Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional Search Ir al contenido principal

Navegación superior (EN)

About Us Support Become Friend Shop Tickets
Español
Visit Collection Exhibitions Activities Education Search
  • Visit
  • Collection
  • Exhibitions
  • Activities
  • Education

Thyssen - Navegación superior (EN)

About Us Support Become Friend Shop Tickets
Español
©
Roberto Matta. ADAGP, Paris / VEGAP, Madrid
Matta

Untitled

1942 - 1943
Oil on canvas.
30.5 x 40.5 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
670
(
1975.27
)
Not on display
  • Level 2 Permanent Collection
  • Level 1 Permanent Collection
  • Level 0 Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
  • Level -1 Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Level 2
Permanent Collection
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 13 15 16 17 18 22 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Recommended start of the visitClassical rooms
1 14th Century. Early Italian Painting 2 15th Century. German and Spanish Painting 3 15th Century. Early Netherlandish Painting 4 15th Century. Italian Painting 5 15th and 16th Centuries. Renaissance Portraiture 6 16th Century. Villahermosa Gallery 7 16th Century. Italian Painting 8 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 9 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 10 16th Century. Netherlandish Painting 11 Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassano and  El Greco 12 17th Century. Caravaggio and Baroque Painting 13 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 14 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 15 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 16 18th Century. Italian Painting 17 18th Century. Italian Painting 18 18th Century. Italian Painting 19 Classical rooms 20 Classical rooms 21 Classical rooms 22 18th Century. Italian Painting 23 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 24 18th Century. French and English Painting 25 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Scenes of Daily Life and Interiors 26 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 27 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Portrait 28 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 29 19th Century. European Painting. Goya and Romanticism  
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Level 0
Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
A B C D E F G H I J Hall Temporary exhibition rooms Access to Permanent Collection Entrance Access to Carmen Thyssen Collection Paseo del Prado Garden
A 17th and 18th Centuries. Old Masters B 19th Century. North American Landscape C 19th Century. French Naturalist Landscape D 19th Century. Impressionism E 19th Century. Monet and North American Impressionism F 19th Century. Gauguin and Postimpressionism G 19th and 20th Centuries. Neo Impressionism and its Wake H 20th Century. Early Avant-gardes I 20th Century. Between the Wars Painting. Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism J 20th Century. North American Painting and Others • HALL
Level -1
Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Temporary exhibition rooms Conference room EducaThyssen Workshop

In 1937, at the suggestion of Federico García Lorca, Salvador Dalí sent a letter to André Breton introducing his friend Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren. The painter, known simply as Matta, had been in Paris since 1933 working at Le Corbusier’s studio and sharing a house with a fellow Chilean, the writer Pablo Neruda. Breton included Matta in his Surrealist exhibition of 1938, and his first paintings were published and commented on in the magazine Minotaure. Very soon, under Breton’s intellectual patronage, the young Matta emerged as a prominent member of the Surrealist group. Shortly afterwards Marcel Duchamp persuaded him to emigrate to America, and he joined the group of Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and André Masson, who found refuge in New York city along with Breton during the Second World War. In 1942 Matta was included in the exhibition of artists in exile organised by the Pierre Matisse Gallery, and is portrayed in the famous photograph immortalising the event alongside Breton, Ernst, Masson, Tanguy, Eugene Berman, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Piet Mondrian, Amédée Ozenfant, Kurt Seligmann, Pavel Tchelitchew and Ossip Zadkine.

During his years in New York, Matta established an even greater complicity with Breton and Duchamp, with whom he shared the notion of Les Grands Transparents, invisible entities that surround human beings. Breton referred to these entities in his writings and the Chilean painter gave visual form to them in his apocalyptic settings. Matta’s emphasis on the power of violence led him to be hailed as one of the most influential figures of late Surrealism, and during the early 1940s his studio in the Greenwich district (New York) became the centre of a debate in which many of the future Abstract Expressionists took part, such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock.

Although the titles of his paintings were essential to the Chilean painter, the present work does not have one. It has sometimes been published as Composition or Abstract Composition, but both the artist’s wife Germana Ferrari and Christopher Green prefer the more neutral name of Untitled, which is now used. Furthermore, although this small canvas belonging to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza has been dated to around 1938‒39 on more than one occasion on account of its biomorphic forms built from fine, semitransparent layers, which greatly resemble his Psychological Morphology paintings or Inscapes (interior or mental landscapes) of the late 1930s, it is more likely to have been painted while he resided in New York.

Christopher Green convincingly proposes that the work should be dated to 1942‒43. Although related to the Psychological Morphology paintings derived from the works of Tanguy, which established a new concept of Surrealist landscape embodying uncontrolled human thoughts, Green points out that the rhomboidal incisions made in the still-wet oil, with which Matta creates a network of white linear forms that hover over the picture space, are not found in his oeuvre until October 1942. The present painting would thus be one of the first in a series executed between 1942 and 1945, referred to by Rommy Golan as the Duchampian suite, which displays linear motifs derived from the large installation produced by Duchamp for the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition staged by André Breton in New York. Duchamp’s installation, a huge Labyrinth of ropes draped across the room in all directions, disorienting the viewer, reflected the feelings of an expatriate — a status he shared with many Surrealists. Breton himself stated in “Prolégomènes à un troisième manifeste du surréalisme, ou non, ” published in New York in 1942 with illustrations by Matta, that “man must flee the ridiculous web that has been spun around him: so-called present reality with the prospect of a future reality that is hardly better.”

