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PAINTER ROBERT MOTHERWELL
AMERICAN 1915 - 1991
ROBERT
MOTHERWELL: WITH SELECTION FROM ARTIST’S WRITINGS BY FRANK O’HARA …..
A symbolic tale of our times, comparable to the legend of
Apelles' leaving his sign on the wall, is that of the modern artist who, given
the wrappings from issues of a foreign review by a friend, trans forms them
into two collage masterpieces; and who, given a stack of Japan paper, makes six
drawings and on seeing them the next day is so excited by the black ink having
bled into orange at its edges that he decides to make six hundred more
drawings. The collages are N.K.F. Numbers One and Two, the drawings are the
group called "Lyric Suite," and the artist is Robert Motherwell. Does
art choose the artist, or does the man choose art?
Motherwell's
choice is one of the most fascinating in modern art. As a young man of
twenty-five, a university student who majored in philosophy, he decided to
devote himself completely to painting, a decision which at the time held
promise of little but hard work and probable discouragement. Yet, a few short
years later, he was to find himself one of the leading figures in the greatest
revolution in modern art since cubism, abstract expressionism.
Recently, in
a television interview, Robert Motherwell remembered the aims of the early
period of abstract expressionism as being "really quite simple in a way,
almost too simple, considering what has happened in the last twenty years. But
really I suppose most of us felt that our passionate allegiance was not to
American art or in that sense to any national art, but that there was such a
thing as modern art: that it was essentially international in character, that
it was the greatest painting adventure of our time, that we wished to
participate in it, that we wished to plant it here, that it would blossom in
its own way here as it had elsewhere, because beyond national differences there
are human similarities that are more con sequential . . (bibl. 36).
The measure
of the success of the abstract expressionist artists may be gauged by our
response to the movement's ethical stand today it seems an inevitable
development, it is surrounded by an atmosphere of "of course." But in
the late '30s and early '40s there was violent resistance to this
"passionate allegiance." We forget, in the complexity of our present
worldwide artistic and political engagements, that period's artistic and
political isolationism (how controversial then were Gertrude Stein and Wendell
Willkie!), the mania for the impressionist masters, the conviction, where there
was any interest at all, that avant-garde was not only a French word but an
Ecole de Paris monopoly. But the greatest resistance of all came from other
American painters— the regionalists, the social realists and the
traditionalists.
No account of
the period can ignore Motherwell's role as an internationalist. In a sense a
turn toward both revolution and inter nationalism were in the air, for the
various national financial depressions had united most of the Western countries
in crisis, if not in political agreement. And the artists, like the
philosophers and the religious, had been the least economically valued members
of distressed societies.
Without
transition the struggle against Depression conditions be came the struggle
against War. War on such a scale that "conditions" became an obsolete
word, faced down by the appalling actual and philosophical monolith of
historical event. But the artists were not faced down by the war vocabulary.
With the advent of war a hetero geneous number of American artists whose only
common passion was the necessity of contemporary art's being Modern began to
emerge as a movement which, in Boris Pasternak's famous description of a far
different emergency, as he relates in his autobiography Safe Conduct, ". .
. turned with the same side towards the times, stepping forward with its first
declaration about its learning, its philosophy and its art."
Underlying,
and indeed burgeoning within, every great work of the abstract expressionists,
whether subjectively lyrical as in Gorky, publicly explosive as in de Kooning,
or hieratical as in Newman, exists the traumatic consciousness of emergency and
crisis experienced as personal event, the artist assuming responsibility for
being, however accidentally, alive here and now. Their gift was for a somber
and joyful art: somber because it does not merely reflect but sees what is
about it, and joyful because it is able to exist. It is just as possible for
art to look out at the world as it is for the world to look at art. But the
abstract expressionists were frequently the first violators of their own gifts;
to this we often owe the marvelously demonic, sullen or mysterious quality of
their work, as they moved from the pictorial image to the hidden subject.
Motherwell's
special contribution to the American struggle for modernity was a strong
aversion to provincialism, both political and aesthetic, a profound immersion
in modern French culture (especially School of Paris art and the poetry and
theories of the Symbolist and Surrealist poets—conquest by absorption, like the
Chinese), and a particular affinity for what he has sometimes called "Mediterranean
light," which in his paintings seems to mean a mingling of the light of
the California of his childhood with that of Mexico and the South of France.
This affinity may explain somewhat the ambiguity between the relatively soft
painted edges of many of his forms and the hard, clear contour they convey,
especially in the series of "Elegies to the Spanish Republic." He can
employ a rough, spontaneous stroke while evoking from the picture plane with
great economy a precise personal light. There is no atmospheric light in his
paintings; if he uses grey it is never twilight or dawn. One of his important
early paintings is called Western Air (page 13) and the light in it persists in
many later works.
