Page 23 - Studio International - January 1973

not to believe that this 'liveliness' of surface and Breton. He became an early and close where they discussed, among other things,
would not have been achieved without him. associate of Roberto Matta, a young South the need to 'find new images of man'
There were, after all, many forces working to American painter then concerned to revive the (Matta21) and the potentialities of automatic
that end. strategies of spontaneity which the European techniques.
Surrealists had largely abandoned in the Like Pollock, Motherwell was concerned to
3 ... and Surrealism thirties. Motherwell met Baziotes and Pollock work his way through synthetic-cubist
The coincidence of late-cubist concerns in the in 1942, and for a while at the close of that year versions of picture space towards a larger
most advanced European painters offered one they paid regular visits to Matta's studio, painting with a more 'active' surface; but his
crucial context of influence for the Americans. together with Kamrowski and Simon Busa20, means were less disruptive, more 'art-
A necessary antinomic context was provided by
that aspect of European Surrealism which
involved the combination of 'automatic'
techniques15 with an interest in primitive and
`archetypal' subject matter. The Americans'
application of the notion of automatism was
comparatively wide, so that in this context as
many disparate sources of influence were
rendered compatible as in the context of late-
cubist versions of pictorial space. (And of
course in much of Picasso's and of Mires
work the two were at least potentially
coincident.) Also, since the American painters
were by and large attracted to a Jungian rather
than Freudian view of 'unconscious',
`subconscious' or 'preconscious' imagery's, it
was not impossible for them to reconcile an
interest in techniques of spontaneity with an
interest in 'heroic' or 'epic' subjects. They
tended to see both as involving the production
of 'archetypes'. In the case of Pollock, for
instance, this involved a reconciliation of the
self-exploratory imagery and techniques of
Miró and Masson with the declarative imagery
and techniques of the Mexican mural painters —
notably Orozco — by whose work he had been
impressed at an earlier stage. The Picasso of the
thirties — the Picasso of Guernica — seemed
around 1940 to epitomize the possibilities
inherent in this conjunction, as the Picasso of
the twenties — the Picasso of the Three Dancers
seemed to epitomize the possibility of the
existence of 'strong' subject matter in late-
cubist space. Pollock in particular seems to have
been obsessed by Guernica'7. Picasso was
seen by many of the New York painters as more
or less omnipotent. 'On the WPA . . . we used
to practise a clandestine kind of automatic
drawing . . . Stuart Davis and Leger were big
influences in those days. But Picasso was God.
Picasso influenced all of us.' (Simon Busa18)
In the forties — and especially c. 1944-6 —
there was an overlying compatibility between
the consequences of the persistence of cubist
influence and the consequences of involvement
in surrealist strategies for 'freeing conscious
control over procedures of composition'.
Robert Motherwell was to a considerable
extent the spokesman to his colleagues for the
theoretical aspects of European Surrealism
in which he had received a thorough education,
largely from Seligmann, Matta and Paalen.
By his own account he 'explained' Surrealism to
Pollock, to Gorky and to Rothko.19 He was
well read in aesthetics and art history and had
been introduced as early as 1941 into the circle
of Surrealist emigres in New York which
included Tanguy, Masson, Duchamp, Ernst Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five 1947. Mixed media, 5o X 3o in. MOMA, gift of Peggy Guggenheim
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