The Writings of Robert Motherwell

By Robert Motherwell, Dore Ashton and Joan Banach

Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), one of the leading American Abstract Expressionist painters, was also a theorist and exponent of the movement. His writing articulated the intent of the New York school —Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, and others—during a period when their work was often reviled for its departure from traditional representation. As founder of the Documents of Modern Art series (later renamed the Documents of Twentieth-Century Art), Motherwell gave modern artists a voice at a time when very few people understood their theories or work. This authoritative new edition of the artist's writings about art includes public lectures, essays, and interviews. Impeccably edited, with an informative introductory essay and rigorous annotation, it is illustrated with black-and-white images that elucidate Motherwell's writings.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 2007.
Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), one of the leading American Abstract Expressionist painters, was also a theorist and exponent of the movement. His writing articulated the intent of the New York school —Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, F

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520940512

Robert Motherwell

Dore Ashton (1928-2017) was Professor of Art History at the Cooper Union and author or editor of over 30 books on modern art and culture, including Noguchi East and West, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, A Fable of Modern Art, and A Critical Study of Philip Guston, all from UC Press. Joan Banach worked with Robert Motherwell from 1981 to 1991. She is an artist who lives in New York.

Book preview

THE WRITINGS OF ROBERT MOTHERWELL

THE DOCUMENTS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY ART

JACK FLAM, General Editor

ROBERT MOTHERWELL, Founding Editor

Volumes available from University of California Press:

Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, edited by Barbara Rose

Memoirs of a Dada Drummer by Richard Huelsenbeck, edited by Hans J. Kleinschmidt

Matisse on Art, Revised Edition, edited by Jack Flam

German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, edited by Rose-Carol Washton Long

Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam

Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary by Hugo Ball, edited by John Elderfield

Pop Art: A Critical History, edited by Steven Henry Madoff

The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Stephanie Terenzio

Conversations with Cézanne, edited by Michael Doran

Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, edited by Alan Wilkinson

Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History, edited by Jack Flam with Miriam Deutch

The Cubist Painters, Guillaume Apollinaire, translated, with commentary, by Peter Read

The Writings of

Robert Motherwell

EDITED BY DORE ASHTON WITH JOAN BANACH

INTRODUCTION BY DORE ASHTON

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Art Endowment Fund of the University of California Foundation, which is supported by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation.

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2007 by The Regents of the University of California

Robert Motherwell’s writings © Dedalus Foundation, Inc. All illustrations © Dedalus Foundation, Inc., licensed by VAGA, New York.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Motherwell, Robert.

The writings of Robert Motherwell / edited by Dore Ashton with Joan Banach.

p. cm. — (Documents of twentieth-century art)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-25047-5 (cloth: alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-520-25048-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

I. Art, Modern—20th century. I. Ashton, Dore.

II. Banach, Joan. III. Title.

N6490.M75 2007

709’.04 dc22 2006039174

Manufactured in the United States of America

16 15 14 13 12 ii 10 09 08 07

10 987654 321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION DORE ASHTON

