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Ensayo del lote
Spanning a monumental fourteen feet, Science, conscience et patience du vitreur is Matta’s wartime magnum opus, painted in 1944, just as the horrors of the Second World War became evident. With the present work, Matta breaks completely with his previous abstract style, introducing instead a fraught, biomorphic figuration. Columnar forms arranged in mind-bending contortions and conflagrations haunt the canvas, floating against an abstracted background of wiry lines spinning in loops and circles amid expressive bouts of vibrant pigmentation. Influenced by Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid) as well as the expansive scale which Mark Rothko achieved in his Mural, completed the previous year (1943; University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City), Matta invents in Science, conscience et patience du vitreur an essentially humanistic figuration which he would continue to operate within for the remainder of his career. The present work is an exceptionally rare example of Matta’s early monumental paintings, the vast majority of which reside in institutional collections, including The Vertigo of Eros (1944; Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Expace and the Ego (1945; Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris).
Writing in 1947, André Breton, the father of Surrealism, describes the genesis of the present work. “Three years ago, Matta broke with the summarily named ‘non-figurative line’ which had been generally ascribed to him, halted the stars in their courses, reclosed the great geodes, snapped his whip to bring the whirlwinds to heel around him, and gave up spreading—lavishing, as he had done hitherto—the music of the spheres. Such a decision on his part must certainly have resulted from a complete change in his own life brought about by various conjunctions followed by new conjunctions, some dramatic in nature, other falling within the province of fortune… In such a case, a return to life implies nothing less than the necessity of recreating life itself. Moreover, human existence at ground level, particularly that of great artists, is not immune from the fumaroles hissing menacingly in the depths. Beyond, unscathed or not, but at any rate transformed for himself as for others, the miner sometimes appears at the summit of the crater” (“Matta, Three years ago…” in Surrealism and Painting, trans. S.W. Taylor, Boston, 2002 [1947], p. 189).
Science, conscience et patience du vitreur is haunted by the spectral figures which Matta conceived of following his “return to life.” The canvas swarms with these faceless, tubular creatures whose writhing actions across the abstracted plane connote the pain, anxiety, and fear which recall the agonizing suffering seen in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-15; Museo del Prado, Madrid) or Picasso’s Guernica. Matta leaves a certain ambiguity surrounding these figures, who suggest both victims and perpetrators. Marticia Sawin, describing the figures in the present work, writes how “they are all caught up in something sadistic and terrifying, but the activity takes place on a dehumanized plane where the viewer finds no point of entry” (“Matta in New York: A Fuse that Lit up the American Scene,” in Matta: 1911-2011, exh. cat., IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, 2011, p. 165).
Explaining his totem-like figures, Matta relays how “I was attempting to use a social morphology, not a personal psychol-morphology, to move away from the intimate, imaginary forms… towards the cultural, totemic expressions of civilizations… the formations in confrontations with social landscapes” (quoted in ibid., p. 166). These figures translate the artist’s long-held fascination with Indigenous art, ancient civilizations, and mythological imagery into painted form. Here, as Marga Paz notes, “the awareness aroused by the revelations of the physical and psychological atrocities caused by the Second World War led him to break with abstraction and introduced disturbing figures in the fields of color full of transparent veils” that he had first developed in his abstract paintings (“Matta,” in Matta: 1911-2011, op. cit., p. 165).
The Chilean artist had relocated from Paris to New York in 1939, following the Surrealist exodus brought about by the outbreak of war in Europe. Matta’s period in New York was both prolific and highly influential for the development of both Surrealism and the later New York School artists. Matta had his first one-man show in 1940 and participated in several seminal Surrealist group shows, including The First Papers of Surrealism and the inaugural exhibition for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in 1942. By 1943, Matta’s influence in New York was at its zenith, with the editor for View Magazine, Charles Henri Ford, writing that year how, “if you ask me who is the most talked about artist in New York, I would say it was Matta” (quoted in M. Sawin, op. cit., 2011, p. 169).
Science, conscience et patience du vitreur represents a seminal shift in Matta’s style away from the automatist-grounded abstractions which first won the artist acclaim in New York and toward a new biomorphic direction. In 1943, Matta became close to Marcel Duchamp, who at the time was living only a few blocks away from Matta’s New York apartment. Matta had first been introduced to Duchamp the previous decade, reading an article on Duchamp’s theory of passage—simultaneous movement within time and space—in painting in Cahiers d’Art. His reintroduction to Duchamp in 1943 helped shape Matta’s turn toward a more esoteric direction, as the two artists began to lunch frequently together, discussing shared interests in science, alchemy, and the occult. Matta’s The Bachelors Twenty Years Later, painted in 1943, is a direct homage to Duchamp’s earlier The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), which Matta saw in-situ in Katherine Dreier’s apartment. The fractured panes which Matta first explores here recur in the linear elements of the present work.