Motherwell
must have shown a surprisingly early talent for art, considering that at eleven
he was awarded a fellowship to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles (where
Philip Guston also studied briefly). Although he also attended art school at
seventeen, he was not to make the final decision to devote himself to painting
until 1941. The intervening years had been spent largely in the study of
liberal arts and philosophy. He was led by his admiration of Delacroix's
paintings to choose for his thesis subject at Harvard the aesthetic theories
expounded in Delacroix's journals. On the advice of his teachers, he therefore
spent the year 1938-39 in France. Delacroix led to Baudelaire, Baudelaire to
the theories of the French Symbolists and especially Mallarme, and there
followed a close study of the Parisian painters.
Shortly after
Motherwell's return to the United States he moved to New York. He discussed his
first days there in a recent talk at the Yale University Art School:
"One of the great good fortunes I have had in my life,
and there have been several, was that at a certain crucial moment in my life
when I was in my mid-twenties and still hadn't really decided what I wanted to
do, though in another way I'd always wanted to be a painter but through the
circumstances of fate had never known a modernist one ... for better or worse,
I don't know—at a certain moment through a contact with a friend who is now
professor of music at Brandeis University I decided to go to New York . . . and
study with Meyer Schapiro. In those days there was nothing like there is here,
that if you were interested in contemporary art there was a place where you
could go and be oriented The closest approach to it, though he is essentially a
classical scholar, essentially devoted to the premises of art history and so
on, in those days was Meyer Schapiro. And I went to New York and studied with
Schapiro. Also by chance took a room near him and knew nobody in New York
—nearly died of loneliness, at how hard and cold and overwhelming it seemed to
me as a person from the Far West, which is with all its defects a somewhat more
casual and open place.
"And
sometimes at eleven o'clock in the night I would drag the latest picture I had
been making on the side in the most amateurish way around to Schapiro. And one
day in exasperation really, because I had then no conception of how busy people
are in New York, he said, 'It takes me two hours to tell you as best I can what
any painter colleague could tell you in ten minutes. You really should know
some artists.' And I said, Well, I agree . . . but I don't know any.' "
(bibl. 38)
As a child,
Motherwell was haunted by the fear of death, perhaps partially because of his
asthmatic attacks. He grew up during the Great Depression and, no matter what
one's circumstances, one could not help being affected by it. The first foreign
political event to engage his feelings was the Spanish Civil War, that perfect
mirror of all that was confused, venal and wrong in national and international
politics and has remained so. For a slightly younger generation than
Motherwell's, and by slightly I mean only by ten years or so, World War II was
simply part of one's life. One went to war at seventeen or eighteen and that
was what one did, perfectly simple, and one thought about it while one was
about it, or you might say, in it. But Motherwell's ethical and moral
considerations were already well formed by the time that war broke out, and for
him the problems were quite different and also far more shattering
psychologically.
It is no
wonder then that when Meyer Schapiro introduced him to the European refugee
artists who had fled here from the Fall of France, he was strongly drawn to
them, both as emblems of art and also as emblems of experience—an experience
which no American artist save Gertrude Stein suffered as the French themselves did.
Their insouciant survival in the face of disaster, partly through character,
partly through belief in art, is one of the great legends, and it did not
escape him. To recall the presence of these artists is indeed staggering (see
page 74). Motherwell's affinity for French Symbolist and Surrealist aesthetics
made him a quick liaison between the refugees and certain New York artists whom
he scarcely knew at the time. The capitulation of France had brought about an
intense Francophilism among all liberal intellectuals, especially those who
felt strongly about the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War; and the fate of Great
Britain was still in question. It was not too difficult to feel a strong
identification, and of course these artists were already heroes of the modern
artistic revolution; if some of them hadn't invented it, they had certainly
aided, abetted and extended it. In the artistic imagination these refugees
represented everything valuable in modern civilization that was being
threatened by physical extermination. It had never been more clearthata modern
artist stands for civilization.
Modern
artists ideologically, as the Jews racially, were the chosen enemies of the
authoritarian states because their values were the most in opposition, so that
one had a heightened sense, beyond the artistic, of seeing a Lipchitz or a
Chagall walk free on the streets of New York. It is impossible for a society to
be at war without each responsible element joining the endeavor, whether
military, philosophical or artistic, and whether consciously or not. The
perspectives may be different, but the temper of the time is inexorable and
demanding for all concerned. I think that it was the pressure of this temper
and this time that forced from abstract expressionism its statement of values,
which is, and probably shall remain, unique in the history of culture. While
the other protesting artistic voices of the time were bound by figuration and
overt symbolism, the abstract expressionists chose the open road of personal
responsibility, naked nerve-ends and possible hubris, and this separated them
from the surrealists, the Mexican School and the American social realists.
