PAINTINGS, COLLAGES, DRAWINGS
Robert Motherwell, Samuel M. Kootz Gallery
Robert Motherwell: PAINTINGS, COLLAGES, DRAWINGS. New York: Samuel M. Kootz Gallery [1946]. Original edition. Large tan sheet printed in purple and folded twice as issued. Artwork, list of 22 works. Light edgewear and faint crease to panel center, otherwise a very good or better copy. Rare.
12.5 x 18 exhibition announcement folded twicefor the exhibition from January 2 – 19, 1946. List of 22 paintings, collages, and drawings. Motherwell’s second solo exhibition, following his October 1944 show “Robert Motherwell: Paintings, Papiers Collés, Drawings” at Art of This Century, New York.
Robert Motherwell (1915 – 1991) was an 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) and The Voyage (1949), 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.
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. 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), 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, 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 (1943). 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.