I visited Meyer Schapiro one summer night in 1942 and found him engaged in conversation with a slender, well set-up, quite handsome young man, with blond hair falling in pale, flat lines across a high forehead. This was Robert Motherwell, then only up to the prolegomenon of what has been a brilliant career.
Motherwell had followed some courses by Schapiro and had studied the aesthetics of the American philosopher, David Prall, whom, during the evening, he frequently cited. Apparently blind to his own rather Saxon blondness, he stressed that evening the fact—to him, it seemed a fact—that Anglo-Saxon painters lack pictorial imagination. Certainly he would not speak that imprecisely today. His own writings on art are now quite precise and often elegant. He was probably expressing the influence over him at the time of the Surrealist painters, mainly Latins, who were then in New York, and most particularly that of Matta, with whom, as I discovered later, he was deeply involved.
I said he seemed young to me then. To be sure, he was younger than I. Delmore Schwartz, as I recall, lamented just a few years before he died: “There was a time when I used to think Dwight Macdonald was so much older than I—and I can’t feel that way any more.” And now Delmore is gone, and Dwight, whom he had thought so much older than himself, is still sociably shouting down those of his dinner guests who happen to be in the right against him. Probably the reason I was so struck by Motherwell’s youth that evening was a certain lack of ease he showed in conversation. It was that of a man not yet fully in touch with himself. Some years later, Motherwell noted this aspect of his personality in a piece in Possibilities, a review he edited with Harold Rosenberg, even characterizing himself there as at times “inauthentic.” Unhappily, the review was limited to just one issue, and the reason, as Rosenberg told me with some glee, was that Motherwell had decided to undergo psychoanalysis, and his analyst had found Rosenberg bad for his ego. It struck me that someone who would drop you for the sake of his ego would have to be someone who had taken you up for his ego’s sake.
Now on the night I met him, Motherwell made a request of Schapiro which in a way expressed his peculiar lack of contact with what I have come to recognize to be a very real intelligence. He wanted Schapiro to tell him of some encyclopedia about the class struggle, so that he could read up on it. Schapiro replied at once: “Fortunately there is no such thing. You can’t just read up on class struggle. . . . If you’re laid off a job, or have to go on strike, you may find out about it. . . . Also you have to read the radical press . . . regularly.” And I think he recommended the paper Labor Action, put out by the Shachtmanite faction of the Trotskyists. (Recalling that paper, one realizes that there is no such thing as a radical press today.) “In any case,” said Schapiro, “you can’t just open a book. . . . To learn about class you have to struggle yourself.” Motherwell saw at once that he had been imperceptive and blushed.
He had come to ask Schapiro for advice about working with the Surrealist painters then in New York, and he particularly wanted to find out how to deal with their leader, André Breton, with whom questions relating to the class struggle were bound to come up. I think it was Schapiro who suggested that Motherwell take me along with him on his next meeting with the Surrealist leader.
After that encounter at Schapiro’s I saw a lot of Motherwell. I was living on Irving Place in Greenwich Village then, he on Eighth Street, right smack across from Macdougal Street. Those were days when people would drop in on one another without first telephoning. Happy days! I think Motherwell must have liked this sort of Bohemian-ism; he was anything but formal then, in fact there was something quite unbuttoned about him. I can hardly remember any time between the summer of ’42 and the fall of ’48 when he didn’t have a little paint on his face or even on the tip of his nose, and his shirt always hung out over his pants—this was long before university students had made this their most typical attire. Anyway, it was with a bit of paint on his nose and his shirt hanging out that Motherwell took me to meet André Breton, the most courtly person I have ever known.
But before that I had met Matta, to whose apartment on Twelfth Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues I was taken by Schapiro only a few days after I had seen Motherwell. As I remember, it was a warm summer afternoon and on the way to Twelfth Street from his own apartment on Fourth, Schapiro told me something about the painter I was going to meet. Matta was of Basque origin, but born in Chile, and he was a member of the Surrealist group. In talking about Matta, Schapiro could not help but tell me something about himself. He had been shown two Surrealist paintings, one by an American, Gordon Onslow Ford, and the other by Matta, and he had remarked, pointing to the Matta, “The painter who did this was born in the country, . . . the other in a big city.” And it turned out that Schapiro had been right. “But how did you know Matta was born in the country?” I asked. “From his exuberant color,” was the reply.
We went up to the apartment. As I remember, it was a three- or four-room place, quite modest, but comfortable, and not without elegance, qualities which are not often found together in the apartments available in New York City today.
Matta welcomed Schapiro warmly, and I was introduced. The painter was very youthful, under thirty, and he was nervously alive, with deep brown eyes and wonderfully straight black hair. (He did not at all resemble the young Rimbaud, as the late Julian Levi has claimed in Memoirs of an Art Gallery. Rimbaud, from the photographs we have of him, was a very blond, very Nordic Frenchman, and Matta is swarthy and dark-haired, like the Latins of the wine country.) He laughed a great deal and his laughter immediately engaged you. It trilled and trilled, going up, up, upward, on soprano wings. Having heard Matta laugh, you wanted to say something to make him laugh again, but as it turned out, it was Matta who said the things which made you laugh, and him, too. For like most intelligent men I have known, he was accustomed to making himself laugh and he liked doing this, providing both the cause and the effect, humor and the exemplary enjoyment of it.
He introduced his wife, Ann, a young woman still in her twenties, from Lincoln, Illinois, of which I believe her father had been the mayor. Julian Levi has described her as unobtrusive. Now Ann Matta was certainly not forward, and she was not very articulate either, but she could not be called unobtrusive, for she was quite beautiful, with rather wild eyes and an expression I can only describe as one of infinite regret. But regret for what? For being married to Matta, who was so amusing, so charming?
We sat down and Matta produced a bottle of absinthe. He announced: “This is not anisette . . . this is the real thing.” So we, who thought we were the real thing, had a drink of the real thing. I had no inkling at the moment that for the next few years Matta would be one of my closest friends.