Paloma Alarcó

20th Centurys. XX - Abstracción en la posguerra europeaPaintingOilcanvas
Listen
Download image Print page

Products and publications

Sin título

Sin título

17.00 €

Hyperreal Pin stamp letter P

Hyperreal Pin stamp letter P

78.00 €

Art Lesson Exhibition Catalogue

Art Lesson Exhibition Catalogue

30.00 € 28.51 €

Alex Katz (exhibition catalog. Spanish with texts in English)

Alex Katz (exhibition catalog. Spanish with texts in English)

32.00 € 30.40 €

Visit online shop

More from the collection

Matta
Matta
Great Expectations. From the Cicle: The Dazzling Outcast
1966
Matta
Matta
Where Madness Dwells A. From the Cicle: The Dazzling Outcast
1966
Matta
Matta
The Dazzling Outcast. From the Cicle: The Dazzling Outcast
1966
Matta
Matta
The Where at Flood Tide. From the Cicle: The Dazzling Outcast
1966
  • Private and/or didactic use
  • Commercial use
Private and/or didactic use
Untitled. Sin título, 1942-1943
Untitled
Matta

©

Roberto Matta. ADAGP, Paris / VEGAP, Madrid

Terms of Use

The exploitation rights of the images correspond to the Fundacion Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza, F.S.P. The Fundación authorizes the downloading of high-resolution images from its website for private use, use for educational and research purposes and non-commercial uses.

However, photographed works are protected by copyright. Therefore, regardless of the terms of use of the images set out below by the Foundation, it will be necessary to obtain a license from VEGAP (www.vegap.es), or from the corresponding collective management organization in the country where the work is going to be used or, where appropriate, from the holder of their rights in order to reproduce or exploit the work.

Use for educational and research purposes is understood as the non-commercial or advertising use of images in presentations, conferences, school or university work, in classes at regulated education institutions, as well as in academic publications, with a circulation of less than 1,000 copies, provided that it is non-profit.

Non-commercial use is understood as the use of the images in a context where no profit, monetary or commercial, is generated, directly or indirectly.

Any use other than those indicated above will require the prior written authorization of the Fundación.

Any request for educational and research use or for non-commercial use (including academic publications), should be directed by email to the Museum Photo Library through the email address archivo.fotografico@museothyssen.org. This department manages the worldwide distribution of the images of the works of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and the management of their reproduction rights for those uses.

The user agrees to use the image of the website solely and exclusively for the purposes described above and in accordance with the following terms of use, which, however, do not apply to the reproduction of the works included in the photographs, as they are protected by Copyright.

Terms of use

  • If the image is used for reproduction, the work must be reproduced in its entirety. The image may not be manipulated, deformed, modified or altered in any way. In particular, no superposition (of images or texts) on the reproduction is allowed.
  • The reproduction of a detail or part of the work may only be made with the prior written authorization of the Fundación In this case, the credit line must include the following mention: “detail”.
  • Any total or partial reproduction of the images of the Fundación that has been previously authorized must be accompanied by the copyright text indicated by the owners or their copyright holders as well as the following mention: Provenance: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid”.
  • The user will send free of charge to the Museum Photo Library one (1) free copy of the edition, publication or reproduction to the following address: Archivo Fotografico, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Paseo del Prado, 8 28014 Madrid, Spain.
Download image
Commercial use
Untitled. Sin título, 1942-1943
Untitled
Matta

©

Roberto Matta. ADAGP, Paris / VEGAP, Madrid

Terms of Use

The Photo Library of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza offers sale and rental service of photographic material of all the works on its Permanent Collection.

To request images or permits for commercial use in academic or research publications, that is, catalogues of other institutions, monographs and other specialized publications, you should contact the Museum's Photo Library by email at the e-mail @email.

To request images or permits for other commercial or advertising uses (general publications, merchandising, exhibitions, audio-visual works, web pages, etc.), you should contact the Museum's Commercial Archive by email at the e-mail @email.

The Photo Library and the Museum's Commercial Archive manage the worldwide distribution of images of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza works, as well as their reproduction rights. The applicable rates are calculated based on the nature and proposed use of the images, as well as the availability of the requested image.

Requests for scans or new photographs will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Once approved, an additional fee will apply. Re-photographing a work will require a minimum of six weeks to complete.

However, photographed works are protected by copyright. Therefore, regardless of the terms of use of the photographs set out below by the Foundation, it will be necessary to obtain a license from  VEGAP (Visual Entidad de Gestión de Artistas Plásticos www.vegap.es) or from the corresponding collective management organizations in the country where the work is going to be used or, where appropriate, from the holder of their rights in order to reproduce or exploit the work.

Download image
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional

Navegación secundaria (EN)

  • #Thyssenmultimedia
  • Press
  • Corporate events
  • Tourism
  • Join our team
  • Newsletter
Instagram
Facebook
X
Youtube
TikTok
iVoox
LinkedIn

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza would like to thanks for the collaboration of:

Fundación Mutua Madrileña Master Card Comunidad de Madrid
©2025 Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum

Menú al pie (EN)

  • Legal terms and use of images
  • Public tenders
  • Transparency site
  • Accessibility and quality
  • Sustainability & 2030 Agenda
  • Contact
Ministry of Culture España es cultura | Spain is culture. The website promoting Spanish culture Paisaje de la Luz | Paseo del Prado y Buen Retiro. Paisaje de las Artes y las Ciencias
Certificación de Conformidad con el Esquema Nacional de Seguridad. Categoría Media. RD 311/2022