Belief in their personal and ethical responses saved them from aestheticism on
the one hand and programmatic contortion on the other. Abstract expressionism
for the first time in American painting insisted upon an artistic identity.
This, of course, is what made abstract expressionism so threatening to other
contemporaneous tendencies then, and even now. The abstract expressionists
decided, instead of imitating the style of the European moderns, to do instead
what they had done, to venture into the unknown, to give up looking at re
productions in Verve and Cahiersd'Art and to replace them with first hand
experimentation. This was the great anguish of the American artists. They had a
sound theoretical, but no practical, knowledge of the suffering involved in
being extreme; but they would learn. They shot off in every direction, risking
everything. They were never afraid of having a serious idea, and the serious
idea was never self referential. Theirs was a struggle as ultimate as their
painting. A struggle which, in the poet Edwin Denby's description in his rem
iniscence of the '30s, was against ". . . the cliche about downtown
painting in the depression—the accepted idea that everybody had doubts and
imitated Picasso and talked politics. None of these features seemed to me
remarkable at the time, and they don't now. Downtown everybody loved Picasso
then, and why not. But what they painted made no sense as an imitation of him.
For myself, something in his steady wide light reminded me then of the light in
the streets and lofts we lived in. At that time Tchelitchew was the uptown
master, and he had a flickering light."
During this
period Motherwell veered between the opposite poles of the marvelous and the
somber, if not morbid; from Mallarme's Swan, imaged in subtle glacial beauty,
to Pancho Villa's corpse, hanging bullet-riddled beside his live image, in
which pink stains take on the aspect of not-yet-dried blood. Shortly before, in
1941, at the beginning of his painting career he had done three divergent
pictures—JLa belle mexicaine (of his first wife, a Mexican actress), an
imaginary landscape, The Red Sun, and the more purely conceptualized The Little
Spanish Prison. The first owes a great deal to Picasso, the second (page 96) to
the surrealist theory of automatism and especially to Masson, and the third
(page 16) is connected in my mind to the royal House of Orange, a modern
version of Dutch clarity of tone allied with Spanish reserve and elegance. As a
selftaught painter, Motherwell had many avenues open to him, and in beginning
he did not close any of them off as possibilities.
Certain of
the abstract expressionists seem to have burst into paint with an already
emergent personal force from the very first works we know—one thinks
particularly of Motherwell and of Barnett New man. The variety from period to
period in each of these artists en compasses a broadening of technical
resources, as it does in Rothko also, and moves in a steadily rising power of
emotional conviction. They have had a conviction, if not a style, from the
beginning, more ethical than visual, which has left them free to include
anything useful and has guided them away from the peripheral. As has Clyfford
Still, for example, each has chosen on several occasions to make moral
statements in relation to his art, rather than aesthetic ones.
This is, of course, a matter of temperament. The passions of
others of their colleagues have led to far more abrupt and dramatic changes.
Motherwell once remarked that an artist is known as much by what he will not
permit as by what he includes in the painting. One would be hard put to aver
whether Newman or Pollock, de Kooning or Rothko, was more drastic in his
decision between the Dionysian and Apollonian modes of feeling, between
seething impasto excitation and somber, subtly evoked grandeur.
Motherwell
himself is very canny in his intuition of the relative values of these modes,
as they apply to his expressive purposes, and of their limitations as abstract
polarities for a sensibility which is modern both through intellectual act of
faith and through natural inclination. The complexity of his modern aesthetic
is unified by certain basic preferences which govern every period of his work
and are of an almost textbook simplicity: a painting is a sheer extension, not
a window or a door; collage is as much about paper as about form; the impetus
for a painting or drawing starts technically from the subconscious through
automatism (or as he may say "doodling") and proceeds towards the
subject which is the finished work.
These basic
preferences have, however, a superstructure of great variety and subtlety.
