Gay Above All

Artist Roberto Matta (Chilean, 1911-2002)

Date1959

Dimensions59 5/8 x 81 3/4 in. (151.45 x 207.65 cm)

Mediumoil on canvas

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LineGift of The Georgia Welles Apollo Society

Object number

1999.5

On View

Toledo Museum of Art (2445 Monroe Street), Gallery, 05

Label Text“Everything urged me to believe that I should apply myself to displaying the world I carried within me… It was the sub-conscious in its burning, liquid state.”– Roberto Matta In the mid-1930s, while in Madrid, Spain, Roberto Matta (also known as Matta) met famed poet Federico García Lorca, who introduced him to Surrealist Salvador Dalí. Invited by André Breton, the founder of the movement, to become an official member of the Surrealists, Matta adopted their technique of automatism—automatic drawing they believed was controlled by the unconscious mind. By 1938, he began his “inscapes” or “psychological morphologies,” as he called them. Alien and abstract but also hauntingly familiar, the compositions are characterized by vivid hues and the coalescing of architectural space with biomorphic forms. With the outbreak of World War II, Matta moved to New York. He translated Surrealist ideas into English, greatly impacting artists now associated with Abstract Expressionism. By the time he painted Gay Above All, Matta no longer associated himself with Surrealism, as he was instead interested in engaging with the social and political worlds around him. However, there are hints of his Surrealist past in this work. The different shapes and colors are evocative of an otherworldly landscape or of particles swirling in an imaginary, cacophonous universe.Published ReferencesToledo Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art Masterworks, Toledo, 2009, p. 331, repr. (col.).Exhibition HistoryToledo, Toledo Museum of Art, Inspired Giving: The Apollo Society 25th Anniversary Exhibition, October 15, 2010-February 13, 2011, p. 32, repr. (col.) p. 32.