Dos du prothale

In 1936, Matta met Salvador Dali, who introduced him to André Breton; impressed by Matta's drawings, Breton invited him to join their Surrealist group in 1937. In the company of André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, Matta immersed himself in psychological investigations and parlor games. At the urging of Onslow-Ford in 1938, he took up painting as well as continuing to draw using the methods of automatism that drew on the contents of the unconscious mind. Matta called his early works "Psychological Morphologies", as they dealt with the structural transformation of mind images. He created a series of these Morphologies in 1938 of which Dos du prothale is one. These psychological landscapes are organic in style and content and very influenced by the surrealist movement.