Seascape (II)
1965
Roy Lichtenstein
Born 1923, New York, NY, USA; where he died in 1997
Collage of coloured paper, silver and moiré-effect foil, wooden box, edition of 65
Collection Kern, Großmaischeid
Editions MAT & other multiples
The ground-breaking production and publishing venture, Editions MAT (Multiplication d’art transformable), was founded in 1959 by Daniel Spoerri. His intention was to make three-dimensional art available to the public at more modest prices than ‘original’, unique works.
Born Daniel Feinstein in Galati, Romania, in 1930, Spoerri had fled to Switzerland in 1942 with his mother, Lydia Spoerri, and five siblings. He won a scholarship to Paris; became a dancer in Bern; a choreographer and a published poet. In 1958 he met Pol Bury and Jesús Rafael Soto, two of the artists whose work he would produce in multiples for MAT. You can see several of theirs here.
Initially, the plan was to produce an edition of 100 of each artwork. In fact, each piece was unique in some way; many were handmade and had kinetic or transformable elements. In the end, some editions were larger than 100. Most were produced in in much smaller numbers than planned. From 1959 into the mid 1960s, some were issued in Paris; others in Cologne and Amsterdam. Editioned works by some of the same artists and their contemporaries were produced around the same time by galleries in Paris, Milan, Zurich and Nagoya.
The MAT artists are among the most famous of the 20th-century: Marcel Duchamp, Josef Albers, Man Ray, Jean Tinguely, and Christo, along with Bury, Soto, the Zero founders, Yaacov Agam, Getulio Alviani, Gabriele Devecchi, Karl Gerstner, Julio Le Parc, Christian Megert, François Morellet, Paul Talman, Victor Vasarely, and Nanda Vigo.
Spoerri showed his own work in the influential Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision exhibition of 1959, in Antwerp, along with the Mack, Piene, Uecker, Bury, Yves Klein, Tinguely, Dieter Roth and Robert Beer. He was also a founder of the Nouveau Réaliste collective in Paris, with Klein and the art critic Pierre Restany, co-signing their manifesto for art based on the realities of everyday life in October 1960.