Motherwell first showed at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery Art of This Century in
the early '40s. The gallery chooses the artist, but the artist also chooses the
gallery; for better or worse the gallery is the artist's public milieu, and in
this case it was certainly for the better. Art of This Century was the head
quarters in America for the militant surrealists present in New York, and it
also featured importantly Kandinsky, Mondrian, van Doesburg, Helion, as well as
Baziotes, Pollock, Hofmann, Rothko, and Still, among the Americans. Motherwell
thus found himself in a milieu where simultaneous passions for the work of
Mondrian, Max Ernst, de Chirico, Leger and Joseph Cornell were enriching rather
than confusing, joined together in time, place and enthusiasm rather than
compartmentalized and classified as they would have been in most art schools of
the time, if taught at all. As the youngest member of this group, Motherwell
already showed a stubborn individuality and purposefulness which were to remain
characteristic through the years of experimentation with motif and symbol that
lay ahead. In the preface to Motherwell's first exhibition, James Johnson
Sweeney remarked on the artist's thinking ". . . directly in the materials
of his art. With him, a picture grows, not in the head, but on the easel from a
collage, through a series of drawings, to an oil. A sensual interest in
materials comes first." (bibl. 142, page 91)
This sensual
interest in materials has led the artist away from the easel towards the small,
decisively executed paper works of the Lyric Suite series and towards the
monumental canvases, murals really, such as Black on White, Africa, and Dublin
in 1916, with Black and Tan. Motherwell's admiration, which has continued
throughout his career, for Matisse and Picasso, especially the "steady
wide light" of which Edwin Den by wrote, have led him to a clarification
of form and a toughness of drawing and color which would be impossible without
the hard scrutiny of this light. It is important to differentiate the light in
different painters. The distinction is not always historical, nor is it always
about source. It is in its actuality the most spiritual element, technical only
in so far as it requires means, painterly means, to appear at all. It is the
summation of an artist's conviction and an artist's reality, the most revealing
statement of his identity, and its emergence appears through form, color, and
painterly technique as a preconceptual quality rather than an effect.
Motherwell
once mentioned his experience as a child of being thrilled when a teacher drew
in colored chalks a schema of the daily weather—an orange sun with yellow rays
for fair weather, a purple ovoid cloud with blue strokes slanting through it
for rain. Later, he remembered this experience, much as one remembers in
adulthood having been pleased by Blake's Songs of Innocence as a child, only to
find that they are masterpieces even to adults. Perhaps his belief in the
communicative powers of schemata stems from this child hood experience. At any
rate, his sensuality is involved as strongly with schemata as it is with
texture or color. The sexual atmosphere of Two Figures with Cerulean Blue
Stripe (page 52), for example, has a specific tenderness and a poignancy which
has nothing to do with "figure" painting or with handling; it is
dependent on the direct diagrammatic relation in a pictorial sense of the two
forms, where the blue stripe is a curtain drawn away from the intimacy of the
scene. It is the opposite of the Balthus painting of the gnome drawing the
curtain from the nude girl's window—where a surrealist voyeurism gives that
painting piquancy, in the Motherwell a Courbet like health establishes a sense
of both sexuality and repose.
Motherwell
has also, through the same preoccupation with material, been closely involved
with "series" of paintings— in quotes because the series sense is not
necessarily that of subject matter but of sensitivity to findings in the motif
which yield further discoveries in the material. The motif for the Elegies was
discovered while he was decorating a page of a poem by Harold Rosenberg in 1948
(page 76). Almost immediately the motif appears in a Spanish context, related
to Lorca's poetry: At Five in the Afternoon , Granada; and then shifts to the
more specific associations embodied in the "Elegies to the Spanish
Republic." Sometimes the motif itself dictates how to use the medium,
where to drag it, splash it, flatten an intervening area or flow it, in order
to accomplish the presentation of the relationship of the images as a whole experience.
The range of technical procedure between Elegy LVII (page 66) with its almost
expressionistic drama to the strict, flat statement of Elegy LV (page 47)
reveals the fecundity Motherwell has found in this motif and also indicates his
ability to bridge the gap between action painting and what Clement Greenberg
has called the "Post-Painterly Abstractionists." The latter Elegy in
particular is also related to the transcendent exposure of the most recent
works. And always there is an absolute belief in the reality of the schema,
executed with such force that individual paintings of the series have been
variously interpreted as male verticals and female ovoids, as bulls' tails and
testicles hung side by side on the wall of the arena after the fight, and as
purist formal juxtapositions of rectangular and curvilinear forms. As with the
great recent painting Africa , the possibility of the schema's arousing such a
broad range of associations, depending on the emotional vocabulary of the
viewer, is a sign of its power to communi cate human passion in a truly
abstract way, while never losing its specific identity as a pictorial
statement. The exposure is one of sensibility, rather than of literal imagistic
intent, and therefore engages the viewer in its meaning rather than declaring
it. (contd.on page 23)
This is an
extreme divergence in aim from other abstract expressionists, excepting Rothko,
Newman and Gottlieb, while the compulsive urgency and crudity of Motherwell's
drawing in paint separates him even from the latter artists. His work poises
itself on the razor's edge of rawness and elegance, of brutality and
refinement. With this pressure constantly on the hand, the arm, the eye, he
must constantly re-invent the occasion for creation.