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What I valued most in him during those years was his sense of fun. Not many painters have humor, and Matta is one of the best of those who have. In his paintings and drawings he can be as funny as Miró or Magritte. And when you got to know him, you began to depend on his humor and didn’t feel quite up to par when he wasn’t around. But there were also occasions when his humor represented a certain danger. An example: I had collapsed a lung and had to lie on my back for six weeks until it inflated. Matta came to see me, as did other friends, but he was the one who made me laugh, and this was what I was not supposed to do, that is, if I wanted to recover. But I didn’t just want to recover. I also wanted to laugh, at things Matta said.
One day I was visited by Nicola Chiaromonte, one of the most interesting of the Italian intellectuals in exile here. He was my good friend, too, a wonderful friend. I can honestly say I’ve never known anyone I’ve liked better or respected more. While Chiaromonte was with me Matta arrived, bringing with him all sorts of good things: food, drink, and a tape recorder, so that I could do some work while I was recovering. But what meant most to me then was not his intention, however generous, but the manner in which he transformed the atmosphere of my place with a few words that set us laughing. Matta did an imitation of Harry Truman—this was the first year of Truman’s Presidency—flying through a snowstorm to meet his mother in Missouri, how he embraced her when they met, just which cheek of hers was kissed, and their dialogue after kissing. Then he went on to develop one of his ideal projects. He was going to arrange a musical concert for dogs at Madison Square Garden. The musicians would play notes too high for humans, but which canine ears could catch. So the concert would be just for dogs. They would all come in limousines, dressed up for the occasion, their owners reduced to the roles of chauffeurs and attendants. And Matta performed the whole concert. He imitated the dogs barking their applause when it was over, and the dogs leaving the Garden filled with music and contentment. I laughed throughout the performance, but Chiaromonte grew more and more somber, finally looked at his watch, and left. Afterward he told me: “I felt I couldn’t say anything to amuse you or interest you while he was around.”
Once we were well acquainted, Ann Matta told me how she had met her husband. She had gone to Paris in 1939, an art student—I think she was on a tour which was to include Florence and Venice, and in the Parisian pension in which she stayed she met Matta. Her story went: Matta, on being introduced, had stared intently at her, then seized hold of her and lifted her in the air over his head. “Let me down!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing?” Matta replied, “I’m trying to sweep you off your feet.” But he did set her down, and then when she told him that the next day she would be in Florence, he said “I’ll see you there.” When she got to the pension in Florence, there was Matta waiting for her. The same thing happened in Venice. They returned to Paris together, were married there, and shortly after took off for the United States just before war was declared.
A happy, a romantic beginning. But the continuation was hardly that. Matta called Ann pacharito, “little bird,” and she evidently did not like being called that. “He’s trying to make me smaller,” she said once, when someone asked her why she objected to the name. But I have heard other, more violent explanations of why that name should have been disliked, and why that name was chosen by Matta. In any case, their life when I got to know them, in ’42, was already one of bewilderment, frustration, and sadness for the young woman Matta had swept off her feet.
Why people who have been in love separate is to me one of the most interesting of all questions, and I know of no instance in which it can be answered fully. But my reason for dwelling on what happened to the Mattas is that what I saw happen to them, and I saw almost all of it, was also happening to other people I knew. I hardly think I am making of their fate an “instance of all fate,” to quote Wallace Stevens’s expression. But yet the fate of many other people was told in clearer, sharper, and more painful strokes in the life of the Mattas than in the lives of others I knew. Once again, how is one to explain this? The desire to give another pleasure ceases to be a joy and then becomes a form of pain. And pain continued under these circumstances is certain to become hate. . . .
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But I must come back to the summer of 1942. Motherwell, as he had promised, took me to André Breton’s apartment on Eleventh Street, and Breton, as he came forward to greet me, took us both with him into the 18th century. The movements of his hands when he talked were graceful, his voice musical, his diction perfect, and his sentences always in syntax: he never failed to take the subjunctive as required. Powerfully built, he gave the impression of a certain effeminateness; in fact he looked rather like Oscar Wilde, though he was, I think, better looking than Wilde, his features being more finely drawn. In revenge, as the French say, his hands were very large, and his fingers huge enough to seem quite monstrous. I often thought—influenced no doubt by his resemblance to Wilde—that those huge fat fingers had absorbed into their substance any feelings in him that were brutal, or in any case indelicate. Maybe these were the very fingers that had painted the portrait of Dorian Gray. . . .
In his apartment on Eleventh Street between Fourth and Bleecker Streets the walls were covered with paintings by Surrealist painters. As you walked up and down the living room conversing with Breton, those paintings looked at you from two sides of the room. Maybe some calculation had gone into this. Perhaps he thought you could not walk with impunity between the rows of Surrealist paintings, as, it has been said, you cannot under the palms. Reserved, always grave even when playful, very courteous yet capable of sudden extraordinary rages, Breton was, in my very short acquaintance with him, always likable and always compelling. Alfred Rosmer, the socialist, Communist, early Trotskyist, member of the Second, the Third, and then the Fourth International, became acquainted with Breton by chance during the late 40’s; his closest neighbor in Vence on the Côte d’Azur happened to be Breton. Rosmer told me in Paris that he found Breton to be so good and noble a person that he often deeply regretted never having been interested in the theories of Surrealism.
Was Breton really noble? In appearance, certainly. His voice had a noble music to it, and there was nobility in his manners and in his feeling for gesture. But more fundamentally? Certainly there is something noble about his prose, and I, for one, find his poems beautiful, as in his farewell to the painter Arshile Gorky, who hanged himself in his Connecticut studio:
How high you are
In the air
Less than in what you leave us
Less than in your name
Aimed at the great storms of my heart
And he held ideas that are certainly romantic: he held for instance that true lovers could reach orgasm by simply listening to each other’s heartbeat.
