Jan Matulka at Thomas McCormick

untitled, 1940's

“By the mid-1940s Jan Matulka was no longer considered an important figure in the art world. His work thereafter decreased in quality.” ..Los Angeles County Museum of Art

One cannot argue with that first sentence since Matulka  had no exhibitions of current work after 1943. Moreover, hardly anything he made after 1940 has entered the collections of art museums.

But did his work really decrease in quality ?

Purist Composition, 1923

Only one piece in this exhibit predates 1940, a gouache on paper titled “Purist Composition” (1923). During that period, Jan Matulka (1890-1970) maintained a studio in Paris where he followed the latest trends in Modernism. Purism, as conceived by Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, was an architectonic variant of Cubism— suitable for making an interior space feel open, bright, and cheerful. That wasn’t the only kind of Modernism that Matulka practiced – but it does seem to lead directly into the kind of painting he would do twenty years later -- with some important differences. The shapes in his “Purist Composition” are as tightly held together as the visual features of a building. The edges are as sharp as paper cut by scissors. In the paintings from the 1940’s, however, the edges have grown soft and blurry, while the shapes have begun to wantonly float away, – as if there were no longer the energy or will to bind them together. It’s a kind of disintegration, but neither tragic, unhappy, or chaotic.. The shapes still have the memory of having been together. The composition is not yet lost, – it has just begun to wander. The effect is a delightful release of tension that seems untethered to any time or place. These paintings could just as easily been done yesterday as in New York during the forties. They are markedly different from the artist’s earlier work, as well as from the angst and heroics of the kind of abstract painting that was beginning to conquer the American art world. Acknowledging such anomalies, the McCormick gallery has called this body of work “the Mystery Paintings”.

As Hilton Kramer wrote in 1970, “Mr. Matulka is not the sort of painter who established an original idiom of his own. He looked to his contemporaries and his tradition—the modern tradition— — for his models.” But the Mystery Paintings would seem to contradict that. They may echo the compositions of Cubism and Surrealism from earlier decades, and they strongly .assert that rectangular picture window that characterizes five hundred years of the European tradition. Yet they also appear to be more about the secret life of colors than anything else. These were color field paintings more than ten years before Clement Greenberg used that phrase.

Each painting feels like a separate journey to a destination unknown. Usually they are playful, energetic, and surprising. Some colorful rhapsodies may verge on the psychedelic, though mostly they are as quiet and tasteful as the Upper East Side neighborhood where the artist then lived. Do they belong in the Museum of Modern Art? Probably not. But they certainly can sustain repeated viewing - while a few might even belong in museums that take a less doctrinaire look at the history of twentieth century painting.