Page 20 - Studio International - March 1966

Je t'aime IV 1955-57 broke free. Maybe Motherwell will—but still there's the lously deadpan way. No elation, no despondency:
Oil on canvas
70* x 100 in. implied 'event'. It is curious to compare his Emperor of things are as they are. American laconicism ? This does
Collection: Mr and Mrs Walter B. China or Homely Protestant with their sharply-par- not preclude tenderness. Feeling is behind the best of
Braiss, Munich
ticularized accents of anatomy—however mythical or Motherwell's work, but so far it is a narrow range of
invented—with the 17th-century Freake Limner's paint- feeling. There is either élan or pessimism.
ing of the lady and her baby. 5 The double nature of Motherwell's gift, its polarities,
4 An appetite for the souvenir is very marked in all make me think of gorillas inhabiting the Wallace
Motherwell's work. It can take the guise of a written Collection. Better, as if the Lascaux caves, with their
phrase, a scrap of poetry, a wine label, a ticket or luggage great echoing caverns of darkness, atavistic signs and
sticker or a fragment of a poster. But if they are souvenirs, symbols flickering by candlelight, and dark claustro-
incorporated within a general scheme, then they are phobia, like an immense stone womb—as if all this were
surprisingly free of nostalgia. suddenly irradiated by coloured streamers, gently-
All Motherwell's protestations about the evils or floating paper kites and brilliantly flashing, darting,
irrelevances of nostalgia—the freedom of Tart moderne' tropical birds. All in terms of consistent puritanism.
as he calls it, and all that—pale beside the fact that it's This is when he's good. At its worst, the work is
damned hard to use a ready-made scrap of printed inclined to be ponderous, with too much reliance on
paper or any object at all without invoking nostalgic the potency of gesture as a form of magic in itself.
references. However irreverently it's done. The Dada- Perhaps it's time he left the caves. There are signs that
ists continually fell into the trap. But Motherwell's his thought is emerging. He uses the word 'syndrome'
'souvenirs' are talismans for the future rather than frequently; is he aware of his own? Almost certainly.
mementoes of the past. How is this achieved ? 6 Perhaps this polarity has a further meaning. 'When
He lacks, totally, the sensuality, insouciance and you start to do a thing well, stop doing it'. (I believe in
sheer spirit of Matisse, and yet these fragments are periodic disruption, anyway.) In the realm of perfor-
incorporated into paintings and collages in a marvel- mance it is often true that an artist is sometimes best