shamans or magicians.

Certainly Motherwell
Art does not think so. But he fervently believes in
the efficacy of signs, the ability of quite
simple configurations to carry and release

Master of Anxiety and Balance powerful associative cargo. The blue triangle
of paint above the ocher and earth-red bars of
Summertime in Italy, No. 28, 1962, offers all
the sense of being in a landscape: light and
In Buffalo, the magisterial abstractions of Robert Motherwell wind stream from the blue, heat radiates from
the brown. Motherwell’s Elegies to the Span-

O ne does not usually think of art shows in

terms of seasons, but the Robert Mother-
well retrospective that opened last week at the
ish Republic, a lengthy series that lasted some
30 years and ended after the death of Franco
and the restoration of parliamentary demo-
Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo is cracy in Spain, are best seen as an Amer-
certainly autumnal: a life’s work fully ican pendant to Picasso’s Guernica, though
matured, all its lights, smokes and fermenta- with different imagery. Black in the hands of
tions distinct, its promises ripely fulfilled. some painters—a Manet, a Goya, a Matis-
The show, organized by Curator Douglas G. se—is a color, not an absence of light; and el
Schultz, is not a huge affair in proportion to negro Motherwell, as the Spanish poet Rafael
the size of Motherwell’s output. There are, in Alberti called it, sometimes acquires a
all, 93 paintings and collages to represent a walloping chromatic power.
man whose oeuvre must be ten or even 20 The basic shapes that make up the Elegies,
times that size. held between bars or strung like meat on a
Motherwell is 68, the youngest member of skewer across the canvas, could hardly be Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110 Motherwell has never used collage as a
the group whose name he coined: the New simpler: black ovals or ragged beam-shaped (above); XX (left); Motherwell in his means of surrealist shock treatment. His
York School, or, as the history books say, the forms that bear a resemblance to bullfighters’ Manhattan loft in 1962 (below) work sits squarely in the formal tradition of
abstract expressionists. Pollock, Rothko, hats, black frames that evoke the deep shadow early Braque, not in the poetic irrationality of
Still, Newman, Baziotes, Gorky, Smith and of doors in light-struck village walls. But out Ernst. But its play between form and mean-
Kline are all dead; only Willem de Kooning, of these signs Motherwell has fashioned a ing is no accident. The “found” element in
Lee Krasner and Motherwell are still at resonant and funereal sequence of images Unglueckliche Liebe (Unhappy Love), 1974,
work. In the meantime the achievements of that, despite its repetitions (when in doubt, is a fragment of sheet music whose words
the abstract expressionists have become so paint an Elegy), is one of the few sustained apostrophize the miseries of passion:
encased in legend, fetishized by the market tragic utterances in post-Picassoan art. He “Begone, begone, ye children of Melan-
and picked over by scholarship that their has always been faithful to the abstract choly!” But set on its dark ground, with a
work, in the eyes of younger generations, has expressionist dictum (which he helped for- rectangle of slaty blue and a marvelous, soar-
assumed a somewhat fabled air. Like grizzled mulate) that subject matter is crucial. ing shape of white paper—Mallarme’s swan,
bison in a diorama, they suggest a lost age of The colors of Elegies are, as he put it, “an making a personal appearance—its stilted
American pioneering. The sheer weight of equivalence of the ferocity of the whole sentiment turns into a concise image of
the cultural appetites their work helped set in encounter.” This is perhaps what Mallarme sorrow and relief.
motion has turned them into monuments refers to in his famous phrase about describ-
against their will.
This process has proved particularly unfair
to Motherwell, because his full maturity as
ing not the object itself but the effect it pro-
duces. To speak of “Motherwell black” or
“Motherwell blue” is not to identify a partic-
M otherwell’s collages amount to a defini-
tion of their medium. It is the nature of
glued paper to look flat, frontal and spread-
an artist came after the abstract expressionist ular hue—there are many blacks in his work ing; to build its image in planes; to set up
“period”—in fact, after 1960 — and his and a near infinite range of blues, from counterpoints between word and shape; to
career illustrates the perils of generalizing creamy cerulean to wine-dark—but rather to make one focus on texture and edge. In pieces
about decades, groups or movements. Of evoke the way these colors work, as stable like In Memoriam: the Wittenborn Collage,
course there are expressionist elements in characters in a plot of sensation. 1975, Motherwell draws by tearing, and the
Motherwell, and strong ones at that. But the This is especially true of the Open paint- implied violence of the torn edge (which
rhythm of this show obliges one to discard the ings, which consist of broad fields of color looks and feels very different from the clean-
hearty cliche of the abstract expressionist as a whose only additional feature is an incom- cut edges of Braque’s newsprint or Matisse’s
kind of existential romantic, flinging pots of plete rectangle or trapezoid, formed by three scissored paper) plays, in collage, the same
paint in the eyes of fate. from Mallarme to Joyce into the ambit of his whose idea of modernism was modeled on or four lines of charcoal or black paint, that browns of “Irish” paintings like Riverrun, role as the ejaculatory splattering of paint in
