is included in many public collections, e.g., Let's Phosphoresce by Intellection, II in the Nelson Gallery–Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Mo.

Bibliography: See studies by W. Rubin (1957), I. Clurman (1970), and E. T. A. Smith et al. (2001).

Matta ( Roberto Matta Echaurren) (1911– ). Chilean painter and sculptor who has worked mainly in Paris, but also in Italy and the USA. He trained as an architect but turned to painting in 1937 and in the same year joined the Surrealist movement. In 1939 he fled from Europe to New York, where with other émigrés including Breton, Ernst, Masson, and Tanguy he formed a strong and influential Surrealist presence. He played a particularly significant role in encouraging Gorky, Pollock, and others to experiment with automatic techniques. From about 1944 he began to create his most characteristic works—large canvases bordering on abstraction that evoke fantastic subjective landscapes and take as their theme the precariousness of human existence in a world dominated by machines and hidden forces. In 1948 he broke with the Surrealists and returned to Europe, but his work continued in a similar vein. He lived in Rome in the early 1950s, then mainly in Paris, although he travelled widely. In 1957 he began making sculpture.