As devoted to
exploration of motif as many of his contemporaries, he seems never to have to
avoid repetition— indeed, he seems almost incapable of it. To recognize this
quality in his temperament one need only compare the sensibilities involved in
the Femmes d'Algers variations of Picasso and the "Blast" series of
Gottlieb, for example, with Motherwell's series of "Elegies to the Spanish
Republic." Without making a qualitative judgment, one may say that Picasso
and Gottlieb are able to achieve their visual explorations within the hierarchy
of an important and persuasively established pictorial structure; whereas
Motherwell from At Five in the Afternoon (1949; page 36) on, is fighting an
over-dominant and already clarified symbolic structure from which, through the
years, he will wrench with astonishing energy some of the most powerful,
self-exacerbat ing and brutally ominous works of our time, and some of the most
coldly disdainful ones as well (emptying of Self). In this sense, Motherwell
creates the structure that opposes him, the domination of which he must
overcome to remain an artist— it is not, as with Arshile Gorky, the marvelous
finding of an apparently infinite number of family forms which may be juggled
and tensed for more or less specific narrative purposes. In Motherwell the
family of forms is a relatively small one and the plastic handling of them
carries the burden of intention, whether passionate or subtle, whether buoyant
or subdued; they are never used for narrative purposes, which is perhaps why
Motherwell thinks of Gorky as a surrealist artist (bibl. 38a), so different is
their approach to form. Though both stemmed from the surrealist theory of
automatism, Gorky proceeded into the physiological "innards" of form
and reference, while Motherwell dragged like a beast of prey his automatic
findings into the neutral light of day and of society.
Another
important series, and one which both advances from previous preoccupations with
gesture and proceeds toward later works with calligraphic elements, such as In
Green and Ultramarine (page 49), is the group of works entitled "Beside
the Sea." Here the motif of an abstract wave breaking into the horizon and
charging above it releases a marvelous arm-energy, and the characteristic
Motherwell bands below, rather than becoming indications of landscape, give the
works an emblematic drive. The sea is as much a metaphor as a throw of the dice
is, or the "Spanish Elegies."
Here too, as
elsewhere, beginning with Viva (page 16) and continuing through the "Je
t'aime" series (page 38), many of the works show Motherwell's literal use
of calligraphy as part of the compositional meaning of the painting. In the
case of the "Beside the Sea" pictures, his name is usually scrawled
through one of the dark bands at the bottom to lighten the tone of the passage
and to give variation and variety which balance the sharp force of the
"wave" above. In almost all of Motherwell's work the use of the
signature is compositional: an insistence on identity, to be sure, and also an
indication of the totality of the move away from easel painting— few of the
pictures are "signed" in the traditional sense, they are registered
by the artist as part of his life, in a matter-of-fact pictorial way, rather
coldly. Like de Kooning's, his calligraphy is so beautiful it would be a loss
not to incorporate it in the picture.
Gertrude
Stein gives us, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, some thoughts which
are particularly applicable to the stance of much of Motherwell's work:
"She always says that americans can understand Spaniards. That they are
the only two western nations that can realize abstraction. That in americans it
expresses itself by disembodiedness, in literature and machinery, in Spain by
ritual so abstract that it does not connect itself with anything but ritual. .
. .
"Americans,
so Gertrude Stein says, are like Spaniards, they are abstract and cruel. They
are not brutal they are cruel. They have no close contact with the earth such
as most europeans have. Their materialism is not the materialism of existence,
of possession, it is the materialism of action and abstraction " This
observation, published in 1933, was prophetic of the whole new movement which
was about to occur in American painting and sculpture, and which indeed had
already been initiated by the three abstract painted metal heads of that year
by David Smith, though she could not have known it. Her insight has also a
relevance to the influence of contemporary Spanish artists, from Picasso and
Gonzalez to Miro, on American and European artists, and particularly to the
difference of application of this influence by the Americans, as opposed to,
let us say, the French and the Dutch, and to the reverberations back on recent
Spanish art. Her own inclination toward automatism was similar to that of many
of the abstract expressionists: it fed and deepened a sense of structural
necessity and of personal identity rather than obscuring the first and
diffusing the latter, as automatism did so often with the surrealists.
Though both
Picasso and Gonzalez as Parisians have had a universal influence stylistically,
their full, bold, and fresh spirit has been most importantly absorbed in
American art, I think, by Motherwell and David Smith, respectively. An
essential caustic Spanish rigor reached these Americans in their different
media, a toughness, a tenacity and wrought-iron insistence which seem to have
been imparted to no one else. For them, the example of identity was stronger
than the style, as the idea of automatism was stronger than the practice.
Instead of inspiration, the example of Picasso gave Motherwell control in his
passion, as that of Gonzalez gave Smith elegance in his ambition, both
necessary qualities for the accomplishment of basically unruly artistic ends. In
contrast to the surrealist painters, Motherwell does not yield to the
subconscious, he is informed by it.
