Roberto Matta, 1911-2002 - Artworld - Obituary

Matta, 91, painter who was the youngest member of the prewar Surrealist group in Paris and a key figure in the development of Abstract Expressionism in New York, died on Nov. 23 at a hospital near his home in Tarquinia, Italy, about 70 miles north of Rome. Born Roberto Sebastian Matta Echaurren in Santiago, Chile, of French and Spanish descent, he earned a degree in architecture from the Catholic University of Santiago in 1931. Two years later, Matta sailed to Paris and found work as a draftsman in Le Corbusier's studio, where he stayed until 1937, taking time off periodically to explore Europe. In Spain he met Federico Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali, who introduced him to Andre Breton. Experimenting with "automatic writing," Matta joined the Surrealist group in Paris in 1937. That year he produced his first drawings; his first oil paintings appeared the following year. Rendered in bright colors, with frenzied lines and brushstrokes, these abstractions, which he referred to as "inscapes" or "psychic morphologies," suggest a cosmic space with apocalyptic overtones.

At the outbreak of World War II, Matta was living in Paris, where he shared an apartment with Pablo Neruda. At the urging of Marcel Duchamp, Matta, like many other European artists, migrated to New York in 1939. The visionary canvases he presented in his first solo exhibition, at New York's Julien Levy Gallery in 1940, made a powerful impression on a generation of U.S. painters, including Gorky, Pollock, Baziotes and Motherwell, all of whom later acknowledged his influence. Matta fell under the spell of Duchamp, whom he met for weekly lunches in New York in the early '40s. He subsequently incorporated into his imagery fantastic, anthropomorphic creatures that often resemble insects and also machine forms that correspond to certain of Duchamp's earlier works.

Returning to Europe in 1948, he first settled in Rome, but in 1955 relocated to Paris, where he lived until 1969, eventually becoming a French citizen. After the mid-'60s, he divided his time between Italy, France and England. He fathered six children, including twins, the artists Sebastian and Gordon Matta-Clark, born in 1943 (both died in the late 1970s). Matta's widow, Germana Ferrara Matta, is currently preparing his catalogue raisonne. Gordon Matta-Clark's widow, Jane Crawford, is completing work on a documentary film about Matta; titled Matta: The Eye of a Surrealist; it is scheduled for release later this year.

Long associated with leftist politics, Matta presided over the cultural congress in Havana in 1966, and from 1970 to '72 traveled in Chile and Peru at the invitation of Chile's President Allende. Matta was honored with a number of retrospectives, beginning with a 1955 show at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Major surveys also appeared in Stockholm (1958), Bologna (1963), Mexico City (1964), Berlin (1970), Paris (1971), London (1977) and Tokyo (1986). In 1995 he won Japan's Praemium Imperiale Award for lifetime achievement in the arts. His most recent U.S. survey, "Matta in America," focused on his 1940s works; it debuted in 2001 at Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art, and traveled in 2002 to the Miami Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

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