But there was another aspect to André Breton. When Violette Nozières, a Parisian schoolgirl, killed both her parents by putting rat poison she had obtained from the Pasteur Institute in their soup, Breton hailed her deed and placed her as a heroine above Jeanne d’Arc. And he celebrated her deed in a poem:
With all the curtains of the world
drawn over your eyes
It’s no use whatever
In front of their breathless mirrors
Their stretching the cursed bow of
ancestry and posterity
You no longer resemble anyone living
or dead
Mythological to your fingertips
Your prison is the mooring buoy they
try to reach in their sleep
They all come back to it, it burns
them
“Mythological to your fingertips.” Why? Because she had murdered her parents? But was Breton in favor of parent-murder? And how is one to understand this assertion in The Second Manifesto of Surrealism: “The simplest Surrealist act consists in going, revolver in hand, into the street and firing as many shots as possible at random into the crowd”? “This sentence has, of course, been too much quoted,” writes the French philosopher Ferdinand Alquié in his book The Philosophy of Surrealism. He grants this much, though: “The fact remains that Breton wrote it.”
And I associate with Breton’s definition of the “simplest Surrealist act” something else which I think in an even clearer way expressed his decision to put an end to further searching for the sacred with some assertion that it had been found. In the 50’s, Alberto Giacometti told me that at one time in the 30’s, known as the heroic period of Surrealism, Breton had asked him to sculpt an idol which the Surrealists could worship. Giacometti, an honest atheist and anarchist, though attracted to the Surrealists because of their approach to art, refused.
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A problem of moral ambiguity came up constantly in the Surrealist movement and in all dealings with Breton, and I think it was allied to an ambiguity about spontaneous creation which the Surrealists, under Breton’s influence, refused to try to clarify. They claimed to write automatically, that is, suspending the intervention of reason. But were their writings automatic? When Breton showed me his “Ode to Charles Fourier” (written in his hand), there were many corrections in the text. I should say much of it was probably written automatically, but still there were corrections.
However, that is not the important point. The important ambiguity in their behavior and their thought lay in their insistence that they were not interested in art or in literature, while at the same time they were striving to succeed, even as artists and writers who were not Surrealists, in literary and artistic careers. At the Eighth Street Club during the 50’s, Max Ernst, speaking for the Surrealist expression in painting and literature, said that Surrealists were not interested in creating beautiful works or proving that they were talented in the use of pictorial or verbal forms. What were they interested in? In discovering something about the subconscious. Had not the French philosopher Jean Wahl defined poetry as “consciousness of the unconscious”? All the same, Ernst’s statement implied that Surrealists were not interested in being described as artists. I answered from the floor that they were. Why, I wanted to know, did Surrealists exhibit their paintings, why were they interested in reviews of their work? Didn’t they like praise as much as the abstract painters did? Ernst was a man of great charm, and he replied thus: Yes, they liked praise just as much, but they didn’t want to earn it. But this was patently untrue, as became clear when I asked him if he would say that they hadn’t earned praise, and he was unwilling to answer roundly that they hadn’t.
Ambiguity in moral matters and ambiguity as to the right use of deliberation in writing and painting, these are the two aspects of what could be called the Surrealist Pact (with the devil?). But the moral ambiguity is the one that interests me here. I recall a meeting of the group at Breton’s, in which the latter, yielding to one of his unanticipated rages, against precisely Max Ernst, insisted that he leave, even opening the door so that he could do so more quickly. As Max Ernst made his way down the stairs, Breton shouted after him, “You are a monster of egotism!” Whereupon Matta went up to Breton and said, “But André aren’t we all such monsters, and isn’t that what you want us to be?” I do not recall that Breton answered “No.” And I do not think he could have answered Matta’s question unequivocally.
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Breton incarnated his movement. I use this word because when, in 1950, the French Surrealist youth, led by an American expatriate named Patrick Walberg, informed Breton that he was no longer a Surrealist (in his absence they had voted to expel him from the group) Breton replied with this shout (and right he was this time to shout):“I am Surrealism!” And he was Surrealism, what was left of it, when, after the fall of France, he came to the United States. But the lively and creative period of this movement was over. The advanced positions Breton had taken—his support for the writings of Lautréamont and the ideas of Freud—had been widely accepted. The painters and poets he had backed were all by then famous. On the other hand, some of the Surrealist ideas were now discredited—and most particularly by the political successes of Nazism. It was hardly revolutionary to praise sadism while Hitler’s agents were practicing it; and in fact the support for Sade was dropped during the war years and only revived much after the war—this time, curiously enough, by people persuaded of Marxism, people like Peter Weiss, the German playwright, and the Parisian Structuralists.
In any case, Breton, in New York City, past middle age, a cultural hero and also a hero of anti-culture, a successful revolutionary, widely suspected by his followers of now wanting to profit personally from the revolutions he had promoted, wary, disabused, alert to everything, and yet with an incredible capacity to become naive at a moment’s notice—that is, if he had to—cut the figure of a leader in a time of cultural shocks; a man who had come, not unscathed but not deeply wounded, through any number of volleys of slings and arrows. In fact, as early as 1932, in Communicating Vases, he had announced: “Beauty will be convulsive—or it will not be.”
Breton had visited Mexico in 1939. He had been with Leon Trotsky a guest of Diego Rivera’s; thus Breton had had many conversations with Trotsky. They signed a joint declaration on art and literature which appeared in Partisan Review in 1940. Naturally they did not agree on all matters, and sometimes their differences led to serious arguments. One bitter argument, according to Breton, was over their different evaluations of Zola and Jules Romains. Trotsky had been reading Romains’ portmanteau novel, Men of Good Will— everybody read it during the 30’s. I had friends—I won’t mention names—who would not go out with girls unacquainted with Men of Good Will (what could one talk to them about?). And Clifton Fadiman, then the literary critic for the New Yorker, had made this pronouncement: “We shall be remembered as the generation that read Jules Romains.” Well, today nobody reads Men of Good Will, though it is, in fact, a very readable book, civilized, engaging, and full of gossip, political and literary.
