Excerpt from "Painting the Way you Live”: Thinking about Mercedes Matter and her Work
By Christina Kee
It is a remarkable thing that Mercedes Matter was both a charter member of American Abstract Artists, established in 1936 to foster greater understanding of abstract art in America, and then 36 years later also the founder of the New York Studio School, which has viewed drawing from life as central to its unique pedagogy since its inception.
The contrast in Matter’s connection to these ostensibly different organizations is mostly lost within the rich events of her extraordinary life story, one defined by a brave and vivid personality whose centermost inclusion in important art moments and conversations seems natural. She was a student of Hans Hofmann, a member of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and part of “The Club,” the gathering of artists and thinkers attended by many of New York’s now famed abstract expressionist painters.
What is striking is how forcefully Matter’s artistic pursuits led her to shape and contribute to communities devoted to the possibilities of painting—through a vision that fully encompassed the spectrum of representation to abstraction. Matter’s “bridge-like” role as a peer and teacher underscores her singular commitment to defining a painter’s space expressive of pure pictorial vitality, derived from the subtlety and energy of lived experience. Her legacy—intellectually, socially, and as an educator—as such is significant, but it is in her works that this devotion is made concrete, in paintings and drawings that bring a conception of the picture plane to life with precise but explosion-like intensity.