And this
requires the daily confrontation of ethical as well as plastic purposes. There
can be no prefigured beauty to be achieved and no predetermined set of symbolic
referents which have not to be re-examined and tested for validity with each
facing of the canvas. The constant testing and retesting of pictorial meaning,
of the "charge" of imagery, has led to an enormous variety of content
from work to work, and it has also led to the continual replenishment of the
sources of that content, whether one calls it inspiration, inventiveness, restlessness,
painterly ambition, whatever. The kind of artistic anxiety which seems to
characterize Motherwell is the furthest from the kind that is debilitating. It
has led him to find new skills in each period to serve the still mysterious
demands of his consciousness.
FRANK O'HARA
%2C%2Bca.%2B1977%2B-1981.JPG)
FACE OF THE
NIGHT (FOR OCTAVIA PAZ ) ca. 1977 – 1981
Acrylic on
Canvas
Dimensions:
182.9 × 457.2
© Dedalus Foundation, Inc./ Licensed by VAGA. New York, NY
RUNNING ELEGY II, YELLOW STATE, 1983
Etching and Aquatint in Colors on George Duchêne
Hawthorne of Larrouque Handmade Paper
Dimensions: 29.8 × 74.9 cm
©The Dedalus Foundation, Inc.
Lithographs
Over his
career Motherwell explored and refined in what he considered an 'endless
challenge' of a serial image which came to be known as the Spanish
Elegy series. From 1948, Motherwell explored this iconic image in drawing,
painting and later in printmaking. His constant search for the perfect
rendition of this form was infinite, explaining:
‘’ My
Elegies … are silent, monumental, more architectonic, a massing of black
against white, those two sublime colors, when used as a color … The reason I've
made so many works … that could be called series … They remain an endless
challenge ‘’ Robert Motherwell
http://nga.gov.au/Motherwell/
ST.
MICHAEL II, 1979
Lithograph,
Screenprint, and Monoprint on White
Arches
Cover Mouldmade Paper
Dimensions: 153 × 101.6 cm
© Dedalus Foundation, Inc./VAGA.
Lithograph
Dimensions:
106.7 × 81.3 cm
© Dedalus Foundation, Inc./VAGA.
UNTITLED
( ELEGY ), 1983-1985
©The Dedalus Foundation, Inc.
ELEGY STUD NO: XIII, 1976
– 1979
©The Dedalus Foundation, Inc.
Collection of David Mirvish
Art © Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Photo by Craig Boyko
DANCE I, 1978
Lift-Ground Etching and Aquatint on J.B. Green Paper
Dimensions: 49.5 × 77.5 cm
Edition of 30 + 10AP
©The Dedalus Foundation, Inc.
Art © Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Courtesy: Private collection
%2B1975.jpg)
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 137.1 x 184.5 cm
%2B1979-80.jpg)
%2C%2B1971.jpg)
%2C%2B1941.PNG)
Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 108 describes
a stately passage of the organic and the geometric, the accidental and the
deliberate. Like other Abstract Expressionists, Motherwell was attracted to the
Surrealist principle of automatism—of methods that escaped the artist's
conscious intention—and his brushwork has an emotional charge, but within an
overall structure of a certain severity. In fact Motherwell saw careful
arrangements of color and form as the heart of abstract art, which, he said,
"is stripped bare of other things in order to intensify it, its rhythms,
spatial intervals, and color structure."
Motherwell intended his Elegies to the Spanish Republic (over 100
paintings, completed between 1948 and 1967) as a "lamentation or funeral
song" after the Spanish Civil War. His recurring motif here is a rough
black oval, repeated in varying sizes and degrees of compression and
distortion. Instead of appearing as holes leading into a deeper space, these
light-absorbent blots stand out against a ground of relatively even,
predominantly white upright rectangles. They have various associations, but
Motherwell himself related them to the display of the dead bull's testicles in
the Spanish bullfighting ring.
Motherwell described the Elegies as his "private insistence that a
terrible death happened that should not be forgot. But," he added,
"the pictures are also general metaphors of the contrast between life and
death, and their interrelation."
Elegy to the Spanish
ELEGY STUD NO: XIII, 1976
– 1979
©The Dedalus Foundation, Inc.
ELEGY TO THE SPANISH REPUBLIC NO.
110C, 1968
Acrylic and Graphite on Paper
15.2 × 20.3 cm
©The Dedalus Foundation, Inc.
