Le Poète (Un poète de notre connaissance)
[1944 - 1945]
Le Poète (Un poète de notre connaissance)
[1944 - 1945]
This totemic figure drenched in blood is a truly arresting apparition.
Aged just 25, Roberto Matta met the Surrealists in 1937. Upon seeing some of his sketches, they immediately embraced him as one of their own. Against a wispy yellow background typical of this period, Matta represented a hybrid, hallucinatory figure. A revolver with a keyhole is pointed at the onlooker. This distinctly surrealist abject unfailingly brings to mind the ultimate surrealist action as described in the Manifesto: shooting randomly into a crowd.
| Domain | Peinture |
|---|---|
| Techniques | Huile sur toile |
| Dimensions | 94,5 x 76,5 cm |
| Acquisition | Achat grâce au mécénat de Tilder, 2016 |
| Inventory no. | AM 2016-854 |
On display:
Detailed description
| Artist |
Matta (Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren Matta Echaurren, dit)
(1911, Chili - 2002, Italie) |
|---|---|
| Main title | Le Poète (Un poète de notre connaissance) |
| Creation date | [1944 - 1945] |
| Domain | Peinture |
| Techniques | Huile sur toile |
| Dimensions | 94,5 x 76,5 cm |
| Inscriptions | S.INDIC.D.B.DR. : Matta / N.Y. 45 |
| Acquisition | Achat grâce au mécénat de Tilder, 2016 |
| Collection area | Arts Plastiques - Moderne |
| Inventory no. | AM 2016-854 |
Source :
New acquisition
“I met Breton. I was very young, completely inexperienced, and they told me I was a Surrealist. You see? I met them and I was so ignorant and so uninteresting for them. Then they looked at my drawings and said to me: You’re a Surrealist. I didn’t even know what it meant.” This was Roberto Matta’s surprising account of his first meeting with André Breton in Paris, in 1937, which would lead not only to his discovery of Surrealism but to a lifetime friendship. A year later, the new Chilean new recruit, as fascinated by Duchamp as by Breton, took part in the International Surrealist Exhibition organised by Breton, Paul Éluard, Duchamp and Man Ray, at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Freethinking, intense, energetic, Matta unlaced the corsets of the Surrealist aesthetic in imagining a new and dazzling mental space conjoining automatism of technique, precision of drawing and a colourful tachism, abstraction and figuration. In the magazine Minotaure in 1939, Breton remarked admiringly that “Every picture Matta has painted over the last year has been a marvellous game in which all the elements of chance come into play, a pearl that becomes a snowball as it absorbs the shimmering radiance of both mind and body.”
In 1940, Matta followed Breton and the Surrealist group into exile in New York, where in 1943 he supported Breton’s call for “a new myth for modern man”. Flamboyant in personality, astonishing in intelligence, cosmopolitan in spirit, Roberto Matta charmed New York high society. In 1945, a first retrospective of his work at Pierre Matisse’s brought together the pieces today considered to be his master works, among them the monumental X-Space and The Ego (now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou) and the enigmatic Le Poète (Un poète de notre connaissance) which the Centre Pompidou has just acquired, thanks to the financial support of communications consultancy Tilder.
It is a gripping sight, this blood-spattered totemic figure pointing its revolver at us – a coded but unmistakeable portrait of Breton, who in his Second Surrealist Manifesto offered firing at random into a crowd as an example of the free, spontaneous, revolutionary gesture. A scandalous idea that answered to the scandal of the bourgeois and fascist violence the Surrealists stood against. A politically committed artist, who understood Surrealism as “an awareness of living the poetics of revolution”, Matta offered in this portrait of Breton as Minotaur an homage to the genius who denounced contemporary tragedy and demanded its political emancipation. This naked, brutal, hallucinatory figure is also symbolic of Surrealist culture as a whole, stirred by myth and primitive art and driven by the desire for a new image of man.
Source :
in Code Couleur, n°27, january-april 2017, pp. 44-45
Bibliography
Matta : Francfort, Galerie Daniel Cordier, 26 mai-30 juin 1959 (sous la dir. de Will Grohmann) (cit. (titré avec un autre sous-titre "Portrait d''un poète. André Breton"))
Matta : Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d''art moderne, 3 octobre-16 décembre 1985 .- Paris : éd. du Centre Pompidou, coll. Classiques du XXe siècle, 1985 (sous la dir. de Alain Sayag) (cat. n° 65 cit. et reprod. coul. p. 137 (titré "Le Poëte (Un Poëte de notre connaissance)", collection particulière)) . N° isbn 2-85850-303-6
Voir la notice sur le portail de la Bibliothèque Kandinsky
Matta : Barcelone, Fundació Caixa Catalunya, 20 janvier-5 avril 1999 // Madrid, Museo nacional Centro de arte Reina Sofía, 24 avril-21 juin 1999 (reprod. coul. p. 99 (titré "Le Poëte", collection particulière)) . N° isbn 84-89860-07-6
Voir la notice sur le portail de la Bibliothèque Kandinsky
Victor Brauner, écrits et correspondances 1938-1948 .- Paris, Editions du Centre Pompidou/INHA, 2005 (sous la dir. de Camille Morando et Sylvie Patry) (cit. p. 235 et note 3, 236 note 16) . N° isbn 2-84426-283-X
Voir la notice sur le portail de la Bibliothèque Kandinsky
Matta, du surréalisme à l''histoire : Marseille, Musée Cantini, 15 févr.-20 mai 2013.- Heule, éd. Snoeck, 2013 (cat. n° 6 cit. p. 50, 252 (titré "Le Poëte", collection Ramuntcho Matta) et reprod. coul. p. 51) . N° isbn 978-94-6161-072-0
Voir la notice sur le portail de la Bibliothèque Kandinsky
Pierre Matisse, un marchand d''art à New York : Nice, Musée Matisse, juin-septembre 2021. - Paris : Bernard Chauveau Edition, 2021 (reprod. coul. p. 107) . N° isbn 978-2-36306-304-5
Voir la notice sur le portail de la Bibliothèque Kandinsky