‘Matta in America’: Decade of Creativity Leaves a Lasting Mark

When Roberto Matta Echaurren arrived in New York City in November 1939, he was doubly in exile. He’d left South America for Paris four years before, at 24, determined to become an architect in the avant-garde capital of the West. Soon after changing his mind and deciding he would be a painter instead, he fled Europe as Hitler’s armies went on the march.

A sharp distinction separates these two types of exile, both of which were undertaken voluntarily. When he left his native Chile, Matta (as he is called) was in flight toward a dream for the future. When he left Paris, he was in flight from the nightmare of an advancing terror. In the youthful experience of the Latin American artist, a familiar religious duality between heaven and hell assumed a modern, secular form.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, a tightly focused exhibition surveys “Matta in America: Paintings and Drawings of the 1940s.” Co-organized by MOCA and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, where it will conclude its tour next summer after visiting Miami, the show is a small gem. It shows why Matta ranks as a “little master” of Surrealist art, and it suggests how his work was pivotal to what came after in New York.

Twenty-one oils and 24 drawings trace Matta’s work from the moment he picked up a paintbrush in 1938 through the eight years he lived in Manhattan. Among them is a sizable number of exceptional drawings in crayon and pencil, sometimes with watercolor added, in which strange, flaming personages seem wracked with sexual tension. Several first-rate paintings are topped by the monumental canvas “The Earth Is a Man” (1941-42), which may be Matta’s greatest achievement.

“The Earth Is a Man” is a Surrealist landscape where the world outside fuses with the inner soul. The infinite cosmos is glimpsed as if through a microscope, while the nucleus of a living cell appears as it might through a telescope.

At the top, a fractured sphere of molten red meets a melting puddle of lemon yellow, which suggests a fearsome sun ablaze in a raging sky. The way these work together is repeated throughout the large canvas.

Matta paints the red sphere and the incandescent sun in such a way as to obscure, confuse and complicate the spatial layers they occupy. At one moment the sphere appears superimposed over the sun, like a mysterious eclipse. At another, the yellow seems to have been burned away by the red heat, exposing the fractured sphere behind it.

The physical difference between a sphere and a puddle is also important. One is a solid form, the other a liquid space. Matta establishes a logical duality when he puts them together, but neither side of the equation performs according to expectation.

Duality lies at the heart of “The Earth Is a Man,” describing the interpenetrating terms in the title. The oscillation between surface color and an illusion of deep space, between solid object and elusive atmosphere, between ancient mystery and modern visual language, is found everywhere throughout this hypnotizing picture. At once an arid desert and an ocean floor, a volcanic convulsion and a radiant display of prismatic splendor, the image seems suspended in a miraculous moment of simultaneous annihilation and conception. Like the global war that was raging in 1941 and 1942, the painting is a crucible.

In an important way, Matta’s work in general was also a forging vessel for young artists in New York. Colette Dartnall and Elizabeth A. T. Smith, curators of “Matta in America,” organized the exhibition to closely examine the pivotal role his painting played in the development of the nascent New York School, which blossomed at the end of the 1940s.

Matta was far younger than other established European expatriate Modernist painters, like Piet Mondrian (born in 1872) or Andre Masson (in 1896). Their presence in America was inspirational to artists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. But they were also gray eminences, whose work the Americans revered--and also dreamed of supplanting.

Matta--despite both his youth and the fact that he had taken up painting only in 1938--already had known or worked with Le Corbusier, Federico Garcia Lorca, Salvador Dali, Alvar Aalto, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Duchamp and other European luminaries. Andre Breton had anointed him a member of the Surrealist circle. He had worked with the architectural firm that built the Spanish Republican Pavilion at Paris’ 1937 World’s Fair, where Picasso so spectacularly unveiled his “Guernica.” So Matta could function as a mentor in Modernist art to the young New Yorkers while also remaining their peer (Pollock was just a year younger).

A painting like “The Earth Is a Man” couldn’t help but have a powerful effect on the Americans. Its size--6 by 8 feet--was huge by the modest standards of easel painting then common in New York. Its apocalyptic qualities--which, like its size, were indebted to “Guernica” and to the murals of Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros and Jose Orozco that Matta saw on a 1941 trip to Mexico--had deep resonance.

Most important, “The Earth Is a Man” embodied a new way of painting. The young Americans were stuck in things like Cubist structure and Surrealist dream imagery, which had been around for decades, and they were looking for a way (or ways) out. Matta’s new paintings held lessons. They were indebted to Cubist and Surrealist principles, but those were being pushed in more abstract, less figurative directions.

Oddly enough, Matta’s earlier work in architecture may be a key to unlocking the strategy of his painting. Think about it: An architectural blueprint embodies a particular pattern of perceptual thought. It plots complex objects in deep space on a two-dimensional surface. Any point on a blueprint exists in two realms at once: right here on the surface and out there in space. The mind holds these concurrent visual contradictions with ease.

The oscillation between the red sphere and the yellow puddle that together light up “The Earth Is a Man” works in the same way. Each is simultaneously right here and out there. One seems to pass through the other, depending on your perceptual frame of reference, in a kind of metaphysical transparency.

Matta’s amazing facility with this complex visual language--four years earlier, remember, he had never even touched a paintbrush--may also have to do with something other than his specific training in architecture. In his native Santiago, Chile, that training had taken place at the Sacred Heart Jesuit College and the Catholic University. The relationship between Catholic mysteries and Surrealist painting in Paris is well known, and here it seems decisive as well.

The physical is conflated with the spiritual in “The Earth Is a Man”--and in “Rocks” (1940), “Invasion of the Night” (1941), “Foeu” (1941) and other powerful works in the show. And the conflation occurs as a dual commitment: to the image in the picture and to the material reality of a painting.

The apocalyptic imagery is secular, not religious, but as a picture it unfolds a clear narrative of creation and destruction. As a painted canvas, the work of art functions like the ritual sacrament of bread and wine--ordinary materials that simultaneously embody the dual nature of Christ as human being and divinity.

Matta’s most powerful and persuasive moment as a painter didn’t last long. By the time he returned to Europe in 1948, at the ripe old age of 37, his work had already moved in a more illustrative direction. The mural-size canvas “How-Ever” (1947) describes a kind of mechanized, assembly-line horror that characterized Auschwitz, as robot-like totems perform monstrous deeds. The work shows that an interest in imagery was usurping a commitment to discovering vital new ways of painting.

The catalog to MOCA’s show features an insightful, highly personal short essay by art historian William Rubin, which suggests how Matta’s School of Paris aesthetic fed into certain of the critical crosscurrents in the early days of the New York School. Just about the only major thing missing from this concise but satisfying show is “The Vertigo of Eros” (1944)--another exceptional painting, and one that had a special impact when the Museum of Modern Art acquired it shortly after it was finished.

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Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 626-6222, through Jan. 6. Closed Monday.