In the mid-1940s, Matta's work changed dramatically. Throughout the first half of the 1940s, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, William Baziotes, Peter Busa, Robert Motherwell, and others met frequently with Matta to learn about his personal ideas about Surrealism. These traits, combined with a shared interest in automatist art-making techniques, allowed Matta to quickly form relationships with several of the young New York School artists. When Matta arrived in New York City, he was the youngest and most outgoing of Surrealist emigres. Matta was well established within the Surrealist group by the time that he was forced to flee Europe for America in the fall of 1939.
Duchamp's influence can be seen particularly in the complex multi-dimensional spaces and fantastical machines that define much of Matta's mid-career work. He later referenced this work explicitly in The Bachelors Twenty Years After (1943), and he continued to reference Large Glass throughout his career. Equally as influential was Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her bachelors, Even) (1915-23), which Matta also encountered around this time. The work's mixture of formal abstraction and social consciousness had a lasting impact on the development of Matta's own personal style and artistic practice. Here, Matta saw Pablo Picasso's seminal work, Guernica (1937). The same year, Matta worked with the architects designing the Spanish Republican pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition. Sensing an emerging talent and common spirit, Breton bought several of Matta's drawings and invited him to officially join the Surrealist group in 1937. Dalí, in turn, encouraged the young artist to show some of his drawings to André Breton. It was through Lorca that Matta was introduced to Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. His relationships with Frederico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and Gabriela Mistral proved particularly influential. He stayed on to work with Le Corbusier for the next two years.ĭuring this time, Matta established close friendships with several members of the Latin American literary avant-garde. He settled in Paris, France, in 1935, becoming an apprentice in modernist architect Le Corbusier's studio. Not long after this project, Matta left behind his privileged upbringing and conservative education to join the Merchant Marines. In his final year of school, Matta devised an ambitious architectural project called the "League of Religions." Signaling an early interest in both biomorphism and fantastical spaces, his building designs were modeled after suggestively posed female bodies. From 1929 through 1933, Matta studied architecture and interior design at the Sacre Coeur Jesuit College and the Universidad Catolica of Santiago.
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