In 1945, Duchamp praised Matta’s painterly development, writing how “his most important contribution was the discovery of regions of space unexplored in the realm of art. He followed modern physicists in his quest of a new space which was not to be confused with three dimensional illusionism—finally he introduced in his space descriptive and figurative elements that further completed his major revelation. Although still young, Matta is the most profound painter of his generation” (quoted in ibid., p. 185).
“The war was becoming a ferocious thing,” Matta recalled of his radical shift in styles in 1944. “I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I began to feel society in a new way, for the first time… Then I passed in my work to these anthropomorphic beings” (quoted in ibid.). The figures which invade Matta’s abstracted background in Science, conscience et patience du vitreur are Matta’s first painted representations of the “Great Transparents,” creatures first conceived in André Breton’s “Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism—or else” (1942), which Matta had illustrated. The present work is also the first extant appearance of Matta’s mystical conception of Vitreur. Matta’s invented term, which evokes a glass-like or transparent being, is connected to the mechanomorphs which pervade Science, conscience et patience du vitreur, and especially the center-right elongated figure whose claw-like limbs appear to break through a pane of transparent glass. This figure’s anatomy and pose parallels that of Alberto Giacometti’s Hands Holding the Void—hardly coincidental, considering that Matta acquired the original cast for Giacometti’s 1934 sculpture from Julian Levy in 1943.
Matta’s stirring response to wartime traumas follows the similar monstrous motifs which fellow Surrealists including Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí developed in response to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, though in terms of scale and emotional impact, the closest referent for Science, conscience et patience du vitreur is Picasso’s celebrated Guernica. Matta was a temporary worker for the construction of the Spanish Pavilion for the 1937 Universal Exhibition, and thus was able to observe Picasso’s daily progress on his masterpiece depicting the devastating bombing of the Basque town during the civil war.
Matta completed the present work by Thanksgiving day in 1944, when Matta records Max Ernst and André Breton visiting for lunch at his Snedens Landing studio and viewing the painting. Science, conscience et patience du vitreur remained in the artist’s personal collection for fifty years before being acquired by the present owner in 1998. Perhaps the most important painting by Matta in private hands, the work has been featured in many of the artist’s most important museum exhibitions, including Matta’s early retrospective at Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 1959; the artist’s 1964 European travelling retrospective, which visited among other stops the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels; the 1985 retrospective at Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou; and the 1999 retrospective held at Fundació Caixa Catalunya in Barcelona and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Writing in 1947, André Breton, the father of Surrealism, describes the genesis of the present work. “Three years ago, Matta broke with the summarily named ‘non-figurative line’ which had been generally ascribed to him, halted the stars in their courses, reclosed the great geodes, snapped his whip to bring the whirlwinds to heel around him, and gave up spreading—lavishing, as he had done hitherto—the music of the spheres. Such a decision on his part must certainly have resulted from a complete change in his own life brought about by various conjunctions followed by new conjunctions, some dramatic in nature, other falling within the province of fortune… In such a case, a return to life implies nothing less than the necessity of recreating life itself. Moreover, human existence at ground level, particularly that of great artists, is not immune from the fumaroles hissing menacingly in the depths. Beyond, unscathed or not, but at any rate transformed for himself as for others, the miner sometimes appears at the summit of the crater” (“Matta, Three years ago…” in Surrealism and Painting, trans. S.W. Taylor, Boston, 2002 [1947], p. 189).
Science, conscience et patience du vitreur is haunted by the spectral figures which Matta conceived of following his “return to life.” The canvas swarms with these faceless, tubular creatures whose writhing actions across the abstracted plane connote the pain, anxiety, and fear which recall the agonizing suffering seen in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-15; Museo del Prado, Madrid) or Picasso’s Guernica. Matta leaves a certain ambiguity surrounding these figures, who suggest both victims and perpetrators. Marticia Sawin, describing the figures in the present work, writes how “they are all caught up in something sadistic and terrifying, but the activity takes place on a dehumanized plane where the viewer finds no point of entry” (“Matta in New York: A Fuse that Lit up the American Scene,” in Matta: 1911-2011, exh. cat., IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, 2011, p. 165).
