The Abstract Expressionism of Robert Motherwell

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Robert Motherwell—Works on Paper

Eleanor Robbins looks at the drawings of a major Abstract Expressionist

Robert Motherwell was what is termed ‘a curious learner’ and, unusually for a painter, he spent more time studying academic subjects such as philosophy, literature and art history than he ever did at art school. After gaining a degree at Stanford he embarked on a PhD at Harvard, which took him to Paris to investigate Romanticism and Delacroix’s Journals.  He encountered the full force of modernism, including the notion that art is not just an aesthetic, but more a way of life and that the preoccupation of the artist should be ‘to describe not the object itself, but the effect it produces’.  In his writings, Motherwell said that he was quite taken by the image of the poet (or artist) working ‘late at night—changing, blotting, transferring, transforming each word and its relations with such care…’  and in his own work we see this purposeful use of formal means hoping to reveal some ‘wider reality’. 

Back in New York, he encountered the Surrealists, studied with one, learned from another and immersed himself in the delights and problems associated with automatism and using painterly means to reach ‘the real functioning of the mind’. Motherwell, whose own writings give substance to the essay in this catalogue, said that he visited Max Ernst once while he was working in a studio in Provincetown, on Cape Cod.  He watched him ‘making automatic paintings on the floor, with a paint bucket wired six feet from the ceiling with a small hole in the bottom dripping black paint on to a canvas beneath, in splattered arcs, varying according to how widely and in what direction he swung the paint bucket hanging on its wire…’ But Motherwell never became fully engaged in Surrealism, although he greatly admired the artists’ means of arriving at new subject matter and the possibilities of new pictorial methods. For Motherwell always ‘the deepest discoveries in art have to do with the artists’ materials, the liquids, grounds, instruments, brushes, sticks, palette knives, pen points, whatever’ and his personal style has more to do with a his sense of interval, of placement and his particular line than it has to do with the Surrealists’ concept of the unconscious.

This little book accompanies an exhibition of Motherwell’s drawings at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery in London (until 26 November 2011).  One of the larger drawings in the exhibition (and beautifully reproduced in the book) is Beside the Sea No. 45 of 1967. The artist used acrylic and ink – ink for the splashes and acrylic paint for the more studied marks. The work was done while the artist was in staying in Provincetown, that narrow spit of land, surrounded by sea, at the tip of Cape Cod.  ‘I used to be struck by the beauty, the force and the grace, at high tide with a strong Southwest wind of sea spray spurting up, sometimes taller than a man, above the seawall.’ Experiments with paper thickness and force of brushstroke led to this shock of the sea, crashing against the concrete abutment and wet sand.

Less gestural and more studied than the Beside the Sea, Motherwell’s ‘Open Study’ series of 1968 is in charcoal on paper.  The charcoal dragged across the page reminds one a little of Matisse’s line drawings where each mark is endowed with a special importance and here, too, the line, the openings and the dots have that same sense of self-containment and definition. We have the sense that behind the pictorial expression lies an exceptional breadth of feeling and experience.

On one large wall of the gallery are 60 drawings from a group called the ‘Lyric Suite’, which date from 1965.  All the others were painted at various times throughout Motherwell’s career until 1990, the year he died. Most are in graphite or ink or acrylic on paper, although, for greater texture and effects of saturation, a good number are on rice paper.

It is the first time the artist’s drawings have been shown in Britain and both the show and the publication are of an unusually high quality in their presentation. Published by the Gallery itself, the book serves both as a catalogue to the exhibition and as a brief introduction to Motherwell as draughtsman.  It contains one essay and a very brief biography and a selected listing of collections where Motherwell’s paintings can be seen. The illustrations are excellent, even the soaking of paint into paper is easily perceived.  With works of this precision, it is a pleasure to see the publishers producing a catalogue of such quality.

 For the interested viewer it is always useful to observe the less formal side of an artist’s work, and perhaps to witness his wrestles with ideas or experiments in expression that can be reworked in a larger scale.  In a couple of these drawings, for instance, we can see the artist experimenting with ingenious media but still using the famous motif of his Elegy to the Spanish Republic. The richness and variety of these illustrations is invigorating to see and clearly supports the belief that Motherwell is a major figure in American  Abstract Expressionism.

The catalogue to Robert Motherwell – Works on Paper is published by the Bernard Jacobson Gallery and is available from the gallery.ISBN 978 1 872784 49 6