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Lot Essay
Robert Motherwell was one of modern art’s finest creators of collage and Untitled is a strikingly expressive example from a particularly productive period in his career. Grounded by deep blue rectilinear forms and patches of black, recalling Motherwell’s famous Elegies, the work is disrupted and infused with energy by the jagged central orange shape, the flickering flames of yellow, and the thin graphic lines that trace paths upon the blue ground. The jutting angle of the orange-brushed Upson board at the heart of the composition evokes a dancing shape, arms raised, gyrating happily. Music and the iterative possibilities of collage were important influences for Motherwell and the depth of their imaginative effect is eloquently expressed by Untitled.
Like creative variations upon a central theme, a number of collages using the same bold blue and graphic lines date to the same year as Untitled, and two works in particular make the musical connection explicit. Muss Es Sein? No. 1 and No. 2 incorporate fragments of notation from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16, the composition that included Beethoven’s famous lines, “Muss es sein?” (Must it be?) “Es muss sein!” (It must be!). All three collages were shown in Motherwell’s 1973 exhibition at the David Mirvish Gallery in Toronto and, in its dramatic exhilaration, Untitled appears to provide a pictorial response to the questioning titles of these accompanying works. Characteristically of Motherwell, however, the possible allusions of Untitled are multiplied by the inclusion of the three-pronged blue shape in the center. This recalls and upends the motif of a painter’s easel in his Cubist-influenced, 1952 collage The Easel I, here transforming the three-legged stand into a devil’s pitchfork engulfed in an inferno of color. By referencing his own work as an American Abstract Expressionist and his key European influences, Untitled could be regarded as a playful, and jubilant, symbol of Motherwell’s own oeuvre.
Like creative variations upon a central theme, a number of collages using the same bold blue and graphic lines date to the same year as Untitled, and two works in particular make the musical connection explicit. Muss Es Sein? No. 1 and No. 2 incorporate fragments of notation from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16, the composition that included Beethoven’s famous lines, “Muss es sein?” (Must it be?) “Es muss sein!” (It must be!). All three collages were shown in Motherwell’s 1973 exhibition at the David Mirvish Gallery in Toronto and, in its dramatic exhilaration, Untitled appears to provide a pictorial response to the questioning titles of these accompanying works. Characteristically of Motherwell, however, the possible allusions of Untitled are multiplied by the inclusion of the three-pronged blue shape in the center. This recalls and upends the motif of a painter’s easel in his Cubist-influenced, 1952 collage The Easel I, here transforming the three-legged stand into a devil’s pitchfork engulfed in an inferno of color. By referencing his own work as an American Abstract Expressionist and his key European influences, Untitled could be regarded as a playful, and jubilant, symbol of Motherwell’s own oeuvre.