Now Trotsky had put Romains above Zola as a novelist, and Breton would not accept this judgment. Not a doubt of it, Breton was right on this matter. The interesting question is why Trotsky should have been so mistaken in his judgment. For Trotsky was often an excellent literary critic. His essay on Céline, written right after the publication of Journey to the End of the Night, is still the best assessment of that writer. Why was he mistaken about Romains’ novel? Here one can only speculate. In one of his articles on the Moscow Trials, Trotsky made a brilliant comparison between the manner in which the GPU obtained confessions and the manner in which Strigelius, the poet in Men of Good Will, who I think represents Romains’ understanding of Paul Valéry, went about creating a poem. Actually, I doubt very much whether Valéry wrote poems in accordance with the method of Strigelius, but it is very likely that the GPU put together confessions in that way. Perhaps Trotsky overrated Romains’ novel because it had enabled him to understand certain things that were taking place in Russia. But here, I think, he was generously confusing his own depth with Romains’ sophistication. In any case, he told Breton that Romains was a greater novelist than Zola, to which Breton replied that no one had even succeeded in writing a novel since Huysmans’ La Bas.
There was another conflict. About this Breton has written himself in his essay, “Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Else.” In this account, Breton did not reveal, as he did to me, how violent his dispute with Trotsky had been. Apparently there was a dog with Trotsky at Rivera’s villa in Coyoacan. Trotsky was fond of it, and as he sat conversing with Breton in the garden, the dog came up, asking to be stroked. Trotsky complied, and stroking the dog’s head, he said to Breton, “This is my friend.” “My friend!” Breton was shocked. As he wrote in his “Prolegomena,” if one is going to call a dog a friend, then what is to prevent one from calling a lobster retrograde, a mosquito reactionary? He went on, he told me—he is less explicit in his article—to object to what he considered a sentimental rhetorical indulgence on the part of someone who had been as tough-minded as Trotsky during and after the revolution. He had said of the Kronstadt sailors, “We’ll shoot them down like partridges.” Did not one have a right to expect a greater rhetorical self-control from a man whose nervous hands had held the levers of history?
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This was the substance of Breton’s complaint, and it seems Trotsky for his part was shocked that anyone should be shocked at his calling his dog his friend. As I remember at the time, Harold Rosenberg, to whom I showed Breton’s “Prolegomena,” and to whom I told what Breton had told me, was sympathetic to Breton’s position, and the two of us went through the whole affair again, I taking Trotsky’s view and Harold Breton’s, and though it wasn’t our argument, we too became quite violent in our assertions and denunciations.
The third argument was the worst. Breton had been reading William James, and he came upon the idea that maybe, like parasites on some huge animal, we are all inside or parts of some tremendous organism which we cannot even see. Breton thought that in this notion of James’s there might be the basis for a new myth. And he said as much to Trotsky, who was simply outraged at the idea. We did not need new myths, but additional clarity, Trotsky shouted at him. He had not rejected the Third International in order to announce his belonging to some gigantic animal not known even to Breton, or to James for that matter, or to any American Idealist. I do not know what Breton said in reply, but in his “Prolegomena,” he proposed “The Great Invisibles” as a new myth for the Surrealist group.
It is interesting to note that such differences could obtain between revolutionary leaders in politics and culture—even when they agreed politically. Paralleling the differences between Trotsky and Breton with regard to the value of reason and myth was one quite as sharp on a less elevated matter, that of intoxicants. The German scholar and literary critic, Walter Benjamin, whose radicalism has struck a chord among contemporary intellectuals, hailed the achievements of Surrealism in 1929 thus: “To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution—this is the project about which Surrealism circles in all its books and enterprises. This it may call its most particular task” (my emphasis). Benjamin does try to qualify such acceptance of intoxicants somewhat by noting that “. . . to place the accent exclusively” on them “would be to subordinate the methodical preparation for a revolution.” All the same, even as so qualified, his attitude is quite different from the one Trotsky expresses in My Life, in which he praises Markin, an obscure Russian sailor in the Baltic Navy, a gunner and a Bolshevik, through whom, according to Trotsky, “the October revolution was victorious.” Why was he so important? Apparently during the Petrograd insurrection there was much looting of the rich wine stores by the rabble: According to Trotsky, Markin instantly sensed the danger and went to fight it: “He guarded the wine stores: when it was impossible to guard them, he destroyed their contents. In high boots, he would wade to his knees in precious wines. Revolver in hand, Markin fought for a sober October.” This man, Trotsky claims, “beat off the alcoholic attack of the counterrevolution.” To make the issue still more complicated, it should be noted that for some observers of the October events, without the alcohol there might have been no insurrection, no revolution at all.
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Some weeks after our first meeting, Matta invited me to a party at which he was to exhibit a new painting of his, and publicly name it. It was to be something like a baptism but not too much like one. Among those present were the painters Chagall, Masson, Tanguy, Seligman, Motherwell, the composer John Cage, the dealer Pierre Matisse, and of course André Breton. At one point in the evening Matta produced his painting and gave it a name, which was, “The Earth Is a Man.”
