Mercedes Matter American, 1913-2001
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Untitled (Table Top Still Life), c. 1998-99
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Untitled (Table Top Still Life), c. 1995
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Untitled (Figure Study) 12, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 13, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 14, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 16, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 17, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 19, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 20, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 2547, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 2548, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 2549, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 2550, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 2551, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 2552, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 2554, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 2555, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 2557, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 2559, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 2560, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 2561, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 2562, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 34, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 35, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 36, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 37, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 38, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 39, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 4, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 40, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 41, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 42, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 43, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 44, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 45, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 46, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 47, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 48, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 49, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 50, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 51, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 6, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Figure Study) 7, c. 1966-68
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Untitled (Seated Nude), c. 1958
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Untitled (Seated Figure), c. 1953
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Untitled (Table Top Still Life), c. 1935-36
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Landscape Verso Abstraction, c. 1928
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Untitled (Table Top Still Life), 1998
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Untitled (MM 102), 1990-90
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Autumn Still Life, 1985
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Still Life With Skulls (MM 101), 1981-82
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Untitled (MM 100), 1980-90
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Untitled (MM 103), 1980-90
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Untitled (MM 104), 1980-90
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Untitled (MM 105), 1980-90
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Untitled (MM 106), 1980-90
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Untitled (MM 107), 1980-90
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Untitled (MM 108), 1980-90
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Untitled (MM 109), 1980-90
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Untitled (MM 110), 1980-90
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Untitled (MM 111), 1980-90
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Untitled (MM 112), 1980-90
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Untitled (MM 114), 1980-90
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Untitled (MM 115), 1980-90
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Untitled Still Life, 1978
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Tabletop Still Life (version 1), 1941-43
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Female Nude, 1938
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Still Life, 1936
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Table Top Still Life, 1936
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Untitled (Table top Still Life), 1936
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Untitled (number 11), 1933
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Untitled (number 4), 1933
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Still Life, 1991
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Tabletop Still Life, 1936-37
contact us to enquire on works by Mercedes Matter
Born in New York in 1913, Mercedes Matter grew up in Philadelphia, New York and Europe. Her father, the American modernist Arthur B. Carles, had studied with Matisse and her mother, Mercedes de Cordoba, was a model for Edward Steichen. She began painting under her father’s supervision at age 6, and studied art at Bennett College in Millbrook, N.Y., and then in New York City with Maurice Sterne, Alexander Archipenko and Hans Hofmann.
In the late 1930’s, she was an original member of the American Abstract Artists organization and worked for the Federal Works Progress Administration, assisting Fernand Léger on his mural for the French Line passenger ship company. Léger introduced her to Herbert Matter, the Swiss graphic designer and photographer, whom she married in 1939.
The Matters were active in the emerging New York art scene and traveled frequently to Europe. Their closest friends included Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Alexander Calder and Willem de Kooning. They were also close to Alberto Giacometti, who was an important artistic role model for Mrs. Matter and a frequent photographic subject for her husband.
Beginning in 1953, Matter taught at the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts), Pratt Institute and New York University. Based on her teaching experiences she wrote an article for Art News in 1963 titled ”What’s Wrong with U.S. Art Schools?” In it, she lamented the phasing out of the extended studio classes required to initiate ”that painfully slow education of the senses,” which she considered an artist’s life work.
The article prompted a group of Pratt students to ask her to form a school based on her ideas, which led, in 1964, to the founding of the New York Studio School. Originally in a loft on Broadway, the school gained almost immediate support from the Kaplan Fund, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation. It granted no degrees, had only studio classes and emphasized drawing from life. Its teachers, chosen by the students, included the artists Guston, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Charles Cajori, Louis Finkelstein and Sidney Geist; the art historian Meyer Schapiro; and the composer Morton Feldman.
The Matters lived on Macdougal Alley, where Mr. Matter had a studio in one of the eight small buildings that had housed what is now the Met Breuer Building. It was his idea that the buildings would make a perfect home for the Studio School, which bought them from the Whitney family in 1967 (of the Whitney Museum of American Art).
Matter practiced as she preached, spending months, and sometimes years, working on drawings and paintings that usually began as still life’s and evolved into near-abstractions animated by thatched lines that attested to her devotion to the work of Giacometti and Cézanne.
In addition to her art and teaching, she wrote articles on artists, including Hofmann, Kline and Giacometti. She wrote the text for a book of her husband’s photographs of Giacometti, published in 1987, four years after his death. Matter died in 2001.
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Mercedes Matter
Paintings and Drawings 1966 - 1986 18 - 30 Jun 2022In our Sag Harbor location “Mercedes’ Matter Paintings and Drawings 1966 – 1986” explores a series of 15 canvases and 15 drawings of Matter’s late period that are harvesting all...Read more -
Clintel Steed
Will You Be My Muse For Summer 2022? 3 - 16 Jun 2022Clintel Steed asks you the open-ended question; Will You Be My Muse For Summer 2022? Rather than seeking an answer to this invitation, he is looking for a new understanding...Read more -
Maureen Dougherty
What are you looking at? 21 May - 2 Jun 2022MARK BORGHI Sag Harbor propositions viewers with What are you looking at? Either with a question mark or exclamation, the viewer is impugned to engage. What are you looking at?...Read more -
To Be An Artist Is To Embrace The World In One Kiss
8 Oct - 24 Nov 2021Mercedes Matter (1913-2001): Her father, Arthur B. Carles, a pioneering American modernist painter, taught her to paint landscapes in the French countryside when she was 6. As a teenager living...Read more -
Compendium
A Survey of the last 75 years of Art History; Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, Minimalism and Pop Art 11 Aug - 3 Sep 2018Mark Borghi Bridgehampton is pleased to present Compendium, a survey of the last 75 years of Art History; Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, Minimalism and Pop Art. This exhibition provides...Read more -
MERCEDES MATTER: A Survey: Paintings & Drawings from 1929 to 1998
6 Apr - 26 May 2017This is the first solo show of the late artist at Mark Borghi Fine Art. The exhibition is a mini retrospective of the traveling museum show of Mercedes Matter’s estate...Read more