Lot Essay
Robert Motherwell has long been regarded as a leading intellectual among the Abstract Expressionist painters in America. With his upper-middle class background and Harvard education, he was the antithesis of the brooding, illiterate but emotionally charged stereotype of the downtown artist. His studies in philosophy allowed him to form a deep understanding of the most influential European avant-garde artistic movements of the period between the wars, Dada and Surrealism. Later, he would edit a book of original writings by the artists involved in those movements, most of whom he came to know during their exile in New York during the Second World War.
Motherwell was deeply committed to the Surrealist idea of exploring the subconscious mind to "discover" imagery for his work. Automatism was a primary method that Motherwell utilized in his painting. Expressive, even passionate brushwork characterized his best work, along with a sensual use of surface and color that has often been attributed to his love of Matisse.
While Motherwell's intellectual credentials were impeccable and clearly influenced his painting, what he prized most of all in a work of art, whether his own or another's, was the communication of passionate feeling. In a letter to Frank O'Hara, a critic, poet and curator at The Museum of Modern Art who prepared the 1965 retrospective exhibition of his paintings, Motherwell wrote:
"Everyone agrees that intelligence manifests itself in an excellent use of language. But laymen do not recognize that painting is also a language. Indeed, what makes a layman is insensitivity to a given language...But if intellegence is essential in order to organize relations, i.e., to arrive at structural form, the subject matter is feeling: that is why art is not a science. Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest--and rarest--of grown-up pleasures is true feeling..." (Motherwell Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, p. 1-2)
Like the work of the great European masters, Matisse and Picasso, whom he admired, and like de Kooning in New York, Motherwell's work, while abstract, is full of figural references. As H. H. Arnason wrote:
"Two Figures, with Cerulean Blue Stripe, 1960, is a work of great majesty, the two abstract figures in a ritualistic embrace, silhouetted against a broad ground of grayed white, relieved at the left edge with the vertical stripe of brilliant blue and one small touch of ochre. The sense of figuration is always implicit in the Elegies and in many other works; in this and other paintings executed after 1958 it becomes explicit. The two figures can be associated with his wife and himself [he had happily married the painter Helen Frankenthaler in 1958], and even though they are presented as black shapes, the predominance of whites and cerulean blue lends to the conception of an air of both lightness and gravity that reflects his mood...A work like Two Figures with Cerulean Blue Stripe is a summation of the wide scope, the comprehensiveness of Motherwell's abilities and interests, plastic and expressive, at the moment when his art was moving into its most fertile period." (Arnason, op cit, p. 46-47)
Motherwell was deeply committed to the Surrealist idea of exploring the subconscious mind to "discover" imagery for his work. Automatism was a primary method that Motherwell utilized in his painting. Expressive, even passionate brushwork characterized his best work, along with a sensual use of surface and color that has often been attributed to his love of Matisse.
While Motherwell's intellectual credentials were impeccable and clearly influenced his painting, what he prized most of all in a work of art, whether his own or another's, was the communication of passionate feeling. In a letter to Frank O'Hara, a critic, poet and curator at The Museum of Modern Art who prepared the 1965 retrospective exhibition of his paintings, Motherwell wrote:
"Everyone agrees that intelligence manifests itself in an excellent use of language. But laymen do not recognize that painting is also a language. Indeed, what makes a layman is insensitivity to a given language...But if intellegence is essential in order to organize relations, i.e., to arrive at structural form, the subject matter is feeling: that is why art is not a science. Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest--and rarest--of grown-up pleasures is true feeling..." (Motherwell Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, p. 1-2)
Like the work of the great European masters, Matisse and Picasso, whom he admired, and like de Kooning in New York, Motherwell's work, while abstract, is full of figural references. As H. H. Arnason wrote:
"Two Figures, with Cerulean Blue Stripe, 1960, is a work of great majesty, the two abstract figures in a ritualistic embrace, silhouetted against a broad ground of grayed white, relieved at the left edge with the vertical stripe of brilliant blue and one small touch of ochre. The sense of figuration is always implicit in the Elegies and in many other works; in this and other paintings executed after 1958 it becomes explicit. The two figures can be associated with his wife and himself [he had happily married the painter Helen Frankenthaler in 1958], and even though they are presented as black shapes, the predominance of whites and cerulean blue lends to the conception of an air of both lightness and gravity that reflects his mood...A work like Two Figures with Cerulean Blue Stripe is a summation of the wide scope, the comprehensiveness of Motherwell's abilities and interests, plastic and expressive, at the moment when his art was moving into its most fertile period." (Arnason, op cit, p. 46-47)