It might have had any number of names, and I remember asking Breton: “Is there a definite Surrealist theory about how a picture should be named?” “Oh yes,” he said. “We have such a theory.” What was it? I can’t remember the words he used exactly, but the purport was that the name given to a Surrealist painting would have to be such that the picture would remain forever nameless. “Well,” I asked him, “take Matta’s painting, ‘The Earth Is a Man.’ Is it nameless, now that he’s named it?” “Yes,” said Breton. “It is now nameless, because the title, ‘The Earth Is a Man,’ is completely independent of that painting.” (It most certainly was.) “You can think about it without looking at the picture at all. You could type out that title, ‘The Earth Is a Man,’ and hang the typed letters up by themselves on the wall and they would have some effect on you.” “And I suppose,” I replied, “you could hang the painting up without the title.” “That’s just what I meant,” said Breton. “But couldn’t that have been done before he invited us here to give the painting a title and called it ‘The Earth Is a Man’?” “That would have been more difficult,” said Breton, unsmiling—he was always grave. “Because, had he shown it to us without having named it, we would have thought it lacked a title.”
As for Matta, he was quite happy with his title. In fact I’ve never in my life seen anyone so excited as he was that night. And he made a little speech about painting and his notions about painting. He said, “There will never be a recognizable object in a picture of mine. Never. Not one object, not the shadow of an object. No object is good enough to be in a picture of mine. No woman is beautiful enough. Let her hair be green, purple, or pink. No fruit, no bottle, no table, no tree. I will not put them on canvas. Never. I swear it.”
I remember asking Breton, “Is that the Surrealist theory of a painting?” “No,” Breton answered. “That’s his own idea. But as you see, he has charm, and his charm is Surrealist.”
What were Matta’s paintings like during the years of the war? Schapiro used to say that what Matta painted were éclats—bursts—not necessarily of color, though he painted these éclats in color, and not in his line drawings of that period, in which there were generally organic forms, often very comical. Now Matta had said that he didn’t paint anything, that he would not represent anything in his pictures. On the other hand he would not say that he was painting nothing. He did not claim, as Ad Reinhardt did years later, that he put everything into his paintings by leaving everything out. I think what Matta must have meant was that the “bursts,” or explosions, which took place on his canvases, were set off in the act of painting itself, and not calculated in advance. He was an automatic painter from the outset, with all the advantages and disadvantages that implies. I’m speaking of his work, of course, before Gorky came on the Surrealist scene, for Gorky’s appearance there was to change everything.
To be sure, the notion that a purely plastic “happening” not rehearsed in advance, but which occurs, so to speak, spontaneously in the act of painting—the notion, I say, that such a happening is an “act,” is to me a strange one, and so far I have not been able to find much justification for it. But perhaps action was meant in the weak sense rather than the strong sense of the word. Action in the strong sense has to destroy something, and it is hard to see what a pure plastic happening could destroy, any more than one can see how a burst of sunlight through a window could move around the furniture in a room. I note that Harold Rosenberg in his little monograph on Gorky, comparing that painter to Matta, says that the medium, the combination of paint, brush, and canvas with which Gorky worked, became a “mind” creating plastic ideas. But this is hardly different from the assertion that language itself creates ideas rather than providing a vehicle for expressing them. We are still a long way from action, at least in any strong sense of the meaning of that word.
It was Rosenberg who fathered the notion of “action” painting, and I do not want to drop that idea without some further examination of it. Evidently the term meant something to many painters, and so one cannot just dismiss it, even if in Rosenberg’s own writing there does not seem to be sufficient justification for its use. What meanings could it possibly have? It could have the meaning of the acting out of a fantasy or an impulse, of a convulsion or a spasm in connection with a canvas. As a matter of fact, Lee Krasner, the widow of Jackson Pollock, years ago implied this meaning to the term when she explained a mural Pollock made for Peggy Guggenheim by saying that Pollock’s physical movements in making the painting were expressed in its brushstrokes, so that the painting was an action painting insofar as the physical actions involved in painting it were an actual part of its content. This notion of action painting does have meaning, though here too I think it involves the weak meaning of action rather than the strong one.
Is there some other possible content to the term “action” painting? Perhaps what could be understood is that it represents a painting which says nothing, that is to say a painting without words. For objects, recognizable objects, have names, and any painting which refers to objects has words in it, and has to say something. The view has been sustained for a long time now that without such saying, that is without reference to objects which are necessarily also words, no painting can communicate an inner world. And so here would be yet another meaning of the term “action” painting: a painting which does not communicate an inner world. One could perhaps also call this equally well a silent painting, except for this: silence does say something, if only, “I’m not saying anything.” But that does not dispose of the matter, for it is probably wrong to translate an abstract painting into any kind of discourse. I would suggest that certain of the abstract paintings of Pollock, of Gorky, and of de Kooning are rather like those mathematical ideas in modern physics which, put into discourse, are self-refuting, but work perfectly well in mathematical physics, which for this reason the French philosopher Kojeve has called “silent.” So perhaps by action painting Rosenberg meant—or could have meant—“silent” painting.
(It may seem odd to refer to certain agitated abstract expressionist paintings—by Pollock, de Kooning, or Joan Mitchell—as “silent” paintings. The category “silent” is perhaps bizarre, but no more so than our time, in which we have often had to depend intellectually on terms that at first sight seem ill-suited. I am thinking not only of “action” painting, but also of Wyndham Lewis’s description of satire as a kind of “grinning tragedy.” If we can think of a tragedy as “grinning,” then may we not think of paintings as “silent” which shout their non-saying, and sometimes even scream it?)
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In the fall of 1942 Breton asked me to help edit the new Surrealist review he was preparing, VVV, and we got out one issue together (Breton’s “Prolegomena” appeared in this issue). But our relationship only lasted for about the length of time, a few months as it happened, needed to get that issue out. People used to say to anyone who said he knew Breton, “Do you know him well enough to have had a fight with him?” I can say I knew him that well.
