Binding Motherwell: Modernism and the catalogue raisonné

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Robert Motherwell: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1941–1991

By Jack Flam, Katy Rogers and Tim Clifford

Robert Motherwell, who died in 1991 at the age of 76, was one of the key members of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the States. The Dedalus Foundation, which he set up in 1981, has now published a three-volume catalogue of paintings and collages. There are 1209 paintings on canvas or panel, with 889 collages and 722 paintings on paper. There are also his early, pre-1941works: enough for three early exhibitions but known now only through nine modest works separately illustrated in volume 1.

Motherwell is now one of the best-documented Abstract Expressionists. As Jack Flam argues in volume I, Motherwell created a varied ‘vocabulary of formal patterns, colors and gestures’ rather than a trademark single type of image, and he felt much more strongly rooted in European modernism than many of his contemporaries. One cannot help feeling that the two are connected, and that the breadth and depth of his cultural resources allowed for the sustenance and continuing unfolding of Motherwell’s art right up to his death in 1991.

Tim Clifford’s detailed chronology has a wealth of insider information about how exhibitions and projects came about (or didn’t). For instance, we learn that Rothko’s famous The Romantics Were Prompted essay was actually extensively rejigged and titled by Motherwell. My favourite bit involved Motherwell’s automatist Christmas cards, which he made in 1941 only to be castigated by the Surrealist, André Breton, for being so bourgeois as to celebrate Christmas!

Volume II covers the paintings on canvas or board and volume III the collages and works on paper. Materials, signing, provenance, exhibitions and bibliography (vast in the case of some paintings) are covered as well as references and known details of each painting’s production, including much information about Motherwell’s frequent repaintings.

The complete catalogue of an artist’s work (the catalogue raisonné) is always a magnificent achievement of research and overnight makes accessible all that is known, allowing us to see easily and intimately patterns of art-making normally known only to specialists. This catalogue is no exception.

There is a problem here in that for Motherwell modern art involved an automatist process at some stage, in which decisions could be made rather quickly and one category of work might then draw on another in a new hybrid. Many early works I had thought of as paintings surprised me by being substantially collages (e.g. Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, 1943) and, while many early collages were heavily painted (e.g. Joy of Living, 1943), many early paintings clearly drew on collage. Flam openly discusses the difficulties he had in deciding whether a work is a painting or a collage.

While paintings on canvas tend to be regarded as more ‘major works’ than collages, from 1943 onwards the practice of collage clearly helped Motherwell construct the sort of formal and expressive contrasts central to his mature aesthetic. From the late 1950s, the categories of painting and collage became fluid again; for example, certain Beside the Sea paintings became collages. Something similar is seen from the 1970s, as when Motherwell had collage elements lithographed as enlarged facsimiles on which he then painted, before remaking the whole as lithographs. He also tore up prints for collages or kept a common abstract printed base and serially changed the painted and collaged forms around or on top of that base.

So marked in Motherwell’s work is this modernist fluidity and un-settling that the standard format of the catalogue raisonné (based on separation by media) cannot help but conflict with it, attempting to categorise works that resist categorization. Happily, Volume I interweaves the strands of Motherwell’s work together, counteracting this limitation.

In order to understand Motherwell in a broader context, readers coming fresh to him will need some background reading, such as Stephen Polcari’s Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience. Thus, when he discusses the earliest work, Flam is particularly good at identifying the lines or texts of various writers that Motherwell knew. Yet he not willing to go farther afield and speculate how Freud’s concepts of competing ‘drives’, which he dubbed Eros (life, love and sexuality) and Thanatos (death, violence and aggression) may have informed, for example, Motherwell’s early Elegies to the Spanish Republic. Nor does Flam consider how the leftist politics of the 1930s were transformed into the existentialism of the 1950s. By then, citing the Republican defeat in Spain was a way of confirming one’s liberal progressivism.

That said, one of the superlative strengths of this catalogue is its documenting of the various changes that Motherwell’s paintings underwent over time. Critics can now try to ponder why, exactly, Motherwell made the changes he did to a particular collage or painting. Moreover, the information here offers plenty of scope for curators to put together really interesting shows, which will deepen our appreciation of how Motherwell created such a fresh and powerfully affective body of work. As Jack Flam writes in his introduction, ‘a catalogue raisonné can tell us things about an artist that nothing else can’, and this catalogue is certainly no exception.

Robert Motherwell: Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1941-1991 (3 volumes), by Jack Flam, Katy Rogers, and Tim Clifford, is published by Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2012. 1672pp, 3098 illus, £200.00 ISBN 978-0-300-14915-9