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Lot Essay
With its bold, gestural brushstrokes and sunbaked, burnished ochres, vivid reds and inky blacks, this painting is Robert Motherwell’s homage to 20th century avant-garde composer Alban Berg, conveyed through Motherwell’s vigorous Abstract Expressionist idiom. Through the artist’s emotionally powerful application of paint, the work projects a vivid impression: his painting expresses a fierce, charged joining, entangling and mingling of paint on canvas. But—in its embrace of chance gestures and Surrealist-inspired automatic drawing—Motherwell’s canvases also possess the direct and spontaneous, expressive and unrehearsed quality that the media of drawing and collage (two of Motherwell’s favorite forms) have.
In Chord for Alban Berg, powerful, pitch black biomorphic shapes, their borders at times traced in ragged red edging, dominate the upper half of the canvas, vying for prominence with alternating blue, black, red and white horizontal lines that cut across the painting’s lower portion from edge to edge, suggesting a horizon line and organizing the pictorial space as a landscape. The artist’s initials appear in the upper left hand portion of the painting.
Tightly overlapping brushwork forms the background of the canvas’s upper portion, laid down in variegated hues of amber, swirling and washing across the canvas, one of Motherwell’s signature colors. The brushwork is disciplined yet at the same time expressive. Splashes of liquid color cross the canvas surfaces in places, spontaneous counterpoint to the more carefully arranged and laid down thicker lines and shapes that predominate. Attentive observers can inventory a wide range of strategies Motherwell used to place color on canvas in this work, adding to the painting’s interest and appeal.
The artist’s choice of colors expressed potent emotional associations for Motherwell, reflecting the landscape and sky of regions he experienced in his life and travels (California, Mexico, Spain) and of powerful existential themes reflecting on issues of life, fate and mortality. For Motherwell, the opposing tonalities of black and white were more than simply color choices; they symbolized the struggle between the very forces of life and death. The colors Motherwell laid down on canvas suggested for the artist the powers of nature itself.
The title’s reference to Alban Berg echoes themes underlying Motherwell’s earlier series of pen and ink drawings of the 1960s entitled Lyric Suite, inspired by the Austrian composer’s music. Literature, music and philosophy were influential forces in the work of this most intellectual of the New York School artists.
The present work includes all the essential features immediately identifying a canvas as a Motherwell composition: the brushwork evidencing the physical effort of painting; the artist’s embrace of painting-as-process, an approach that valued accidents, missteps, and the intrinsic qualities of paint itself as vital aspects of the making of the work; the intense colors set in contrast with depthless black pigment; a brash and physical laying down of the paint; broad expanses of canvas that suggest the open physical space of landscape; and the juxtaposition of straight lines against curves that, as a draughtsman, Motherwell so relished.
The sinuous lines of this canvas may have been achieved through the strategy of automatic drawing, a technique that Motherwell learned from the Surrealists and often used, the artist giving up conscious control over the process by which the work is made. “You let the brush take over and in a way follow its own head…it will stumble on what one couldn’t by oneself” Motherwell commented in regard to automatic drawing (G. Glueck, “Robert Motherwell, Master of Abstract, Dies,” New York Times, July 18, 1991).
Of the process of painting, Motherwell once remarked, “I don’t exploit so-called ‘accidents’ in painting. I accept them if they seem appropriate. …One doesn’t want a picture to look ‘made’ like an automobile or a loaf of bread. …I agree with (French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste) Renoir, who loved everything hand-made” (F. O’Hara, Robert Motherwell: with Selections from the Artist’s Writings, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1965, p. 54).
In its management of both color and form, the present work is a consummate expression of the language of abstract art by the artist who coined the term “New York school,” and who was one of the founding and greatest figures among those struggling and vigorous painters in New York gaining attention in the years following World War II with their expressive abstract painting style. Upon his death, Motherwell was hailed by critic Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential observers of postwar American art, as “the very best of the Abstract Expressionist painters” (G. Glueck, “Robert Motherwell, Master of Abstract, Dies,” The New York Times, July 18, 1991).
