Roberto Matta valuation
Chilean architect turned Surrealist, who painted psychological space as if it were weather.
Roberto Matta was born in Santiago in 1911, qualified as an architect and worked in Le Corbusier's Paris office before Dali and Breton drew him into Surrealism in 1937.
What a work by Roberto Matta is worth
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Bio
Roberto Matta was born in Santiago in 1911, qualified as an architect and worked in Le Corbusier's Paris office before Dali and Breton drew him into Surrealism in 1937. He invented what he called inscapes — vast, luminous, deep-space landscapes of the mind, painted in thin washes and scraped lines, with no horizon and no fixed scale. He spent the war years in New York, where his automatism was directly influential on Gorky, Motherwell and the young Abstract Expressionists, before being expelled from the Surrealist group in 1948. He worked in Italy and France until his death in 2002.
The 1938 to 1947 period leads the market by a considerable margin; Matta then worked for another fifty years at high volume, and the later output is a much broader and more modest field. Separating the two is the substance of most valuations. He is significantly forged, especially in works on paper, and the estate archives in Paris and Santiago are the references. The prints and the crayon-and-pencil drawings are numerous. Prices are set in New York, Paris and the Latin American sales.
At a glance
- Born
- 11 November 1911, Santiago
- Died
- 23 November 2002, Civitavecchia
- Movement
- Surrealism
More on Wikipedia.
Minotaure, Gorky and the expulsion
Matta graduated in architecture from the Catholic University in Santiago in 1935 before working in Le Corbusier's office in Paris. Breton encouraged him and introduced him to the Surrealists, and he contributed drawings and articles to the journal Minotaure. He was expelled from the group in 1948 after his relationship with Arshile Gorky's wife, which was blamed in part for Gorky's suicide.
His first wife, Patricia O'Connell, later married the dealer Pierre Matisse, and his second was Germana Ferrari. His sons Gordon Matta-Clark and Ramuntcho Matta also became artists, so the family name alone does not settle authorship. He died at Civitavecchia, in Italy, in November 2002, aged 91.
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