In 1947 Matta returned to Mexico, the land that first sparked a revolution in his painting in 1941. There, encountering a landscape that evoked the geologically active Santiago de Chile of his childhood, Matta underwent a radical transformation: “My work began to take the form of volcanoes. Everything I saw in flames, but from a metaphysical point of view…the light was not a surface, but an interior fire…I painted that which burned within me and the best image of my body was the volcano.” (Martica Sawin, “Matta in New York: A Fuse that Lit Up the American Scene” in Matta 1911-2011 (exhibition catalogue), Valencia, 2011, p. 172) In Mexico he was, like many of the other New York School artists, transfixed by the murals of Los Tres Grandes (David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco), and the psychic power provided by their massive, narrative format. Simultaneously in these years following the deployment of the atomic bomb and rapid technological advances in the United States, Matta increasingly moved away from his earlier Surrealist focus on psychoanalysis, and towards a fascination with science, and humanity’s place within the cosmos. Synthesizing these diverse influences, Matta embarked in an explosive new direction from the late 1940s onwards, abandoning his early intimate morphologies for eruptive, atmospheric compositions on a grander scale.

Upon returning to New York later that year, Matta found himself at a crossroads between the individualistic abstraction of the New York School and the increasingly ironfisted Andre Breton; he officially broke with the Surrealist Group in 1948. Settling in 1950 in Rome after a painful divorce and a tumultuous few years of travel throughout South America and Europe, Matta entered fertile new ground for exploration, unhampered by the dogmas of the twentieth century’s Western artistic centers.

William Rubin, the curator of Matta’s 1956 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, characterized the series to which Morningness belongs as ‘Dawns.’ “Biological growth, the poetry of germination conceived in terms of a botanical fantasy, is the theme of the ‘Dawn’ variations that occupied Matta from the end of 1952 until just recently,” Rubin observed. “The ‘Dawns’ represent a renewal of hope and the return to an inner search enriched by the painter’s sojourns in the regions of man’s external dilemmas.” (William Rubin, Matta (exhibition catalogue), New York, 1957, p. 9) In Morningness, geometric machine-like figures tumble through dark, pearlescent clouds, converging in a crimson fury of birth and renewal. Sparks of emerald and marigold ignite this nucleus, leaping forth in a destabilizing, hallucinatory moment of rebirth.