Page 19 - Studio International - March 1966

From a notebook on Robert Motherwell

by Bryan Robertson

1 Meticulous and precise sense of flat placement rather controlled and classical lucidity, compression. The
than an involuntary or compulsive organization of forms coupling of sex with death. Expansion and contraction.
in space: the structure is frontal and vertical, con- In some ways the whole of Motherwell's range has
sistently so. The shapes, the marks are certainly organ- been described, as early as 1943, by three paintings :
ized, but deployed is a better word : deployed laterally. The joy of living, Mallarmé's swan (collage with very
Cubism is totally irrelevant : its principles may have been acute sense of placement and stability, also the begin-
intellectually apprehended but they have not been felt; nings of a certain elegance not without guts) and most
nor have they been by any other American painter. A notably Wall painting with stripes. This last contains the
useful omission. Cubism was for the Cubists, the seeds of the whole of his classical side. Much later, the
implications of Surrealism were for everyone. Je t'aime series.
The constituent parts of a Robert Motherwell painting Most recently, the big new paintings In green and
or collage are distributed with such inevitable weight— ultramarine and Dublin 1916 come near to balancing
or finesse, depending on mood—that placement is the the equation. The two Africa paintings are more perfect,
only word for this action : 'placing' lacks the forcefulness though, and are clearly the distillation, so far, of
of what is engendered from the canvas or paper. the other, wilder side. Perhaps they are an alternative
'Meticulous', yes, but the process is not painstaking. synthesis : the classical sensibility and refinement bear-
All traces of effort, strain or struggle are effaced from the ing down upon the passion and controlling it as opposed
final work. The image retains its emotional undertones. to the Je t'aime paintings when the calligraphy, the
Considering its compressed energy—sometimes real heated gesture and the meaning of the words ( ? cheat-
forcefulness—this is an achievement. 'The American ing), disrupt the innately classical distribution of forces.
thing is the vitality of movement, so that there need be 3 Possibly this placement idea is part of an American
nothing against which the movement shows as move- inheritance in art. But how dangerous and facile are
ment', said Gertrude Stein (an occasional sage producing these speculations in national traits. I'm thinking really
sentences of concentrated truth with the implacability of the artists of the colonial period who were also
of sculpture). In Motherwell's case, you can substitute explorers and recorders and naturalists. The obsession
the word 'concentration', in an active living and with an image that is so strong that the image becomes
breathing sense, for 'movement'. Movement or action an event, a celebration (or a mass, a litany, in Mother-
in the form of a circle, an inevitability, so that you live well's case), seems constant. I think of Audubon and
a lifetime moving from A through to A again. the earlier limners and sign-writers, Currier and Ives,
2 Marked limitation of formal vocabulary since 1943. Catlin, Harnett, and obviously Hopper. Kline had a
Mainly whittled down to the circle, the triangle and the sense of place, which was also an action, and an event—
square—not the cone, the cube, the cylinder ... Equally however abstract. The greatest American artists needed
marked imbalance between wildness and centrifugal it: Whistler, Homer, Eakins, even old Ryder had an
expressionist markings and composition and a more ineradicable affection for place. Pollock and Rothko

Left
Joy of living 1943
43 1/2 x 33 1/4 in.
Collage
Collection: Saidie A. May
Right
N.R.F. Collage Number 2 1960
28 1/8 x 21 1/2 in.
Oil and collage on paper
Collection: Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York