Robert Motherwell was only 21 years
old when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, but its atrocities made an
indelible impression on him, and he later devoted a series of more than 200
paintings to the theme. The tragic proportions of the three-year battle—more
than 700,000 people were killed in combat and it occasioned the first air-raid
bombings of civilians in history—roused many artists to respond. Most
famously, Pablo Picasso created his
monumental 1937 painting Guernica as an expression of outrage
over the events. From Motherwell’s retrospective view, the war became a
metaphor for all injustice. He conceived of his Elegies to the Spanish
Republic as majestic commemorations of human suffering and as
abstract, poetic symbols for the inexorable cycle of life and death.
Motherwell’s allusion to human mortality through a nonreferential visual
language demonstrates his admiration for French Symbolism, an appreciation he
shared with his fellow Abstract Expressionist painters. Motherwell was
particularly inspired by the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s belief that a
poem should not represent some specific entity, idea, or event, but rather the
emotive effect that it produces. The abstract motif common to most of the Elegies—an
alternating pattern of bulbous shapes compressed between columnar forms—may be
read as an indirect, open-ended reference to the experience of loss and the
heroics of stoic resistance. The dialectical nature of life itself is expressed
through the stark juxtaposition of black against white, which reverberates in
the contrasting ovoid and rectilinear slab forms. About the Elegies,
Motherwell said, “After a period of painting them, I discovered Black as one of
my subjects—and with black, the contrasting white, a sense of life and death
which to me is quite Spanish. They are essentially the Spanish black of death
contrasted with the dazzle of a Matisse-like sunlight.” This and other remarks
Motherwell made regarding the evolution of the Elegies indicate
that form preceded iconography. Given that the Elegies date
from an ink sketch made in 1948 to accompany a poem by Harold Rosenberg that
was unrelated to the Spanish Civil War, and that their compositional syntax
became increasingly intense, it seems all the more apparent that the “meaning”
of each work in the series is subjective and evolves over time.
Nancy Spector
Dimensions: 38.4 h x 91.2 w cm
Purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund, 2002
© Dedalus Foundation, Inc./VAGA. Licensed by Viscopy
%2C%2B1977.jpg)
%2C%2B1944.jpg)
ROBERT MOTHERWELL: AMERICAN / 1915 - 1991
To the Palette for A La Pintura (1969)
Source: Oxford University Press
American painter, printmaker and editor. A major figure of the Abstract
Expressionist generation, in his mature work he encompassed both the expressive
brushwork of action painting and the breadth of
scale and saturated hues of colour field painting, often with a marked emphasis
on European traditions of decorative abstraction.
Motherwell was sent to school in the dry climate of central California to
combat severe asthmatic attacks and developed a love for the broad spaces and
bright colours that later emerged as essential characteristics of his abstract
paintings. His later concern with themes of mortality can likewise be traced to
his frail health as a child. From 1932 he studied literature, psychology and
philosophy at Stanford University, CA, and encountered in the poetry of the
French Symbolists an expression of moods that dispensed with traditional narrative.
He paid tribute to these writers in later paintings such as Mallarmé’s
Swan (1944; Cleveland, OH, Mus. A.) and The Voyage (1949; New
York, MOMA), named after Baudelaire’s poem. As a postgraduate student of
philosophy at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, in 1937–8, he found further
justification for abstraction in writings by John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead
and David Prall, later relating their views on the expression of individual
identity through immediate experiences to his own urge to reveal his
personality through the gestures of his brushwork (see Action Painting).
Motherwell decided to become an artist after seeing modern French painting
during a trip to Paris in 1938–9, but in order to satisfy his father’s demands
for a secure career he first studied art history from 1940 to 1941 under Meyer
Schapiro at Columbia University, NY. Through Schapiro he met Roberto Matta and
other exiled European artists associated with Surrealism; their use of automatism as a means of registering
subconscious impulses was to have a lasting effect on Motherwell and on other
American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner and William Baziotes,
whom he befriended in New York after a trip to Mexico in 1941 with Matta.
While in Mexico, Motherwell executed his first known works, the Mexican
Sketchbook of 11 pen-and-ink drawings in black and white (artist’s col.;
for first page, see Arnason, 1982, p. 29). These were influenced by Matta but
were more abstract and spontaneous in appearance. The appeal of automatist
spontaneity, however, was complemented for him by the clear structure, simple
shapes and broad areas of flat colour in paintings by Piet Mondrian, Picasso
and Matisse.
The interaction of emotionally charged brushwork with severity of structure
began to emerge in paintings such as the Little Spanish
Prison (1941–4; New York, MOMA), a deceptively simple composition of
slightly undulating vertical stripes in yellow and white interrupted by a
single horizontal bar.
In 1943 Motherwell produced a series of dark, menacing works of torn and
paint-stained paper in response to the wartime atmosphere. Surprise and
Inspiration (Venice, Guggenheim), originally called Wounded
Personage, equated the act of tearing with killing and the paint-soaked paper
with bandages. These collages, which heralded his lifelong commitment to the
medium, were presented as the focal point of his first one-man exhibition held
in 1944 at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery, New York.
