Artist and writer, intellectual and muse, Mercedes Matter (1913-2001) was a consummate art insider. Best known in recent years as the doyenne of the New York Studio School, Matter had an event-filled life, at least in terms of the development of 20th-century modernism in America. Now, with a retrospective exhibition at the Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College in Manhattan, her painting and other artwork is having its own long-overdue renaissance.
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Her contribution as an educator and gadfly was particularly significant. Her 1963 article in Art News magazine, What's Wrong with U. S. Art Schools, with its keen analysis of pictorial mechanics as reinvented by the pioneers of abstract painting, provided the groundwork for the course of instruction at the New York Studio School. Established the following year, the school still serves as a uniquely pragmatic introductory program to painting and drawing.
The daughter of the avant-garde Philadelphia painter Arthur B. Carles, and Mercedes de Cordoba, a favorite model of the Photo-Secession group, Matter grew up in an artistic milieu. By the age of 12 she had already visited France, Venice, Rome and Umbria, drawing from and collecting postcards of works by favorite Renaissance masters.
The two most freely idiosyncratic paintings in the exhibition date from around age eight, when Matter lived with her parents at Edward Steichen's house on the edge of Paris. One is a pale still life, the other a side view of a girl with bright red hair, her father's favorite kind of model. The paint handling is brusque and deft, the small–format images firm and arresting. After her parents divorced, Matter spent her remaining childhood and adolescence attending various private schools in the U.S., France and England.
She would periodically return to Philadelphia to see her father, who would take her along to parties. But Arthur B. Carles was a distant, withholding parent. In his place, Matter found ready artist father substitutes.
At 19, she briefly became the lover of her painting teacher, Hans Hofmann, who later became a more avuncular, guiding presence. Matter also claimed to have gotten Hofmann painting again after the distractions of his school had sidelined him. Arshile Gorky and Wilfred Zogbaum were among her other amours.
Their influences can be discerned in her continuing engagement with the problematics of painting. By the early 1930s she was an intensely coloristic symbolist, like her father. Her abstract color studies from the period are excellent, as are later paintings, followed by and coinciding with her involvement with Gorky, that feature curls of abstracted still life objects that sprout eye, orifice and moon shapes à la Picasso and Miró.
Matter worked as a WPA muralist during the Depression, and was an assistant and translator for Ferdinand Léger, whom she took to Philadelphia to meet her father, as she did Hofmann. On a subsequent trip to the U.S. Léger introduced her to her future husband, the Swiss photographer and designer Herbert Matter, who was working for Condé Nast.
The Matters lived in California during the war, and worked for friends Charles and Ray Eames. Much more biographical material is covered in the superior essays contained in the curiously unwieldy catalogue that has been published on the occasion of the traveling retrospective.
Back in post-war NYC, Matter attended the Artist's Club -- she was the only original female member -- and became a habitué of the Cedar Bar. Matter's work from the ‘40s and ‘50s, mostly still lifes, manifests and codifies her teaching philosophy: constructing interior planes through the use of bright color, (from Matisse and the Fauves via Hofmann), knowledge contained in the compressed line (via Mondrian), Poussin's dynamic pictorial composition, Cézanne's elastic, physical space.
Leo Castelli offered her exhibitions in the ‘50s, but she felt she wasn't ready. A kind of perfectionism that will brook no satisfaction in accomplishment and a distrust of completion eventually became a personal ethic, and subsequently seeped into the Studio School value system.
Matter also began publishing writing on contemporary artists and on issues such as drawing. On visits to Paris, she became friends with Alberto Giacometti, for whom she wrote an essay accompanying a book of photographs of the artist's works done by Herbert Matter. Giacometti would visit the school on his final trip to the U.S., and his perceptual revitalization of the act of drawing would become a central precept of her teaching.
The still life continued to be her subject as her work progressed, though it took second place to her life at the Studio School during her most active years of involvement with it.
The paintings, though continuing with her characteristic strong color and love of red, eventually broke up into fragmented areas dependent upon the white of the canvas. In her final years she abandoned color altogether, perhaps in a symbolic refutation of her father, and worked on a series of semi-abstract series of animal-skull still lifes.
A rigorous and cerebral painter, Matter turned away from widespread artistic fame. But it was upon the foundations of an understanding contained in her paintings that many an artist extrapolated a solid, influential career. Matter seemed to communicate better through the public domain of the school and the forum than in the private domain of the studio, but it is the re-elevation of studio practice that is her most lasting contribution.
"Mercedes Matter: A Retrospective Exhibition," Oct. 30-Dec. 14, 2009, at Mishkin Gallery of Baruch College, 135 East 22nd Street, New York, N.Y. 10010. The exhibition subsequently appears at four additional venues.
JOE FYFE is a New York artist and critic.
