Art Review
A Painter’s Cut-and-Paste Prequel
‘Robert Motherwell: Early Collages,’ at the Guggenheim
Karsten Moran for The New York Times
‘Robert Motherwell: Early Collages’:
A look at the new show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
By HOLLAND COTTER
Abstract Expressionism is overrated. And it wasn’t initially a movement
or style at all. It was a bunch of unalike artists, some great, some
not, who shared a city, a war, some ideas and a bar, circa 1940. Pretty
much everything else, including a fecund two-decade fad for soulful
painting that grew from that moment, was largely a product of marketing
and myth spinning.
That, at least, is the way future historians may well see AbEx’s
“heroic” origins. And they’ll see that Robert Motherwell (1915-91) — a
born explainer, neatener and networker — had a ground-level role in
creating the brand, narrowing it to a specific kind of art that
purportedly channeled emotion through gesture. But Motherwell also
coined a more realistically neutral and accommodating label for the
vanguard art of the time: the New York School. That name covered a lot
of stylistic ground.
So did he when he began his career. We see him hard at work at it in “Robert Motherwell: Early Collages”
at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. And it’s a bracing, mettlesome,
variegated sight, surprisingly so, given this artist’s reputation for
formulaic elegance and AbEx orthodoxy.
In reality, Motherwell always stood slightly apart from other
characters, even in standard tellings of the New York School tale. To
Pollock’s loutish cowboy and de Kooning’s Olympian swashbuckler, he
plays the genteel, brainy West Coast kid, a want-to-be painter, writer
and philosophy scholar who arrived in Manhattan in 1940 to study art
history with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia.
Cultural traffic was heavy in the city just then, as émigré artists,
fleeing the war in Europe, poured in, among them Fernand Léger, Piet
Mondrian, and a raft of Parisian Surrealists. Because Motherwell spoke
fluent French — he had spent time in Paris — and was literary minded,
Schapiro enlisted him to meet and greet the refugees, making him one of
the few people in the New York art world with ready and continuing
access to them.
Within the Surrealist circle, he encountered the young Chilean-born
painter Roberto Matta, and they became, for a while, fast friends. It
was through Matta that he met a crucial mentor, the collector and
impresaria Peggy Guggenheim, who was about to open a
gallery-museum-salon called the Art
of This Century. And it was Matta who, on a joint trip to Mexico in
1941, fully initiated Motherwell into Surrealist automatism, an
improvisatory technique that radically loosened up his idea of what art
could be and how he could make it.
By 1943, he loosened up enough to take a stab at collage making, and
Guggenheim provided the occasion. She was planning a big collage survey
that would bring together European past masters of the form like Arp,
Braque and Picasso with American newcomers. She wanted Motherwell in the
mix. She gave him a deadline and said: Get to work. He did. One of the
collages that resulted is in the present show.
It’s titled “Joy of Living,”
though there isn’t much joy evident in this moody, unkempt concoction
of smudged ink, nervy doodles and perspectival geometry, punctuated by a
scrap cut from a military map and a sprinkling of curious red stains on
a patch of white paper, like blood seeping through a bandage.
The piece was a hit. It attracted critical notice and even found a
buyer, not bad for a first time out. And this public success set the
seal on Motherwell’s newfound infatuation with what would become his
primary medium over the next several years and the locus of some of the
most interesting work he would ever do.
His paintings and drawings over a long career ahead would often be
repetitive and predictable. Not these early pieces, though. A few settle
for easy Gallic élan, and, Lord knows, there are Picassoisms flitting
everywhere here. But other collages look bulky and dark, even slightly
monstrous. They’re heavily labored but raw, as if he’d slaved over them
until he just couldn’t bear to another minute and stopped. This
impression of effort is probably partly a result of wrestling with
formal demands that were new to him, involving the gestureless,
surprisingly complicated physics of cutting, tearing, layering and
gluing. Plus he was dealing with unfamiliar materials, most of them
ready-made and therefore potentially intractable: papers of different
weight, patterned and not; high- and low-grade inks, kindergarten
gouaches, adhesives that discolored or bled.