During the 1940s, like many of his colleagues in the New York School,
Motherwell remained devoted to recognizable imagery, to the expressive
potential of calligraphic marks and to subject-matter of a literary and of a
political nature, as in Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (gouache and oil
with collage on cardboard, 1943; New York, MOMA). The abstract paintings for
which he is best known, such as Elegy to the Spanish Republic
XXXIV (1953–4; Buffalo, NY, Albright–Knox A.G.), one of a series of more
than 140 large canvases initiated in 1949, expressed a nostalgia that he shared
with many of his generation for the lost cause of the Spanish Civil War. The
works in this series typically consist of black, organic ovals squeezed by
stiff, vertical bars against a white ground, retaining the unpremeditated
quality of an ink sketch even when enlarged to enormous dimensions, as in the much
later Reconciliation Elegy . He conceived of the shapes as elements
within an almost musical rhythm, rich in associations with archetypal imagery
of figures or body parts but sufficiently generalized to convey a mood rather
than a specific representation.
During the
late 1940s and 1950s Motherwell spent much of his time lecturing and teaching;
he taught at Black Mountain College, NC, in 1950, and
from 1951 to 1959 at Hunter College, New York. He also worked on three
influential editorial projects: the Documents of Modern Art series, which he
initiated in 1944 and which included his most important literary contribution
to the history of modern art, The Dada Painters and Poets: An
Anthology (New York, 1951); Possibilities magazine, from 1947;
and Modern Artists in America (New York, 1951), which he co-authored
with Ad Reinhardt.
By the time that he returned fully to his art in the late 1950s, Motherwell had
developed various different series. The Elegies, severe in their
concentration on black and white and in their ever-growing scale, were the
vehicle of his most profound emotions, while the small oil paintings occasioned
by the decay of his second marriage, the Je t’aime series of 1954–8
(e.g. Je t’aime IIA, 1955; New York, Grossman priv. col., see
Sandler, 1970, p. 246), expressed more intimate and private feelings. His
collages, which he began to reproduce also by lithographic means in the 1960s,
began to incorporate material from his studio life, such as cigarette packets
and labels from artists’ supplies, so as to become records of his daily
experiences (e.g. Summer Lights Series published by Gemini GEL in
1973; see Arnason, 1982, pp. 203–6). The coastline near the artists’ colony of
Provincetown, MA, where Motherwell began to spend his summers in 1962, inspired
works such as Beside the Sea No. 5 (1962; artist’s col., see Sandler,
1970, p. 209), a series of 64 pictures in which he splashed oil paint against
rag paper with the full force of his arm as a physical equivalent for the
action of sea spray on the bulkhead in front of his studio.
From 1968 to 1972 Motherwell worked on a series of paintings with the generic
title Open as a personal response to the colour field painting made
by younger abstract painters in the 1960s. Typical of this more contemplative
strain of his art is Open No. 17: In Ultramarine with Charcoal
Line (polymer paint and charcoal on canvas, 1968; artist’s col., see H. Geldzahler: New
York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970, New York, 1969, p. 236), which consists
of a surface of a single colour on to which he has drawn three sides of a
rectangle in charcoal lines: an abstract equivalent to the views through open
windows favoured by European painters such as Matisse as metaphors for the
relationship between the interior world of the emotions and the external world
of the senses.
Motherwell’s first important print, the lithograph Poet I (London,
Tate), was published by Tatyana Grossman’s Universal Art Editions in 1961. He
subsequently produced an important body of printed work, notably A la
pintura (1972; London, BM), a limited edition book of 24 unbound pages
printed in letterpress, etching and colour aquatint, in which he exploited the
medium’s capacity for combinations of rich colour and exacting line to
approximate the sensuous effects of his paintings. One of Motherwell’s most
significant, late series of paintings and drawings was the Hollow Men.
While the title of these works is taken from T. S. Eliot’s poem of despair for
Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Motherwell’s paintings evoke a
different spirit: the artist’s desire to slice through superficiality and
reveal the essence of his art. As such, the Hollow Men incorporates
both the style of the Elegies and that of the Opens. The organic
forms of the Elegies are now translucent rather than solid, and
consequently more exposed; they are set against a threatening black ground. In
these shapes, Motherwell has also revealed more of his automatic drawing, which
he believed was the essence of his artistic personality, than in any
large-scale works since the 1950s. The Hollow Men stands as one of
Motherwell’s final attempts to assert the authenticity of his Abstract
Expressionist art.
Robert Saltonstall Mattison
From Grove Art Online
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