Two things I learned from Breton. After I had introduced Harold Rosenberg to him—Rosenberg contributed to the first number of VVV—Breton said to me: “I know you think Rosenberg is very intelligent. But tell me this. Do you think he’s an artist? This is very important.” I said I thought Rosenberg was an artist, but what really struck me was my own surprise that it should be important to be able to answer this question about someone affirmatively. But if it wasn’t important to be an artist, then why were we getting out a magazine devoted to art? I think my difficulty was that I thought of art as something produced by someone we then called an artist because of what he had produced. I did not think of the artist as being himself an expression of his productive life. In other words, I wasn’t used to thinking of the artist subjectively. Curiously enough, I had thought of him too behaviorally, as if he were merely the foreman of his factory rather than its main and most significant product. I had thought of art in terms of making, and not in the terms Valéry expressed in his formula:“Faire, et en faisant, se faire” (“Make, and in making, make oneself”).
Then there was something else I got from Breton. At VVV we had received a manuscript from the French critic and scholar René Etiemble—it was an attack on Jacques Maritain. I did not care for the article and I wanted to reject it. I had met Etiemble in 1940 in Chicago and Breton knew that I was acquainted with him. When I said I wanted to reject his article Breton asked me, “What about the man? What about Etiemble? Do you reject him?” “No,” I said, “I only want to reject his article.” “Well,” said Breton, “if you don’t reject the man, then I think you’ll take the article, especially in view of the much finer articles which you know that he can write.” I do think that Breton was quite right about this, and that a magazine should be edited in that spirit.
And now I think it is only right to warn my readers that certain unpleasant things will necessarily be told. They deal with the increasingly cynical view of sentimental and sexual relations which developed in a very few years’ time among the Surrealists generally, and then took on an explosive violence in the life of Matta. First of all, Matta broke off with Ann, and under these circumstances: still a young woman, Ann told him she wanted to have a child. He agreed, but on the condition that she agree to a divorce. He suggested this as a quid pro quo. He would produce a child with her, if she would obtain a divorce from him. And this is how it happened. They remained together until she became pregnant, and after she gave birth, they were divorced. Only nothing of this kind takes place exactly as planned. She did not give birth to just one child, but to two, twins, identical twins, and then Malta left her. Shortly afterward he remarried. His new wife was Patricia Connolly, a wealthy New York girl whom he had met at Gloucester.
But I referred to cynicism in the whole Surrealist group, and there are no doubt some who will deny that the Surrealists stood for cynicism in sentimental relations. Now there was one who certainly did. This was Marcel Duchamp, the artist of whom Gorky had said that he had the most sarcastic profile of any person he had ever known. Duchamp’s was the willed headstrong cynicism of a man who at some point in his life must have been unbelievably romantic, and he expressed his cynicism with an irresistible verve. He used to argue with me—and this is twenty-five years before Structuralism—that there were no values, only differences. Instead of insisting on the original design of every snowflake, he made the point that every light bulb was different from every other, thus ready-mades were unique. And he delighted in reducing the human body (in painting) to its mechanical conduits for foods and fluids. Who else but he would have thought of entering a urinal into an exhibition of sculpture? “The Bride Stripped by Ferocious Bachelors”—that was his image of sexual relations, and he had great prestige and influence among the Surrealists, especially with Matta.
Of Breton, for example, it is said by Mary Ann Caws in her book on him that he expressed reverence for women. This, no doubt, because of the love lyricism in works of his like Nadja and L’Amour Fou. In addition to which, there were those signs of nobility in him which I have already indicated. But I am not sure that it extended to those moral matters in which sex is involved. He once boasted that no woman had ever seen him nude when not “pricked out” for women’s pleasure, if I may here use Shakespeare’s expression. How different is this though from the attitude expressed in Paul Eluard’s beautiful but hardly noble line of verse: “Only your kisses are to be kissed.” What about the rest of the woman? Is that to be thrown away, obliterated, forgotten? When one looks closely at Breton’s love lyricism, one finds what is certainly a noble tonality, but I think it is a dream of the woman that makes the writer sound this note, and not any real woman with her actual problems. Walter Benjamin has seen this too. In his essay on Surrealism he writes: “The lady, in esoteric love, matters least. So, too, for Breton. He is closer to the things that Nadja is close to than he is to her.”
Breton insisted on the importance of games. He had said that whenever humanity suffers a catastrophe—and he was in New York City during the time we were undergoing the catastrophe of World War II—games are going to be invented, and in any case ought to be played. He particularly liked “Truth or Consequences” and he liked to set consequences, as for example: you have to be my slave for this evening, or you must never read anything you wrote for the next year. But I must say that whenever Breton was present and “Truth or Consequences” was played, the game did not get out of hand or become uncivilized. I had played the game with others of his group when he was not present, and then it almost always did get out of hand. I remember being given this consequence for refusing to answer some question truthfully: “Your penalty is this: you must kiss my wife, and right on the mouth.” This sort of thing was typical.
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Having remarried, Matta took a house on the Palisades and used to drive there for weekends, for he maintained his apartment in New York. It was in the New York apartmnt and in his home on the Palisades that we together planned and brought out a little review, Instead. When people asked what the title represented we replied that it meant “instead of all the other reviews.” Matta made up the format of the magazine and selected the drawings to be represented and I edited the literary material. With each issue we published—Instead did not come out at regular intervals—we threw a party, and at these parties made the magazine up. And so it must be realized that it was not made up by people who were entirely sober.
Matta designed the review in such a way that it was hard to find the continuity of most of the articles. You had to wind your way from page to page hoping to take up again something you had begun to read. He said he wanted the review to be a sort of labyrinth. At the time readers did not appreciate this, but Matta held that if they didn’t know how to make their way from page to page they were not intelligent enough to be readers of Instead. I think we lost a lot of readers because of this. But since the 60’s when taste changed and when absurdism became a kind of faith (I think absurd), people who saw the old issues of Instead developed a kind of taste for it. Today a review made up like that would probably find a public.
