ROBERT MOTHERWELL
Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) was the youngest and one of the principle members of the Abstract Expressionists who during the 1940s and 50s transformed the history of American painting. Motherwell was also an extremely talented printmaker and draughtsman and a writer and theorist on art. The quality of his works lies in their power to suggest so many rich and varied analogies. He is deeply indebted to the romantic and symbolist movements, particularly of nineteenth-century France. Like the symbolist writers who chose language that evoked a wide range of associations and encouraged multiple layers of meaning, Motherwell assembles poetic metaphors to create a modern, personal iconography.
During a transformative voyage to Mexico in 1941 with his friend the young surrealist painter Robert Matta, Motherwell developed his creative principle based on surrealist automatism. This involved tapping into the unconscious and exploring the possibilities of free association and spontaneous technique. Motherwell’s style could be defined as abstract automatism, which became one of the key tenets of Abstract Expressionism. One of his greatest innovations was writing on the canvas (‘Je t’aime’) – a method adopted by his pupil Cy Twombly – in works that expressed his most intimate and private feelings. Motherwell was also impressed by the earthly vitality of the people in Mexico and their straightforwardness of feeling and he sought to convey similar qualities in his own art. Prior to this he had lived for some time in California and absorbed the warm brown colours of the earth and the ultramarine tone of the sky perceived in long open horizon lines. He associated these broad, continuous fields of colour with a similar sense of freedom and life to that discovered in Mexico, and incorporated them into many of his Opens – a series of paintings and prints begun in 1967 and developed across nearly two decades.
Intimate and meditative, the Opens consist of a unified field of colour, broken up by minimally rendered lines in loosely rectangular configurations. These works were initially inspired by the shadowed rectangle created by the accidental juxtaposition of two different sized canvases. The Opens suggest a sensation of ascension and Motherwell has described some of them as ‘an opening into an airy, rising world’, though they have also been interpreted more figuratively as windows or doors. Matisse’s paintings, which bear the imprint of the nineteenth-century fascination with Japonisme, are crucial to the Opens, in particular his Porte-fenêtre à Couilloure (1914). There is an affinity between Japanese Zen painting and Motherwell’s work – the obvious reduction in colour, the predominance of black and white, the importance of gesture and most importantly the discovery of the metaphysical void. Both are built on the conception that one begins with an empty space and that the subject is what animates this space. This notion relates to another important theme in Motherwell’s work, that of the voyage and the idea of navigating over a vast nothingness. The Opens achieve this through remarkably minimal means, counterbalancing the surface tension in the background plane with its subtle gestures of Abstract Expressionism.
In contrast to the Opens that express feelings of continuity, serenity and freedom, Motherwell’s Elegies are based on the conflict and tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. This series, whose recurring motif is a rough black oval, consists of over a hundred works made between 1948 and 1967. They are among Motherwell’s most renowned images and some the most important paintings of the twentieth century. Sombre, barbaric and compelling, they consist of broad, massive forms dramatically applied in black paint on the white canvas. These heavy, slow-moving shapes have been interpreted variously as metaphors for the struggle between life and death, memory and loss, and duality in the human psyche. The Elegies exemplify the artist’s persistent re-examination of a single theme and its endless potential and relevance. He described his art as ‘circular rather than linear’, and indeed he seemed to return to a few essential motifs throughout his life, but always with significant variations that resulted from new life experiences. Motherwell believed in the power of archetypes such as the ‘open’ and the ‘elegy’, and of their ability to express feelings in art that could be simultaneously personal and universal.
To accommodate the greatest range of thought and feeling, Motherwell has worked in other media such as collage, an interest prompted initially by the collector Peggy Guggenheim’s invitation to produce collages for an exhibition in 1944. These works are topical and wide-ranging, mirroring the experience of daily life. As such, they serve as a fascinating souvenir or record of the artist’s visual, intellectual and sensuous encounters. Motherwell’s early collage works from the 1940s and 50s will be exhibited again at the Guggenheim Museum in Venice in a show in 2013.