Rainbow Matter Custard

[I didn't get around to quoting this remarkable bit of didactic text in my review of the Mercedes Matter retrospective at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University but this is the perfect place to make up for the omission.]

"Some people have it rough. Born into the East Coast cultural aristocracy in 1913, Mercedes Matter began life as a beloved and privileged artistic prodigy. Her father was Arthur B. Carles, a pioneer American abstract painter who studied with Matisse, showed at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery and exhibited work in the legendary Armory Show. He was also an unrepentant bohemian: long-haired and bearded, a lifelong alcoholic and womanizer. Her mother, Mercedes de Cordoba, was a Parisian correspondent for Vogue and a favorite model of photographer Edward Steichen. Her uncle Pedro was a star of Broadway and early Hollywood, and her aunt Sara was a famous fashion photographer and illustrator. Her father started her painting at the age of 6, and she spent her early teens touring the art capitals of Europe. After attending the progressive girls' school Bennett College in Millbrook, New York, she moved to Manhattan and began studying with Hans Hofmann at the Art Students' League.


Matter (then going by the name Jeanne Carles) and Hofmann (33 years her senior) became close friends — briefly lovers — and maintained a close relationship until Hofmann's death, in 1966. Matter is said to have lured Hofmann back to painting after a two-decade hiatus, and casually instigated the summer painting retreat that evolved into Hofmann's Provincetown school. She became the lover of another student of Hofmann's, painter Wilfrid Zogbaum. Fudging paperwork, Matter qualified for the WPA dole and became an assistant, translator and lover to Fernand Leger, who was in America designing WPA murals along the Hudson River. In 1936 Matter was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists Association, became the lover of Arshile Gorky, and was arrested at a WPA demonstration and thrown in jail. There, she met Lee Krasner, who became another close — though not lifelong — friend, joining Hofmann's painting class and modeling jewelry for Matter's close friend Alexander Calder.


Through Leger, Matter met and began working for Swiss graphic designer and photographer Herbert Matter, who, as an artist for Condé Nast publications, was largely responsible for translating the photomontage innovations of the dadaists into the visual vocabulary of the cultural mainstream. They, too, soon became lovers. In 1941 they married, but by some condition of Herbert's Swiss citizenship, they were forced to move to Santa Monica and work for Charles and Ray Eames for the duration of World War II. Upon returning to Manhattan, they found themselves at the center of the burgeoning New York school — Krasner was now married to Jackson Pollock, and both Hofmann and Gorky were seminal figures in the emerging language of abstract expressionism. The Matters were among the Pollocks' closest friends, and Mercedes was part of the inner circle at the Cedar Bar and the first woman member of the Artists Club, forming close friendships with Philip Guston, Bill and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, critic Harold Rosenberg, and composers Morton Feldman and John Cage, among others. Herbert joined the Yale fine-art faculty, and Mercedes went on to found the Studio School, a small but influential atelier-style institution in the original home of the Whitney Museum.


All this biography is a roundabout buildup to the big question: "Mercedes who?"


Read the rest of Matter's Most here.

Images: Didactic panel; Woman with Red Hair circa 1922; Tabletop Still Life circa 1936; Untitled (number 11) 1933; Tabletop Still Life 1936