Page 22 - Studio International - March 1966
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journey, but he is avid for the voyage, which is rather refinement (the devastating aptness and frugality of
different. Having embarked, he must continue. His American taste), many qualities, but no sensuality.
psychic automatism' must mean continually moving I come back again to my notion of America being
into the unknown. How wide and how deep are the founded on an idea and therefore its ideals must be
soundings you can make? achieved by correspondingly abstract processes. The
Wall painting with stripes 1944 10 Much talk with Motherwell of sensuality and its strong metaphysical and transcendental drive ; pious
54 x 67} in. non-appearance in American art. Passion, yes : and and noble aspirations made fiercer by the recognition
Oil on canvas
Collection: J. Patrick Lannan rage, exaltation, tragedy, humour, delicacy, intense of corruption, decadence, and plain old-fashioned evil ;
the hymnal 'ascension' device in American music. All
American artists I've ever met, with any talent, deplore
the economic and social jungle they find themselves in.
They are idealistic puritans : they enjoy the good things
of life but they do not want to pay the present price
for them. Many have died from the strain of it all.
Gorki, Tomlin, Baziotes, Pollock, Kline, Smith. Several
died violently. It was the same with de Steel in Europe.
But in America, unless I am sentimentalizing the
situation, a strained conscience is raging against crass
opportunism, complacent nationalism, and promotion
disguised as commitment'.
11 The American Conscience is an elaborate and totally
unassuageable reality. It is in Henry James, Hawthorne,
Purdy, Albee and others. This same sense of out-
rage, of violation, feeds the work of the alarming
Kienholtz and that most misunderstood and aesthetic-
ally underestimated artist, Warhol—who is obsessed
with death : bodies falling in suicide from skyscrapers,
lynchings in the South, automobile wrecks, Liz Taylor
sick and garishly made up, Marilyn Monroe after
death, expendable objects and so on.
There is no time for sensuality in all this; and the
word 'camp', so confused now in connotations, does
not apply. Camp is infantilism : this is fiercely adult.
12 Sensuality, in the way in which it transforms a
Titian or a Matisse, a Michelangelo, a Chou bronze or
a Khmer carving, can only come as a by-product, a
throw-away gesture from a very ancient civilization.
It is an implicit part of a culture well past maturity;
made physically real in art by men of great gifts, but
projected unconsciously. Perhaps Rothko has it.
Pollock had, on occasion—Easter and the totem, Four
opposites; Krasner in Earth green; Frankenthaler
touches it very often. Motherwell embraced it in the
Je t'aime paintings and sometimes shakes hands with
it in other works. But often he only goes through the
motions of it. An austere sense of luxury.
I do not equate sensuality with ease or repose. But
there must be a suggestion of these conditions : an
allowance made for them, at least. Motherwell is after
the controlled wildness (and sensuality) of Monteverdi
—and that sparse purity of line and economy of texture.
13 Motherwell did not, in my view, have as much to
do with abstract expressionism as he imagines. His
knowledge of the central issues of modern art, and
what 'has fed them—the tradition and its flowering
make him an articulate spokesman. The written work
is invaluable, but Motherwell is sometimes carried away
with ideas. They are not always applicable to his
Irish elegy 1965
69 1/2 x 83 3/4 in. Acrylic on canvas
Collection: The Artist
Courtesy: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery. New York