His dynamic brushstrokes; painterliness; vigorous execution; efforts to tap the unconscious as a source of inspiration through the embrace of chance effects; together with his hand-drawn gestures that explored the essential elements of line and color distinguished Robert Motherwell as an artist in the first rank of the Abstract Expressionists, as well as one who embraced the strategies of Color Field painting. He was the most intellectual of the Abstract Expressionists and the best educated, but also an artist keenly attuned to the sensuous, physical world, as is evident in the sheer physical beauty and energy of the present work.
In Chord for Alban Berg, powerful, pitch black biomorphic shapes, their borders at times traced in ragged red edging, dominate the upper half of the canvas, vying for prominence with alternating blue, black, red and white horizontal lines that cut across the painting’s lower portion from edge to edge, suggesting a horizon line and organizing the pictorial space as a landscape. The artist’s initials appear in the upper left hand portion of the painting.
Tightly overlapping brushwork forms the background of the canvas’s upper portion, laid down in variegated hues of amber, swirling and washing across the canvas, one of Motherwell’s signature colors. The brushwork is disciplined yet at the same time expressive. Splashes of liquid color cross the canvas surfaces in places, spontaneous counterpoint to the more carefully arranged and laid down thicker lines and shapes that predominate. Attentive observers can inventory a wide range of strategies Motherwell used to place color on canvas in this work, adding to the painting’s interest and appeal.
The artist’s choice of colors expressed potent emotional associations for Motherwell, reflecting the landscape and sky of regions he experienced in his life and travels (California, Mexico, Spain) and of powerful existential themes reflecting on issues of life, fate and mortality. For Motherwell, the opposing tonalities of black and white were more than simply color choices; they symbolized the struggle between the very forces of life and death. The colors Motherwell laid down on canvas suggested for the artist the powers of nature itself.
The title’s reference to Alban Berg echoes themes underlying Motherwell’s earlier series of pen and ink drawings of the 1960s entitled Lyric Suite, inspired by the Austrian composer’s music. Literature, music and philosophy were influential forces in the work of this most intellectual of the New York School artists.
The present work includes all the essential features immediately identifying a canvas as a Motherwell composition: the brushwork evidencing the physical effort of painting; the artist’s embrace of painting-as-process, an approach that valued accidents, missteps, and the intrinsic qualities of paint itself as vital aspects of the making of the work; the intense colors set in contrast with depthless black pigment; a brash and physical laying down of the paint; broad expanses of canvas that suggest the open physical space of landscape; and the juxtaposition of straight lines against curves that, as a draughtsman, Motherwell so relished.
The sinuous lines of this canvas may have been achieved through the strategy of automatic drawing, a technique that Motherwell learned from the Surrealists and often used, the artist giving up conscious control over the process by which the work is made. “You let the brush take over and in a way follow its own head…it will stumble on what one couldn’t by oneself” Motherwell commented in regard to automatic drawing (G. Glueck, “Robert Motherwell, Master of Abstract, Dies,” New York Times, July 18, 1991).
Of the process of painting, Motherwell once remarked, “I don’t exploit so-called ‘accidents’ in painting. I accept them if they seem appropriate. …One doesn’t want a picture to look ‘made’ like an automobile or a loaf of bread. …I agree with (French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste) Renoir, who loved everything hand-made” (F. O’Hara, Robert Motherwell: with Selections from the Artist’s Writings, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1965, p. 54).
In its management of both color and form, the present work is a consummate expression of the language of abstract art by the artist who coined the term “New York school,” and who was one of the founding and greatest figures among those struggling and vigorous painters in New York gaining attention in the years following World War II with their expressive abstract painting style. Upon his death, Motherwell was hailed by critic Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential observers of postwar American art, as “the very best of the Abstract Expressionist painters” (G. Glueck, “Robert Motherwell, Master of Abstract, Dies,” The New York Times, July 18, 1991).
His dynamic brushstrokes; painterliness; vigorous execution; efforts to tap the unconscious as a source of inspiration through the embrace of chance effects; together with his hand-drawn gestures that explored the essential elements of line and color distinguished Robert Motherwell as an artist in the first rank of the Abstract Expressionists, as well as one who embraced the strategies of Color Field painting. He was the most intellectual of the Abstract Expressionists and the best educated, but also an artist keenly attuned to the sensuous, physical world, as is evident in the sheer physical beauty and energy of the present work.