The tone of much of this early work though, alternately brooding and
volatile, comes from its expressive content. Motherwell once said that
he had been obsessed with the idea of death since he was a child. And
that obsession is there in his art from the start.
The much-exhibited 1943 collage-painting “Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive”
is based on a very specific image of death, a 1923 photograph of the
corpse of Villa, the assassinated Mexican revolutionary. Motherwell
shows the body, rendered all but abstract, twice, once daubed with
blood-colored paint, and again set against a sheet of busily patterned
wrapping paper that here suggests a bullet-strafed wall.
Motherwell’s single best-known work, the huge series of more than 100
paintings titled “Elegy to the Spanish Republic,” is a memorial to an
extended episode of modern political violence, the brutal suppression of
Loyalists in the 1930s in the Spanish Civil War. Stretched over
Motherwell’s entire career, the series began in 1948, and a collage from
that year, simply titled “Elegy,“ encapsulates its essential
resurrectional components: two testicular ovals and a phallic upright.
Many more pieces, however, are clear responses to an even more immediate and colossal crisis, World War II. A section of the military training map seen in “Joy of Living” turns in up a latter collage, “View from A High Tower,”
dated 1944-45. Here, the map sits like a targeted patch of green in a
convulsed landscape of folded, wrinkled and ripped paper. Just off the
picture’s center floats a form that is hard to interpret. It could be a
dead body, headless and shrouded, but the letters inscribed on it, “VIV”
and “LA,” read like a broken cry to life, a resistance anthem: Vive la
France.
By this point, Motherwell had more than just mastered color. He had made
it a central element in his collage work, and he would never use it
again or anywhere else with such experimental boldness. It’s what turns
the 1946 “Blue With China Ink (Homage to John Cage)”
into an infinity of kite-filled sky, and, a year later, makes “The
Poet,” painted ember orange, a little furnace radiating heat. Color is
also part of what makes the 1949 “Collage in Yellow and White, With Torn Elements”
autumnal in every sense, with its goldenrod yellow and wild-aster
blues, and paper scraps clinging loose to its surface like golden leaves
to an October tree.
In some ways, this is the most radical piece in an extraordinary show, organized by Susan Davidson,
a senior curator at the Guggenheim. It comes out of both Surrealism and
Expressionism but leaves both behind, and maybe abstraction, too: What ,
after all, could be more concrete, more illusion free than the visibly
fragile material this picture is composed of?
And in this work, more obviously than any other, Motherwell relinquished
his role as sole creator, which is Abstract Expressionism’s defining
feature. Gravity, chemistry and light deserve equal billing as
collaborators in a piece of art that has almost certainly changed color,
texture and form since it was new.
Motherwell, the memorialist, surely understood this. Maybe that’s why he
did his best — his freest, most vital, least doctrinaire — work in
collage, a medium that in the end belongs to one all-encompassing
movement, time.
Robert Motherwell exhibit at the Guggenheim: Motherwell and Frank O’Hara
Robert Motherwell, “View from a High Tower” (1944-45)
September 27, 2013–January 5, 2014
Devoted exclusively to papier collés and related works on paper from the 1940s and early 1950s by Robert Motherwell,
this exhibition features nearly sixty artworks and examines the
American artist’s origins and his engagement with collage. The
exhibition also honors Peggy Guggenheim’s early patronage of the artist.
At her urging, and under the tutelage of émigré Surrealist artist
Matta, Motherwell first experimented with the papier collé technique. He
recalled years later: “I might never have done it otherwise, and it was
here that I found . . . my ‘identity.’” By cutting, tearing, and
layering pasted papers, Motherwell reflected the tumult and violence of
the modern world, establishing him as an essential and original voice in
postwar American art. Motherwell initially produced both figural and
abstract collages, but by the early 1950s Surrealist influences
prevalent in these first works had given way to his distinctive mature
style, which was firmly rooted in Abstract Expressionism. Robert Motherwell: Early Collages
will be presented at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, May
26–September 8, 2013, before traveling to its second and final venue,
the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, September 27, 2013–January 5, 2014.
This exhibition is organized by Susan Davidson, Senior Curator, Collections and Exhibitions, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
