Robert Motherwell
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"I DON'T KNOW what I think of that idea. I'd have to paint it and see." Motherwell set out to be a professor of philosophy, strayed into painting. As a result, he is spokesman for abstract expressionism as (in his experience) it developed out of surrealism. His disciplined thinking has afforded active defense for paintings and painters otherwise exposed in their irrationality. It has also doubtless clarified his own work, decanting language and leaving the paint in a pure state.
Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1915, was able to "draw anything by fifteen, learning from copying High Renaissance masters. . . . Drawing is a matter of internal rhythm. I never had anything to do with a model." He studied philosophy under Ralph Barton Perry at Harvard, aesthetics under David Prall, went to Paris in 1938 for a year of further study, and began to paint. He returned to study at Columbia with Meyer Shapiro, who introduced him to Kurt Seligmann. Through Seligmann he met other surrealists: Ernst, Tanguy, Masson, and most important for him, Matta.
At this time Motherwell was under the influence of Matisse's "bourgeois sensualism," and he had also taken to the use of collage, a technique for the manipulation of forms and textures which has stayed with him. "Now Matta was the decisive influence." He went to Mexico with Matta, began to work in "automatic abstract art," returned after half a year to see the surrealist exhibition at the Whitlaw Reid mansion, when he met Baziotes. He was given a one man show by Peggy Guggenheim in 1944.
Since then he had been seen yearly. Large canvases, mounting symbols which convey an hypnotic life-size effect, establish an art of subconscious imagery under conscious control. Two dimensional as a billboard or a page, its qualities were essentially mural. After a near decade of such personal imagery--in the midst of a communicative life enmeshed in the world about him-Motherwell had had the opportunity to work on a mural scale for a synagogue. This has suited his talent well, offering him a field where the language of symbols (visible thought) was formulated.
For Motherwell, such painters as Baziotes, Gottlieb, Rothko, Still, Tomlin, are on common ground, which they share with Matta, and Miro--"the greatest artist of the generation after Picasso." He is able to convey the thing which somehow makes them a group, the excited sense that the idiom of an epoch has been captured.
Motherwell: An artist's "art" is just his consciousness, developed slowly and painstakingly with many mistakes en route. . . .
Consciousness is not something that the painter's audience can be given; it must be gained, as it is by the painter, from experience. If this seems difficult, then-as Spinoza says at the end of his Ethic--all noble things are as difficult as they are rare.
Without . . . consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
Without . . . consciousness, the audience is only sensual, one of aesthetes.
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