:host { --enviso-primary-color: #FF8A21; --enviso-secondary-color: #FF8A21; font-family: 'boijmans-font', Arial, Helvetica,sans-serif; } .enviso-basket-button-wrapper { position: relative; top: 5px; } .enviso-btn { font-size: 22px; } .enviso-basket-button-items-amount { font-size: 12px; line-height: 1; background: #F18700; color: white; border-radius: 50%; width: 24px; height: 24px; min-width: 0; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; text-align: center; font-weight: bold; padding: 0; top: -13px; right: -12px; } Previous Next Facebook Instagram Twitter Pinterest Tiktok Linkedin Back to top
Deux personnages debout

Deux personnages debout

Roberto Matta (in 1961)

Ask anything

Loading...

Thank you. Your question has been submitted.

Unfortunately something has gone wrong while sending your question. Please try again.

Request high-res image

More information

Specifications

Title Deux personnages debout
Material and technique Oil, sand and plaster on canvas
Object type
Painting > Painting > Two-dimensional object > Art object
Location This object is in storage
Dimensions Height Error: 184,5 is not a valid BCD value cm
Width 160 cm
Artists Artist: Roberto Matta
Accession number 2701 (MK)
Credits Purchased 1964
Department Modern Art
Acquisition date 1964
Creation date in 1961
Provenance Gallery Gimpel Fils, London 1964
Exhibitions Zurich 1964; Rotterdam 2010; Rotterdam 2017b
Internal exhibitions Collectie - surrealisme (2017)
External exhibitions Dalí, Magritte, Man Ray and Surrealism. Highlights from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2023)
A Surreal Shock. Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2023)
Research Show research A dream collection - Surrealism in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Literature Zurich 1964, cat. no. 20; Rheims 1966, p. 271, fig. 3
Material
Object
Geographical origin Chile > South America > America

Entry catalogue A dream collection - Surrealism in Museum Boijmans Van beuningen

Author: Marijke Peyser

In early 1961 Roberto Matta spent three months in Chile, his native country. During that time he was interviewed by the local press on countless occasions. Asked ‘How do you paint?’, Matta replied that he started by making marks on the canvas and then went in search of something unfamiliar, something that he had never been seen before, something new. His method calls to mind the lesson Leonardo da Vinci taught his pupils: ‘I don’t draw horses, I see them in the marks that I make.’[1] In the conversations, the question as to whether there was a permanent theme in his work also came up. Matta’s answer was unambiguous: ‘Man, always man. Man is always the same. What varies is the emotion he experiences, the place where he lives.’[2]

Man also plays the main role in the painting Deux personnages debout. Two forms stand opposite one another; a male and a female figure. They are shown at peace in a non-threatening situation, which is an exception in Matta’s oeuvre: his paintings usually depict apocalyptic scenes, like L’idée noir (1942) or Le goût d’apocalyps (1957-58). Deux personnages debout was painted in a technique unusual for Matta. Instead of painting very thinly in oils, the artist mixed the paint with sand. The paint was partially absorbed by the sand, muting the colours – blue, brown, white and beige. In some places the canvas is still visible.

Matta, who trained as an architect, did not begin to paint until he was twenty-seven, in the summer of 1938, at the insistence of his friend Gordon Onslow Ford.[3] The technique he used then and spoke about in the interviews was automatism, the ‘key’ to his oeuvre and one of the fundamental principles of Surrealism championed by André Breton.[4] Matta met Breton in the autumn of 1937 in his Galerie Gradiva in Paris. Breton immediately bought two of Matta’s drawings that he saw there: ‘Breton and others there looked at my drawings and said: you are a Surrealist. I had absolutely no idea what that meant,’ said the artist.[5] In Breton’s book Le surréalisme et la peinture (1965 edition) he devoted more attention to Matta and his work than to any other Surrealist. In ‘Des tendances les plus récentes de la peinture surréaliste’ (1939) Breton wrote: ‘Last year every painting by Matta was a feast in which chance was all.’[6] According to Breton, Matta gave his protagonists a way out of distressing situations: the composition offers a new perspective, a geometric place which – literally – enabled them to escape the conflict which they have to deal with on the canvas.[7]

Footnotes

[1] Da Vinci/Richter 1980, p. 36.

[2] Paris 1985, p. 289.

[3] Ibid., p. 268.

[4] Washington 1992, p. 239.

[5] Paris 1985, p. 267.

[6] Breton 1965, p. 146.

[7] Ibid., p. 192.

Show research A dream collection - Surrealism in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Show catalogue entry Hide catalogue entry

All about the artist

Roberto Matta

Santiago 1911 - Civitavecchia 2002

Bekijk het volledige profiel