What we see is not what legend tells us to art made critics uneasy. Surely this was all a Oedipal battle, that was not enough. Hence seems to give access to a field behind the 1972, an homage to Joyce’s meditations on his paintings. It is chance, fixed: no one can
see. For Motherwell is a painter of superb trifle historicist, a bit too stylish? the feeling, not yet dispelled in all quarters of field. This enclosure may be strict-edged or Dublin’s river, the Liffey, soon acquire this say how a piece of paper will go when it is
though admittedly fitful balance who has Motherwell never dissembled about his the art world, that Motherwell was too fuzzily tremulous, but it always conveys the fixed quality. Color in Motherwell is not an torn. This combination of violence and
managed to raise a magisterial syntax of form sources. Not only was a sign for the human French, too fluent, not hard enough on impression of architectural form—a window adjective, but a noun. reflection, along with the easel size of the
over an undrainable pond of anxiety, and the body like Figure in Black, 1947, with its himself or his viewers. Unlike such Nietz- or a door, a passage from inside to outside. A It is the collages that most clearly repres- images, is Motherwell’s basic addition to the
apparent fluctuation of his art between the mask’s eyes staring from the bent trapezoid schean contemporaries as Pollock and Still, painting like Summer Open with Mediter- ent the “French” aspect of his work. He put art of collage. In making it, he became the
“expressive” and the “classical” really of a head, clearly derived from Picasso, but he was (dreaded word!) “elegant,” and the ranean Blue, 1974, creates a strikingly con- this explicitly in the title of an early one, The only artist since Matisse in the ’50s to alter
depends on how much of that water is show- Motherwell would also write more know- fact that the blackness, raggedness and cise yet opulent impression of landscape by French Line, 1960. Its main element is the significantly the syntax of this quintessen-
ing around its foundations. He is not a great ledgeably about Picasso than most of his restrained violence of many of his paintings these pared means. The passages of tone in top of a diet-toast package torn and shaded tially modernist medium.
sublimator, like Matisse or Braque. Yet in its contemporaries, critics included. If the rect- invoked the tragic only made matters worse. the paint, the variations of blue depth, drench into a shape vaguely suggestive of a liner at His collage is social encounter; it uses the
breadth, grace, discipline and lucidity, as in angular opening that kept appearing, as a Today these objections sound like dated the eye in sea light without offering a glimpse sea seen bow-on. Its stripes suggest deck flotsam of everyday life—cigarette packets,
the standards of self-criticism that are promise of space beyond the picture plane, in cavils. All art is fiction, and the more com- of horizon; it is as though a part of nature had chairs and awnings, and they convey one into labels, brown paper—to pass us through
embedded in its patrician rhetoric, his art is painting after painting from the early ’40s to plex the fiction the better the art is apt to be. been taken down to its barest essence— the atmosphere of luxury and fine-tuned abstraction and back to common experience.
genuinely Apollonian. Even its disorder the Open series of the late ’60s and early ’70s Motherwell’s elegance is not a matter of discarding the thing but leaving the bodies that was part of the fantasy raised by His painting is natural or mythic encounter;
speaks of a nostalgia for order. derived its authority from Matisse’s Blue style. It comes from deeper wells: mainly nuances—and then contrasted with an the S.S. France, and first-class ocean travel in one traverses its condensations and gestures
That such traits are strengths seems Window or View of Notre Dame, Motherwell from his highly critical and intelligent sense equally reduced emblem of culture: three general, two decades ago. The diet wafers, to arrive, on the other side, among the
obvious today, amid the lax and clamorous would be the last to deny it: he was preoccu- of the accumulated language of modernism lines, the platonic ghost of a building, human- the label tells us, are “the faithful friends of ochers of Italy and California, the blues of
egotism of most neo-expressionist painting. pied with continuity and saw modernism as a and of how his own pictorial impulses relate izing the blue and saving the eye from getting your ligne”—a word that means figure, but Nice and Provincetown. In moving between
But it was not always so. Twenty years ago, tradition. to that language. It is the elegance of realized lost in it. also shipping line and, of course, line, as in these two poles, Motherwell has become
Motherwell’s reflective temper, his unab- He meant to claim the same kind of filial thought. But Motherwell’s color is never descript- drawing. This elegant triple-en-tendre is for some people the greatest abstract painter
ashed reverence for the Parisian past and, attachment to Matisse that Delacroix (another One needs to be fairly naive these days to ive. Even the more recent arrivals on his meant to be read as a pledge of Parisian alive, and for others not an abstract artist
above all, his wish to bring modernist writing household god) had to Rubens. To those believe that artists can literally function as palette, like the soft greens and grayed allegiance. at all. — By Robert Hughes
72 TIME, OCTOBER 10, 1983 TIME, OCTOBER 10, 1983 73