To get back to the unpleasantness which I announced, at that time many people broke off with each other. Patricia Connolly, so recently married to Matta, expressed her shock that Pierre Matisse was going to leave his wife, Teeny, to whom he had been married for over twenty years. I had no idea when she confided this to me that she was at that moment planning to divorce Matta and marry Pierre Matisse herself, and that the whole thing had been arranged between the two of them. For his part Matta, who was quite sensitive to the breakups that were taking place or threatening around us, began to say that this was a time of hemorrhages, and in accordance with the language game favored by the Surrealists, he broke up the word “hemorrhage” and spoke instead of the “Age of Hemorrh”—in fact he made a painting, a bleeding, threatening, engulfing painting which he called by that name. I think it was one of his best. I remember when he showed it to me. “You know I never talk about my work but this is something special.” I think it was.
In back of Matta’s place on the Palisades there was a kind of dollhouse which he used as a playroom for his two sons, and as a bedroom too when they stayed over on weekends. I mention the doll-house because it came up one day when we were talking with Marcel Duchamp about a party for the next issue of Instead.
Duchamp made this suggestion: why didn’t we have a masked man in the little house, and why didn’t we announce to each woman who came to the party, even as she entered, that just as there were foods to be eaten and liquors to be drunk, so there was a man in a mask in the children’s house to serve any purpose a woman might have? Matta was delighted with the idea and at once agreed. The only problem was where to get a man whom we could count upon to make good what we were ready to promise. Then Duchamp maliciously asked Matta, “What will you do if Patricia goes into the children’s house?” I think he must have known then about her and Pierre Matisse. Matta replied, “I don’t want her to.” “Why not?” asked Duchamp. “Because,” Matta said, “I love her and she loves me.” “I think you’re stupid,” said Duchamp. “All you had to say was that you love her.” Even to have said only that would have been to have said something false.
In all the struggles among married couples that were taking place perhaps the most unpleasant to think of then as now was the struggle between the painter Arshile Gorky and his wife, Agnes Magruder, who was called Mougouche. Here Matta was deeply involved and so I have to tell the whole story.
Gorky had been known as a painter in New York for many years; many were aware of his outstanding qualities but I think his present fame was due to his discovery by André Breton who first knew how to appreciate him, and singled him out from all the painters in New York as the one to be most admired. Also he owed something to Matta; there is no question about this. Meyer Schapiro in his introduction to Ethel Schwabacher’s Arshile Gorky has sensitively stated what this debt was. Gorky, previous to meeting Matta, had imitated Picasso and Miró (he did not, however, have Miró’s sense of humor). I remember going to a show at the Whitney at which one of Gorky’s paintings covered an entire wall and talking to him about it afterward. It was an analytical piece of Cubism which Picasso might have painted himself, and it was as well painted as any Picasso. When Gorky asked me what I thought of it, I indicated that I thought it was a wonderful painting, but that it was not his painting. Gorky replied, “You mean it’s a Picasso.” “Yes,” I said, “though painted by you.” “Well,” he said, “I think Picasso is right, so why should I paint differently?” But if he had not begun to paint differently his would not be a famous name in painting today.
However, he did begin to paint differently, and he did this after he had met Matta. As Schapiro has indicated, when Gorky imitated Picasso or Miró he was like a son imitating a father, but when he imitated Matta he was like a brother imitating a brother. Matta could paint a Matta and Gorky could not quite paint a Gorky, but Gorky could paint a more beautiful Matta than Matta himself was able to produce—though I must say there is a certain energy in Matta, so that even his poorer paintings are not quite dead and there is a certain lack of tension in even the most beautiful paintings of Gorky. In any case, at the time I’m speaking of, Gorky had met Matta, tried to assimilate his “bursts” into a style of his own, and was making some of the wonderful paintings that thrilled André Breton, and at that point he developed cancer.
I went to see him at about that time. It was just after the war and I was on the point of getting out a French issue of Dwight Macdonald’s magazine, Politics. I asked Gorky to contribute a drawing to it, which he did, a beautiful color drawing in a new technique he had invented but which could not be used for the review; it would have been spoiled in black and white. I went to see Gorky to return the drawing to him but he would not take it back and urged me to keep it and then he told me that he had cancer and something, just something, of his other difficulties as a result of having cancer. And then he said, but without any sentimentality or self-pity that I could notice, “Well, maybe I’m like Job.”
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Though Gorky was to die a suicide less than a year after that conversation I had with him, he was always the painter, the almost perfect painter, in the formalist sense, and never the poet of that distress in which he and we all lived. There is a vast difference between the formalist conceptions which determined Gorky’s art at its most abstract and the assertion of Matta, “There will never be a woman on my canvas, not even one with green hair.” I think Matta, if the lesser artist as a painter, was on the other hand a poet of our distress, as a Surrealist indeed he had to be.
I should like to quote here from an interesting statement in Heidegger’s essay, “Why Poets,” which I did not read until some years after the events I am describing, but which does apply to them. It is from Heidegger I took the term “time of distress.” But here are the philosopher’s own words:
Long is the time of distress of this world’s night. . . . In the middle of this night, the time’s distress is greatest. It is then that the indigent epoch no longer even feels its indigence. . . . To be a poet in the time of distress . . . is to try to seek the traces of the gods who have fled. . . . Not only is the sacred, insofar as it is a trace of divinity, lost, but even the traces of that lost trace are almost obliterated. . . .
Heidegger also makes the point that it is useless in such a time, and I think he implies even wrong, to use violence so as to make the sacred appear. “The spirit must blow where it lists.” Now if the Surrealist movement in its criticism of “the paucity of reality” in modern life, and in its criticism, too, of conventional morality and conventional art, stimulated those artists attracted to it to be poets of the time of distress, members of the group, and André Breton particularly, often did try to start up the sacred by some act of force.
But I think the great thing about the Surrealists is that they were attuned to the distress of their time—a distress which continues into ours, and to which the American abstract artists, including Gorky, were not attuned. There is one single exception—Jackson Pollock. But this is a complicated matter, too complicated a matter for me to treat here with the fullness it deserves.
