Lot Essay
It's a Pity frames a single confrontation between two figures snatched, almost like a film still, from Matta's cosmic panoramas of the mid-1940s. Here, we have one of the most extraordinary spectacles of pleasure and pain -set in unspecified spaces mid-way between the torture chamber and the locker-room, the ancestral tomb and the space of science-fiction- to have been painted in this century. Under the double agenda of regression to the primitive and of futuristic aggression, Matta's helmeted figures may be read either as humans devolved into insects or as cyborgs equipped for chemical warfare.
It's a Pity belongs to the series of works that marked Matta's artistic coming of age, not only in their colossal scale, but also in their stylistic assuredness. These are the first mature works of the young man who had been, in Paris in the late 1930s and then in New York in the early 1940s, the favourite of André Breton and the last wunderkind of Surrealism.
In contrast to the dysfunctional "bachelor machines" of Marcel Duchamp, whose magnum opus The Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) had been the major source of inspiration for Matta since the beginning of his career in 1936, Matta's mechanomorphic beings were always engaged in some kind of intersubjective rapport. They connected in the most whimsical fashion at first, in his colored drawings of 1939 to 1945, where transparent humanoids cavorted in desert landscapes, flirted at cocktail parties, or got entangled in unimaginable forms of sexual intercourse. Yet as Matta stated years later in an interview with the critic Max Kozloff, after realizing what the Second World War was about, after the discovery of the concentration camps, he decided to express something more forcefully historical and societal, less personal and fanciful than in his earlier works. While remaining whimsical, his situations became theaters of terror. Matta's titles It's a Pity, Being With (1945), Accidentality (1947), The Violence of Tenderness (1949), all point to the same thing: the frightful absurdity of the self-inflicted predicament.
In It's a Pity, two figures, possibly a female victim facing a male torturer, confront one another in what looks like an interrogation scene in a war camp or, perhaps, nothing more (and nothing less) than a dreadful domestic scene, a great yelling match, with a couple locked together in an entanglement of spiky contraptions. Most memorable are undoubtedly the fantastically intricate areas of the faces. After their arrival in New York at the outset of the war, Matta and fellow Surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst abandoned their habit of drifting through the Paris flea markets. Visits to dealers of West Coast Indian, Eskimo, Oceanic art, in search for the great thrill of "the primitive," replaced those more serendipitous hunts.
All of Matta's figures from the year 1945 to 1947 wear the elaborate headdress of priestly participants in sacrificial rituals and feature the monstrous jaws and huge proboscises found in Oceanic statuary. Yet the transmogrifying of the figures' red and pink lips into miniature human bodies suspended upside down in front of the faces, figures which can also be read as male and female genitalia, has unmistakeable art historical sources. Here Matta remembered one of the most striking features of Picasso's famous 1912 sheetmetal Guitar (MOMA), a lesson Picasso had himself learned from tribal statuary--the Grebo masks from the Ivory Coast--and which he used again and again in his Surrealist works of the 1930s. The lesson was that forms can allow for a multiplicity of readings: the projecting cylinder of Picasso's guitar, which negatively marked the sounding hole of the instrument, could be read either as a gaping mouth in the middle of a face, or as male or female genitalia in the middle of a torso. Meanwhile, the erect, semaphoric poses of the figures and the deep colours of It's a Pity, ranging from ochres to browns, forest greens to grey, also derive from the polychrome totem poles from New Ireland and New Guinea.
Matta produced these heavily narrative paintings in New York precisely when the Abstract Expressionists were turning away from story-telling. Yet it is precisely this interest in narrative, which prompted the critic Clement Greenberg to disparage Matta as "the prince of the comic strips," that has proven--both in light of the return to narrative and figuration of the 1980s, and in light of the current obsession with the representation of the body in pain--so interesting.
Romi Golan
Yale University, New Haven, Oct. 1997
This painting is sold with a photo-certificate of authenticity from Germana Matta dated March 1997. It bears archive number 46/8
It's a Pity belongs to the series of works that marked Matta's artistic coming of age, not only in their colossal scale, but also in their stylistic assuredness. These are the first mature works of the young man who had been, in Paris in the late 1930s and then in New York in the early 1940s, the favourite of André Breton and the last wunderkind of Surrealism.
In contrast to the dysfunctional "bachelor machines" of Marcel Duchamp, whose magnum opus The Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) had been the major source of inspiration for Matta since the beginning of his career in 1936, Matta's mechanomorphic beings were always engaged in some kind of intersubjective rapport. They connected in the most whimsical fashion at first, in his colored drawings of 1939 to 1945, where transparent humanoids cavorted in desert landscapes, flirted at cocktail parties, or got entangled in unimaginable forms of sexual intercourse. Yet as Matta stated years later in an interview with the critic Max Kozloff, after realizing what the Second World War was about, after the discovery of the concentration camps, he decided to express something more forcefully historical and societal, less personal and fanciful than in his earlier works. While remaining whimsical, his situations became theaters of terror. Matta's titles It's a Pity, Being With (1945), Accidentality (1947), The Violence of Tenderness (1949), all point to the same thing: the frightful absurdity of the self-inflicted predicament.
In It's a Pity, two figures, possibly a female victim facing a male torturer, confront one another in what looks like an interrogation scene in a war camp or, perhaps, nothing more (and nothing less) than a dreadful domestic scene, a great yelling match, with a couple locked together in an entanglement of spiky contraptions. Most memorable are undoubtedly the fantastically intricate areas of the faces. After their arrival in New York at the outset of the war, Matta and fellow Surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst abandoned their habit of drifting through the Paris flea markets. Visits to dealers of West Coast Indian, Eskimo, Oceanic art, in search for the great thrill of "the primitive," replaced those more serendipitous hunts.
All of Matta's figures from the year 1945 to 1947 wear the elaborate headdress of priestly participants in sacrificial rituals and feature the monstrous jaws and huge proboscises found in Oceanic statuary. Yet the transmogrifying of the figures' red and pink lips into miniature human bodies suspended upside down in front of the faces, figures which can also be read as male and female genitalia, has unmistakeable art historical sources. Here Matta remembered one of the most striking features of Picasso's famous 1912 sheetmetal Guitar (MOMA), a lesson Picasso had himself learned from tribal statuary--the Grebo masks from the Ivory Coast--and which he used again and again in his Surrealist works of the 1930s. The lesson was that forms can allow for a multiplicity of readings: the projecting cylinder of Picasso's guitar, which negatively marked the sounding hole of the instrument, could be read either as a gaping mouth in the middle of a face, or as male or female genitalia in the middle of a torso. Meanwhile, the erect, semaphoric poses of the figures and the deep colours of It's a Pity, ranging from ochres to browns, forest greens to grey, also derive from the polychrome totem poles from New Ireland and New Guinea.
Matta produced these heavily narrative paintings in New York precisely when the Abstract Expressionists were turning away from story-telling. Yet it is precisely this interest in narrative, which prompted the critic Clement Greenberg to disparage Matta as "the prince of the comic strips," that has proven--both in light of the return to narrative and figuration of the 1980s, and in light of the current obsession with the representation of the body in pain--so interesting.
Romi Golan
Yale University, New Haven, Oct. 1997
This painting is sold with a photo-certificate of authenticity from Germana Matta dated March 1997. It bears archive number 46/8