Explaining his totem-like figures, Matta relays how “I was attempting to use a social morphology, not a personal psychol-morphology, to move away from the intimate, imaginary forms… towards the cultural, totemic expressions of civilizations… the formations in confrontations with social landscapes” (quoted in ibid., p. 166). These figures translate the artist’s long-held fascination with Indigenous art, ancient civilizations, and mythological imagery into painted form. Here, as Marga Paz notes, “the awareness aroused by the revelations of the physical and psychological atrocities caused by the Second World War led him to break with abstraction and introduced disturbing figures in the fields of color full of transparent veils” that he had first developed in his abstract paintings (“Matta,” in Matta: 1911-2011, op. cit., p. 165).
The Chilean artist had relocated from Paris to New York in 1939, following the Surrealist exodus brought about by the outbreak of war in Europe. Matta’s period in New York was both prolific and highly influential for the development of both Surrealism and the later New York School artists. Matta had his first one-man show in 1940 and participated in several seminal Surrealist group shows, including The First Papers of Surrealism and the inaugural exhibition for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in 1942. By 1943, Matta’s influence in New York was at its zenith, with the editor for View Magazine, Charles Henri Ford, writing that year how, “if you ask me who is the most talked about artist in New York, I would say it was Matta” (quoted in M. Sawin, op. cit., 2011, p. 169).
Science, conscience et patience du vitreur represents a seminal shift in Matta’s style away from the automatist-grounded abstractions which first won the artist acclaim in New York and toward a new biomorphic direction. In 1943, Matta became close to Marcel Duchamp, who at the time was living only a few blocks away from Matta’s New York apartment. Matta had first been introduced to Duchamp the previous decade, reading an article on Duchamp’s theory of passage—simultaneous movement within time and space—in painting in Cahiers d’Art. His reintroduction to Duchamp in 1943 helped shape Matta’s turn toward a more esoteric direction, as the two artists began to lunch frequently together, discussing shared interests in science, alchemy, and the occult. Matta’s The Bachelors Twenty Years Later, painted in 1943, is a direct homage to Duchamp’s earlier The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), which Matta saw in-situ in Katherine Dreier’s apartment. The fractured panes which Matta first explores here recur in the linear elements of the present work.
In 1945, Duchamp praised Matta’s painterly development, writing how “his most important contribution was the discovery of regions of space unexplored in the realm of art. He followed modern physicists in his quest of a new space which was not to be confused with three dimensional illusionism—finally he introduced in his space descriptive and figurative elements that further completed his major revelation. Although still young, Matta is the most profound painter of his generation” (quoted in ibid., p. 185).
“The war was becoming a ferocious thing,” Matta recalled of his radical shift in styles in 1944. “I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I began to feel society in a new way, for the first time… Then I passed in my work to these anthropomorphic beings” (quoted in ibid.). The figures which invade Matta’s abstracted background in Science, conscience et patience du vitreur are Matta’s first painted representations of the “Great Transparents,” creatures first conceived in André Breton’s “Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism—or else” (1942), which Matta had illustrated. The present work is also the first extant appearance of Matta’s mystical conception of Vitreur. Matta’s invented term, which evokes a glass-like or transparent being, is connected to the mechanomorphs which pervade Science, conscience et patience du vitreur, and especially the center-right elongated figure whose claw-like limbs appear to break through a pane of transparent glass. This figure’s anatomy and pose parallels that of Alberto Giacometti’s Hands Holding the Void—hardly coincidental, considering that Matta acquired the original cast for Giacometti’s 1934 sculpture from Julian Levy in 1943.
Matta’s stirring response to wartime traumas follows the similar monstrous motifs which fellow Surrealists including Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí developed in response to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, though in terms of scale and emotional impact, the closest referent for Science, conscience et patience du vitreur is Picasso’s celebrated Guernica. Matta was a temporary worker for the construction of the Spanish Pavilion for the 1937 Universal Exhibition, and thus was able to observe Picasso’s daily progress on his masterpiece depicting the devastating bombing of the Basque town during the civil war.
Matta completed the present work by Thanksgiving day in 1944, when Matta records Max Ernst and André Breton visiting for lunch at his Snedens Landing studio and viewing the painting. Science, conscience et patience du vitreur remained in the artist’s personal collection for fifty years before being acquired by the present owner in 1998. Perhaps the most important painting by Matta in private hands, the work has been featured in many of the artist’s most important museum exhibitions, including Matta’s early retrospective at Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 1959; the artist’s 1964 European travelling retrospective, which visited among other stops the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels; the 1985 retrospective at Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou; and the 1999 retrospective held at Fundació Caixa Catalunya in Barcelona and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.