Does the representation of real distress, such as ours, involve a compact with the devil? Who perhaps asks nothing more of us than to claim to have seen God when we have not. How many have refused to make such a compact? “And I have seen what men believe they see,” exulted Arthur Rimbaud in his poem “The Drunken Boat.” But later, in “A Season in Hell,” he conceded, “I had declared sacred the disorder of my brain.”
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So much for the spiritual differences between Matta and Gorky. Complicating all this was the fact that Mrs. Gorky, a bold, handsome, and engaging woman, was attracted to Matta and he to her. And then Gorky went driving with his dealer Julian Levi and other friends; there was an accident, in which no one was hurt but Gorky, but he seriously. His spinal cord was affected and his right arm partially paralyzed. He was told by the doctors who attended him that he would recover the use of his arm in time, but he did have reasons to fear that he might not, and in this state, afflicted with cancer as he was, the right arm which produced all he could be proud of useless, he was visited in the hospital by Matta and Mougouche. In this visit, under the circumstances, one may see a cruelty that is almost inexpiable.
It was late summer in 1948; I was living in Sag Harbor, Long Island. Someone called me and told me that Gorky had left the hospital he had been brought to after the accident, gone to his place in Connecticut, and hanged himself in his studio.
Beyond these facts all that I know was told me by Matta. He came from New York to see me a few days later and told me he was on his way to Maine where he was going to join Gorky’s wife. He had seen Gorky, though, just before the latter’s suicide. Here is how it happened.
Gorky had called him from the hospital and asked him to meet him in Central Park. (This was 1948 and Central Park on a Sunday in those years was a very different place.) According to Matta, he had tried to dissuade Gorky from leaving his hospital bed, but could not, and so he consented to the meeting. They met in a deserted spot agreed upon over the phone. Gorky, who was quite tall, well over six feet, carried a heavy cane in his left hand and had a leather collar around his neck (which had been near-broken in the automobile accident). He said to Matta, raising the cane in his left hand, “I’m going to give you a good beating. You are very charming, but you have interfered with my family life.” He raised the cane in his left hand, and holding it upright, added this: “Besides, whatever your talents, you don’t understand work. Like the Soviet Union. You don’t understand it.” (Gorky was, during the war, pro-Russian. Once he said to me, “The Russian peasants are beating the German mechanics.” And when I remarked, “Why should Stalin say anything about art when he’s not interested in it?,” Gorky replied, “If he were, he wouldn’t be in the Kremlin, he’d be on Fifty-seventh Street.” But Gorky never joined the Communist party, and I believe Matta after the war did, and that he supports the Communist position today.)
But on that Sunday in Central Park, there was Gorky threatening to chastise Matta for not understanding the Soviet Union and work. He raised the stick, and Matta ran. And Gorky ran after him. And Matta said he was afraid of only one thing, that Gorky would fall and that his head would come off. So Matta ran out of the park, and at some point Gorky stopped chasing him, got in a cab, and went to his Connecticut farm. There he hanged himself.
Anyway, Matta told me, the Surrealists had always exalted suicide, they had made heroes of the writers Jacques Vaché and René Crevel, who were suicides. They could now make a hero of Gorky, a moral hero, but in fact they were making a villain of him, Matta. He did not try to conceal his excitement and I must submit here that it did not seem to be hysterical; he admitted no guilt toward Gorky. His love for Mougouche, he said, was beyond what he had felt for any other woman, and he seemed to claim that she, in her turn, felt that way about him. The dead Gorky was a sacrifice which had made possible their present ecstasy. He was aware of what was being said of him. Breton had even called him a murderer, and hung up on him; many other former friends had cut him on the street. The American artists whom he had influenced now had a pretext for ignoring or attacking him. Pierre Matisse had made public his intention to marry Matta’s wife, Patricia, who now asked Matta for a divorce. Moreover, Matisse dropped him from the painters regularly exhibited in his gallery.
So his misfortunes were mounting, but he told me with an exuberance I could not but think was genuine that all these things mattered nothing to him compared to his feelings for Mougouche. Had he felt that way before Gorky’s suicide? As a matter of fact, he had not, he said. I did not spare him, but asked: did there have to be a corpse? He did not answer this directly; his reply was that the Surrealist movement had taught sadism and even insisted on it. The question was not whether a person happened to be sadistic, but whether he had gone into sadism deeply or superficially, as if it were some discipline, like folklore, or architecture, or ancient languages. He said: didn’t Breton tell us the Marquis de Sade was a greater man than Christ, and that he, Breton, who hated any reference to God, was still willing to follow Swinburne’s example and call the Marquis “divine”? And he brought up the matter of the simplest Surrealist act, the emptying of a revolver into as many passersby as possible. “Could anyone who subscribed to that idea,” he asked, “attack me?” Now the Surrealists subscribed to that idea and also attacked him. I must note, too, that in 1950 I read in Combat an apology by the Surrealist poet, René Char, for not having carried out the simplest Surrealist act; he had not fired at a single passerby, let alone as many as possible, and the implication was that he should have done this.
Despite his exuberance, I had to have some doubts about what was in store for Matta, and in fact, a few weeks later, he and Mougouche had broken off. Their love was as dead as the husband they had humiliated, and when I next saw him (a few months later, in Paris) he was close to a nervous breakdown. Evidently there was a difference between the support for sadism as an ideology, and a dependence on sadism in fact. Certainly he had found out something about himself he had never taken cognizance of before his great moment of exhilaration.
I must note here that in his little book on Gorky, Harold Rosenberg took what seems to me a very slanted view of the tie between the artist he favored and Matta. Rosenberg’s judgment here, based, as he admitted in his text, on gossip, is arbitrary, unconvincing, and I will go as far as to say willful. Matta no more wanted to destroy Gorky than to be destroyed by him.
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I think that the year 1948 may have marked the end of Surrealism as a movement.
