There is very little reliable information about MattaËs university years. It is said that he studied painting at the studio of a Chilean "cubist painter," Hernán Gazmuri, who had been to France and practiced a form of "cubism" that consisted of a geometrization of classical themes. In any case, some say that this was MattaËs only formal art education, which is not altogether true. In Chile, architecture is implicitly taught as a form of visual arts. To understand this, one must reconstruct the artistic environment in which Matta operated at the time, which would give us clues about his primary relationship with drawing. But, most important, one must keep in mind his early friendship with the architect Sergio Larraín García-Moreno, one of the initiators of architectural modernism in Chile and an articulate importer of Bauhaus ideas into architecture study programs, based on the reforms to these programs that he himself led as of the early Ë50s.

His friendship with the architect Sergio Larraín García-Moreno is important because Larraín received his secondary education in France and Switzerland. In Europe he met Vicente Huidobro, who introduced him to some artists in his own social circle in Paris. This reference would be of use to him upon his return to Chile in 1924, where he began his architecture studies. Because of his educational background and the eminent position of his family, he was allowed to complete his education in only three and a half years, graduating in 1927, the year in which Matta entered the same school. In 1929, Larraín was appointed teacher and probably had very close contact with the development of MattaËs graduation thesis in 1933. What I am suggesting here is that, at the same time, Matta was aware of LarraínËs own thesis: a project for a railway station with a hall 34 meters long and 75 meters high. There were no such buildings in Chile at the time, with the exception of the dome of the Museo de Bellas Artes, which was of a totally "beaux arts" design, while incorporating elements of French metallic architecture. The dome in MattaËs project had these antecedents, and the relationship between Larraín and Matta must have been culturally influential too, because Larraín was one of the few people in SantiagoËs cultural scene who had a frame of mind that was closer to artistic modernity and who supported MattaËs plans to leave Chile, leaving behind him the promise of a successful career as an architect.

From testimonies of close friends we know that in this period Matta opened a furniture shop and designed his own furniture. The fact is that his brother, Mario Matta, would become one of the great furniture designers and a leading antique dealer during the period when interior decoration was being reformed in Chile. Most likely, Matta worked for his brother, supplying him with designs. In fact, it was in this furniture shop that he built the maquette of the wooden inner structure of his thesis project. One must remember that Matta gained social recognition as a successful interior decorator, a fact that was problematic for him, being a young scion of an oligarchy in crisis who had·moreover·led the change in the interior decoration standards of the emerging social class that was replacing his own class in power. Working as an interior decorator and antique salesman, his brother Mario bought and sold the French and English objects that had arrived in Chile during the second half of the nineteenth century only to become part of the antiquities market that emerged as a result of a progressive dismantling of a model of life that had been dominant up until then.

In 1933, Matta sailed for Europe. The anti-oligarchy assault of the Ibañez dictatorship instilled a feeling of rootlessness in the very same families that in the past had provided the historical model of reference in the power structure. The families that were saved were those that recycled their talents, replacing agriculturally based economies for financial concerns and the new industrial investments. European and American critics are generally unaware of the fact that it is only after 1939 that consistent development programs can be applied in Chile, allowing for the creation of the institutional structure of the state that subsisted until the 1973 crisis. The class transformations experienced by Chilean society in the first half of this century are symbolically decisive to understand the changes that occurred in the field of art.