During his lifetime, Robert Motherwell often fretted that curators and critics had no sense of the totality of his vision. He felt they too often probed or highlighted his tentative, developmental forms and overlooked the continuity of his coursing growth as a 20th Century master artist.
In order to rectify this myopia, he became de facto curator of ”Robert Motherwell: The Open Door,” which opened earlier this month at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth for its only United States viewing.
Motherwell agonized for seven months over the choice of pictures, the vast majority of which were drawn from his own collection and have never been seen before. Many of the largest canvases were on rollers in warehouses along the Hudson River, and he had not viewed them for 20 or 30 years. He did not complete the selection of objects until July 10, less than two months before the opening of the collection`s first installation at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City. On July 17, he died after suffering a stroke at his home on Cape Cod at age 76.
Organized by the Mexican government and InterCultura, a Fort Worth-based nonprofit organization, the results of Motherwell`s own editing of his work are more comprehensive than he may have intended.
Regardless of what he hoped this exhibition to achieve-or what his sparring partners in academia, museums and the press may have asserted previously-it is clear now that Motherwell ultimately may be judged as a better teacher than painter.
Also, instead of being a lugubrious existential thinker, Motherwell consistently indulged in visual puns drawn from a small symbolic language of his own making which, this exhibition makes clear, were more important to him than the painstaking execution of paintings. Sometimes thought of as the most European member of the New York School, or abstract expressionists, Motherwell`s intellectual sensibilities and intensity were Gallic no doubt, but in the spirit of Rabelais, not Sartre.
It is rare and exciting to be able to start evaluating the whole of a great painter`s work so soon after his death. The 68 pictures-by no means a large number compared to a sweeping retrospective-plus the purely intellectual implications of this installation, nonetheless sorely test a viewer`s ability to encompass everything in a single visit and then retain it.
Apart from eight massive magisterial paintings off by themselves, pictures are hung according to scale and color in gallery groupings without particular regard for chronology. (Motherwell left behind no suggestions to curators on how to hang the installations.) Although the paintings do banter interestingly in conversations among themselves, that visual small-talk ultimately obscures the role of individual paintings as players in much more important issues.
As a result, the first impression of Motherwell is as a highly agitated, puzzlingly grim fellow with a short attention span. The old bugaboo keeps coming to mind: that Motherwell was three or four painters trying to live in one body.
However, a number of clarifying impressions emerge and then persist in their defiance of those mistaken notions. Most immediately, for all his iconographic invention and span of media, Motherwell selected a surprisingly narrow palette and stuck with it through a half-century. Like a college professor attempting to teach a complex introductory course to sophomores, Motherwell knew to keep his language simple.
Among the three earliest paintings in the show, ”Spanish Picture with Window,” ”Maria (Emilia Ferreira y Moyers),” and ”Recuerdo de Coyoacan,” all oils on canvas from 1941, virtually his entire lifetime color cast-with one notable exception-is laid out. The pinks and the reds, which reach from subtle crimson to the most striking scarlet, are especially notable in these three pictures. Their reappearance throughout the exhibition reverberates soothingly and helps lace some cogence into the otherwise massively divergent forms within Motherwell`s works.
While the pinks are certainly important enough to contend with, as something linguists would call a structural element if nothing else, it is nonetheless impossible to escape the sense that for Motherwell they served often as warm-ups, as preparation for the explosive laying down of reds which flash compulsively in and out of his paintings. ”Little Spanish Death,” a small study in pinks and black acrylic on canvas from 1980, could easily be in the swelling artistic upsurge which resulted in ”Face of the Night (For Octavio Paz).”
Further enforcing the importance of consistent formal elements throughout his career span, beginning with those three early pieces, is an additionally independent and persistent use of brilliant reds-on canvases that, while similarly large, bear no visual relation whatsoever to ”Face” and the many other huge horizontal black forms which are considered Motherwell`s signature work.
Their brooding darkness became so central a part of Motherwell`s identity because of the years he devoted to the ”Elegy for the Spanish Republic”
series. His ”Phoenician Red Studio” done in 1977 of acrylic and charcoal on canvas and ”The Disappearance of Goya`s Dog” of acrylic and papier on a canvas panel in 1990 are the liveliest examples in Fort Worth of scarlet ascending.
The only color missing from the early `40s pictures was a distinctive blue that Motherwell began using by the mid-1950s, a somewhat darker version of robin`s egg. It, too, is generously represented throughout the show in both large and small scales, making its debut in ”Blue Collage” done in 1958.
”The Voyage: Ten Years After” of 1961 is the most notable example of large-scale breakaway in the exhibition, and it pivots around a dribbled smear of Motherwell blue.
Viewed in tandem with ”Maria (Emilia Ferreira y Moyers),” one of the three early openers, ”Voyage” builds the case for Motherwell`s having been a merry prankster.
”Maria” clearly evokes the 1656 portrait of the Infanta Dona Margarita by Diego Velazquez, an icon incorporated within ”Las Meninas.” Perhaps the most visually and allegorically complex painting by the introspective Spanish master, in it Velazquez studies himself, the past and the future, and the essential character of his royal patron Philip the Fourth of Spain.
When Motherwell painted ”Maria,” he was living in Mexico and drinking deeply and consciously of Spanish culture. He claimed throughout his life that the years in Mexico gave birth to him as an artist.
And what greater artist and intellect for such a young man to emulate than Velazquez? Always considered a thinker and a true cosmopolite, Motherwell-a recent philosophy graduate of Stanford to boot-had by the early
`40s constructed most of the visual vocabulary he was to employ for the rest of his career. Perhaps its syntax ebbed and flowed, its specific imagery evolving into different forms or falling by the wayside; but his intellectual and visual guides were clearly marked early on, and he remained true to them. Like Velazquez, Motherwell played with his basic subject matter-in his case, media and pigments-manipulating them into painterly deception.
”Voyage” is an example: although painted in acrylic, the effect is clearly that of oil-based paint, and more precisely in some planes, of crude oil freshly smeared from the barrel onto the canvas, something the upcoming generation of young German artists like Georg Herold is only recently getting around to. ”Altamira 2” done in 1975 is another example of the deception.
Far from being the humorless existentialist, painter of countless grim memorials to the death of democracy in Spain, Motherwell had every reason to chuckle at the tendentious pieties of curators and auctioneers who never quite seemed to get it. Now that he is gone, his little ”Maria” can keep on smiling for quite some time.
Finally, this exhibit suggests that Motherwell was more interested in his ideas than in the paintings which conveyed them. How else to explain satisfactorily the consistently thin execution and poor physical condition of many works in this exhibition?
”Totemic Figure,” a 1962 oil on canvas, is a notable example: a very young canvas in terms of the great longevity oil paintings can easily achieve, it is in appalling condition, with crackling and flaking so extensive that even the worst storage conditions could not account for. Cavalier priming of the canvas and rapid, indifferent brushstrokes are the chief suspects.
