Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell (1915-1991)

Robert Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington, and grew up in San Francisco. During the 1930s, as an undergraduate at Stanford, he studied Freudian psychology and literature, particularly that of the French Symbolists. As a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard, aesthetics was his interest. In 1940 he entered Columbia's graduate program in art history. There he attended art history classes taught by Meyer Shapiro, who encouraged him to become an artist.

In 1941 Motherwell met Roberto Matta, the Chilean artist who introduced him to Surrealism and with whom he traveled to Mexico. Motherwell was strongly influenced by Matta's concept of artistic automatism, which emphasized the spontaneous gesture. During the 1940s Motherwell developed a spontaneous, painterly style through which he rendered semiabstract, figural imagery, often related in theme to French Symbolist poetry or to Spanish culture. In 1943, inspired by the work of Kurt Schwitters and Henri Matisse, Motherwell began to experiment with collage. The following year, only three years after deciding to become an artist, he had his first one-man exhibition, at Peggy Guggenheim's New York gallery, Art of This Century. Toward the end of the decade, Motherwell transformed his collages into large-scale canvases, in paintings such as “Voyage” (1949; Museum of Modern Art, New York).

Motherwell was enormously productive during the 1950s. He developed the theme of the Elegies to the Spanish Republic, which he would paint until the end of his career. The large-scale, gestural, and painterly works based on this leitmotif secured Motherwell's position as a prominent Abstract Expressionist, winning him much critical acclaim. He also continued to explore and expand the medium of collage, which he considered a modern substitute for still-life painting. His autobiographical and lyrical collages incorporate materials from his daily life. Marking an important shift in mood and style, Motherwell began the Open series in 1968. Remaining a primary focus until 1974, these works consist of a single field of rich color accented only by three lines forming an "open" rectangle. The Open series takes into account the flat color-field paintings produced by other artists of the 1960s yet also retains Motherwell's characteristic scale, painterly gesture, and sensuous color. In the years following the Open series, the artist continued to explore variations on collage as well as gestural and color-field painting.

In addition to being recognized as an Abstract Expressionist, Motherwell wrote extensively on art throughout his career. He was the editor of the “Documents of Modern Art” and co-edited the journal “Possibilities” (1947-1948) with the critic Harold Rosenberg. Motherwell taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina (1945-51) and founded the School of Fine Arts in New York (1949-50). His first major retrospective, one of many, was at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965. Motherwell died in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he had lived for the last twenty years of his life.

Elegy with Opening, 1984

Acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 24 x 36 in. (61 x 91.4 cm)

Signed (upper right, scratched through top paint layer): R M; signed (verso, center): “R Motherwell / July 1984”

Museum Purchase (Charles F. Smith Fund) and Gift of the Dedalus Foundation (1995.09)

Painted in the last decade of his life, “Elegy with Opening” belongs to the series entitled Elegies to the Spanish Republic which Motherwell began in 1949. Four stylistic phases, sometimes overlapping, may be identified in the Elegies theme: 1. early works associated with the discovery and invention of the Elegy format; 2. paintings representing the development and refinement of that format; 3. explosive painterly Elegies; and 4. the studied and subdued compositions of later years. “Elegy with Opening” thus has its origins in a stylistic and thematic schema established by the artist at mid-century.

In 1949 Motherwell fortuitously rediscovered a small drawing he had made the previous year that was intended to accompany a poem by Harold Rosenberg published in “Possibilities”. Motherwell was so inspired by the drawing that he incorporated it as the basis for a slightly larger work, “At Five in the Afternoon” (private collection). The title echoes the refrain of a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca, whose writings had deeply impressed Motherwell. That year Motherwell enlarged the format again in “Granada” (1949; National Trust for Historic Preservation, Washington, D.C.), the work that marked the beginning of the Elegies series. This group of paintings, characterized by the expression of emotion through abstract form, gestural and painterly technique, somber subject, and monumental scale, secured Motherwell's reputation as an Abstract Expressionist. Begun as the artist's personal response to the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, the large-scale Elegies were meant to evoke, through the dichotomy of dramatic oppositions, the conflict and tension of life and death. As Motherwell said, the Spanish Civil War was "the first public event in which I felt deeply emotionally involved. . . . It seemed to me something beautiful and marvelous had died, . . . and if I were to elegize something, . . . I preferred then to connect it with something . . . of great consequence." (1) This theme was so important to the artist that he had painted more than one hundred Elegies by late 1965.

In spite of considerable differences in scale, “Elegy with Opening” has much in common with Elegies of previous decades. The use of black versus white, the rectangular black panel versus the biomorphic curving oval, and the articulation of space and light versus closure and density are metaphoric oppositions that remain constant throughout the series. “Elegy with Opening” demonstrates the artist's continued preference for painterly surfaces with subtly modulated, sensual qualities. Painterly black edges further indicate the specific touch of the artist and are quintessential Motherwell. Moreover, color is used sparingly, as sparks of brilliant blue and hot yellow that punctuate small areas of the sooty gray, charcoal, and black surface. Like other Elegies, “Elegy with Opening” remains decidedly abstract, conveying its meaning directly and immediately through the associative, symbolic, and interactive properties of color and form. As Motherwell stated, "'Meaning' was the product of relations among elements." (2)

If color, form, and subject are inextricably bound, “Elegy with Opening” suggests that life and death are inseparable and intertwined. Of color, Motherwell explained that black and white were "protagonists in the struggle between life and death." (3) The protagonists interact most dramatically in the left third of the canvas, where the black oval encroaches upon a rectangular "opening" of white light framed in black. Motherwell's statement about "death contrasted with the dazzle of a Matisse-like sunlight" seems especially apt in relation to “Elegy with Opening”. (4) If white is associated with life, the white "opening" also counters the black of death, evoking a host of associations as a portal, a threshold, and the idea of passage or transcendence. In 1980 Motherwell stated that white has always conveyed the "radiance of life" and that "death has been a continual living presence." (5) His use of color and form in “Elegy with Opening” suggests the interaction of life and death, which remained the essential subject of his career.

LF

Bibliography:

Robert C. Hobbs, "Motherwell's Concern with Death in Painting: An Investigation of His Elegies to the Spanish Republic Including an Examination of His Philosophical and Methodological Considerations," Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1975; E. A. Carmean, "Elegies to the Spanish Republic," in E. A. Carmean and Eliza Rathbone, “American Art at Mid-Century: The Subjects of the Artist” (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1978): 95-122; H. H. Arnason, “Robert Motherwell”, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982); Jack Flam, “Motherwell” (New York: Rizzoli, 1991); Mary Ann Caws, “Robert Motherwell” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

NOTES:

. Motherwell in conversation with Bryan Robertson, "Art: N.Y.," TV broadcast produced by Colin Clark, Channel 13, New York, December 15, 1964 (typescript in Motherwell Papers, Greenwich, Conn.), quoted in Hobbs, "Motherwell's Concern," p. 176.

2. Ibid., p. 24.

3. Quoted in Grace Glueck, "The Mastery of Robert Motherwell," “New York Times Magazine”, December 2, 1984, p. 82.

4. Quoted in Carmean and Rathbone, “American Art”, p. 102.

5. Quoted in E. A. Carmean, ed., “Robert Motherwell: The Reconciliation Elegy” (Geneva and New York: Skira/Rizzoli, 1980), pp. 74-76.