Word: matta
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...tiny Nude Seated on a Rock -curves of pink flesh set against a sapphire sky-gleams like a piece of jewelry. There are lonely street scenes by the Russian-born American, Eugene Berman, a moving little Fisherwoman by Berman's equally romantic brother Leonid. In the fiery Matta canvases colors explode and splash, while the unearthly landscapes by the late Ives Tanguy. who was one of Soby's closest friends, are strewn with strange shapes, which led Tanguy to call one painting The Furniture of Time. The collection has a dung-colored landscape by Jean Dubuffet ("the strongest...
Living Character. Shortly after Gary's novel first came out in France in 1956, Gary had a long letter from a game warden living in the Ivory Coast territory of French West Africa. Raphael Matta, a Frenchman of Italian descent, seemed Morel sprung to uncanny life-though Gary and Matta had never met or heard the other's name. Like Morel, Matta had undergone a shattering World War II experience. An exploding land mine almost took his life, and left him totally deaf...
Then one day he visited the Vincennes zoo. There he learned that 600 varieties of mammals are facing extinction; no species have already disappeared from earth just since 1800. Matta was relatively young (30), making $280 a month in an export-import firm in Paris, and marked for advancement. But he never hesitated. He threw over both present prosperity and future prospects to take a $160-a-month job as superintendent of the 2,000,000-acre Bouna game reserve, 500 miles upcountry from Abidjan...
Accompanied by his chic French wife Christiana, Matta set up housekeeping in a native hut. A slight (barely 100 Ibs.) man with bristling black hair and piercing eyes, he had a strange way with the wild animals-antelopes, buffaloes, lions, elephants-that were his charges, walked fearlessly among the wildest and greatest beasts. He always refused to carry a weapon against them. "If I did," he said, "even not to use it, the charm wou'd vanish, for I would have the overwhelming conviction of having committed a betrayal of the animals' trust." He bathed with hippos, swam...
...Master's Voice. In awe, the surrounding Lobi tribesmen referred to him as "Kongo Massa," or "Master of the Bush." But the Lobi men are hunters, and Matta's hippos and antelopes meant meat to them. Skins could be sold to white trophy hunters, and tribal Africans pay high prices for elephants' sexual organs for use in fertility rites. Matta had only nine men to protect an area twice the size of Long Island. He begged the chiefs to restrain the poachers. That failing, he appealed to his own French superiors in Abidjan for more money...