Untitled (Psychological Morphology)

Matta and Onslow Ford were also fascinated by the mathematical objects photographed by Man Ray, which were included in the Exposition surréaliste d’objets at the Charles Ratton Gallery, Paris, in 1936 (Paris, Musée national d’arte moderne, André Breton: La Beauté convulsive, 1991, exh. cat., p. 302, ills.), and which Breton described on this occasion as “surprising concretizations of the most delicate problems of geometry in space” (ibid., p. 229). But it was not a matter of simply translating scientific, pseudoscientific, or mystical ideas into visual form. Matta’s psychological morphologies and “inscapes” are essentially visual: only on canvas can these mental and physical universes come into being.

The two-stage process that led to paintings such as this was described by Onslow Ford in relation to a canvas closely related to the Bergman painting, now known as Morphology of Desire (1938, Gordon Onslow Ford, on deposit at the San Francisco Museum of Art; Paris 1985, pp. 90–91, ill.), but reproduced in 1939 as Morphologie psychologique 37 (André Breton, “Des tendences les plus récentes de la peinture surréaliste,” Minotaure 12–13 [May 1939], ill. between pp. 17 and 23): in the first stage, “the canvas was begun with multicolored marks of the palette knife and the rapid manipulation of paint, to create in a few minutes an automatic base.

Second stage: the automatic ground was considered at leisure and, over days and weeks, the subject took shape [s’esquissa] in the painting and was brought to light to reveal a gelatinous field of blue-space-time-matter where a drama was played out between personages and objects” (Onslow Ford, in Paris 1985, p. 29). In the Bergman painting, Matta has only lightly worked over the initial automatic manipulation of paint, compared to other paintings of the period: sexual imagery is visible in male and female forms (for instance, the vertical shape at right and the opening at lower center), and other objects are faintly detectable, such as a tree at upper left and a female profile at lower left. These readings are not intended as definitive, for the configurations in this and other paintings of the period are meant to remain ambiguous.

Rather, they are indications of the complexity of Matta’s imagery, which shifts freely between abstraction and the figurative evocation of objects, people, and landscapes; it was in the tension between these modes of representation and the ensuing images that the “jamais vu” (the never seen), as Onslow Ford recalled (in ibid., p. 28), might be found.

— Entry, Dawn Ades, Surrealist Art: The Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1997, p. 188-89.

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