NOTES ON MONDRIAN AND CHIRICO 1942

REVIEW OF ART OF THIS CENTURY ca.1943

NOTE ON MODERN ART ca.1943

PREFACE TO APOLLINAIRE'S THE CUBIST PAINTERS 1944

THE MODERN PAINTER'S WORLD 1944

PLATE CAPTION IN ABSTRACT AND SURREALIST ART IN AMERICA 1944

REVIEW OF CALDER'S THREE YOUNG RATS 1944

PAINTERS’ OBJECTS 1944

PERSONAL STATEMENT 1945

PREFACE TO PAALEN’S FORM AND SENSE ca. 1945

STATEMENT 1946

BEYOND THE AESTHETIC 1946

STATEMENT 1947

PREFATORY NOTE TO JEAN ARP'S ON MY WAY 1948

A TOUR OF THE SUBLIME 1948

NOTICE TO APOLLINAIRE'S THE CUBIST PAIHTEBS 1949

A PERSONAL EXPRESSION 1949

REFLECTIONS ON PAINTING NOW 1949

ABSTRACT ART AND THE REAL 1949

BLACK OR WHITE 1950

FOR DAVID SMITH 1950

PREFACE TO DUTHUIT’S THE FAUVIST PAINTERS

THE NEW YORK SCHOOL

EXPRESSIONISM ca.1950

NOTES ON CY TWOMBLY 1951

SYMBOLISM 1954

THE PAINTER AND THE AUDIENCE 1954

OF FORM AND CONTENT ca. 1954

THE ARTIST AND MODERN SOCIETY 1955

THE ARTIST'S LIFE 1956

NOTES ON BRADLEY WALKER TOMLIN 1957

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MIRÓ 1959

LECTURE WITH CHARLES R. HULBECK 1959

STATEMENT FOR CONVERSATIONS WITH ARTISTS 1960

WHAT SHOULD A MUSEUM BE? 1961

PAINTING AS EXISTENCE: AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID SYLVESTER 1962

HOMAGE TO FRANZ KLINE 1962

A PROCESS OF PAINTING 1964

DAVID SMITH: A MAJOR AMERICAN SCULPTOR 1965

PLATE CAPTION FOR THE STEDELIJK MUSEUM CATALOGUE 1966

STATEMENT 1967

ON JACKSON POLLOCK 1967

ON ROTHKO 1967

ON THE LYRIC SUITE 1969

INTERVIEW AND LETTER TO MICHEL RAGON 1969

STATEMENT ON THE OPEN" SERIES 1969

MOTHERWELL MUSES 1969

THOUGHTS ON DRAWING 1970

ON THE HUMANISM OF ABSTRACTION: THE ARTIST SPEAKS 1970

STATEMENTS BEFORE CONGRESS 1970

THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF CHILDREN'S ART, AND MODERNISM 1970

ON ROTHKO, A EULOGY 1970

INTRODUCTION TO CABANNE’S

1971

STATEMENT ON RADICALISM IN THE VISUAL ARTS 1971'

A RECOLLECTION OF DAVID SMITH AND THE 1950s 1972

INTRODUCTION TO THE JOURNAL OF EUGÈNE DELACROIX 1972

STATEMENT ON PICASSO 1974

THE NEW YORK SCHOOL (AND SYMBOLISM) ca.1976

ART AND REALITY ca.1976

PARISIAN ARTISTS IN EXILE: NEW YORK 1939-45 1977

PROVINCETOWN AND DAYS LUMBERYARD: A MEMOIR 1978

WORDS OF THE PAINTER 1978

PRESENTATION OF AN AWARD TO ERICK HAWKINS 1979

THE INTERNATIONAL WORLD OF MODERNIST ART 1980

HOTES FOR A JOYCE SYMPOSIUM 1980

IN MEMORIAM: ANTHONY SMITH 1981

JOURNAL ENTRY ca.1981

REFLECTIONS ON ABSTRACT ART 1982

FOREWORD TO WILLIAM C. SEITZ'S ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST PAINTING IN AMERICA 1983

KAFKA'S VISUAL RECOIL: A NOTE (FOR DORE ASHTON) 1983

ANIMATING RHYTHM 1984

RESPONSE: WHEN IS A PAINTING FINISHED? 1985

ON NOT BECOMING AN ACADEMIC 1986

A PERSONAL RECOLLECTION 1986

NOMINATION OF JASPER JOHNS TO THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS 1988

BIBLIOGRAPHY COMPILED BY KATY ROGERS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INDEX

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This anthology is the result of a painstaking reconsideration of all written documents produced by Robert Motherwell, including notebooks, sketchbooks, letters, interviews, and essays. The sequence of the texts follows the dates they were written, although publication dates were occasionally later. Many of the writings were included in Stephanie Terenzios The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, but others were culled from the extensive archive preserved by the Dedalus Foundation in New York. Our intention was to compile a group of writings characteristic of Robert Motherwell, but also to seek as concise a representation as possible, avoiding both prolixity and repetition. To accommodate the restoration of important texts that were abridged in Terenzio, it was decided, with one or two exceptions, to leave out Motherwells interviews and letters. The interviews are documented in the comprehensive bibliography that follows the writings, and, with the letters, are available for study by specialists at the Dedalus Foundation. Notes to the texts are provided when necessary to clarify essential points of context and circumstance. We have essentially retained Motherwell s original punctuation and capitalization but have corrected or modernized spelling when necessary.

Much of the work on this anthology is beholden to the late Stephanie Terenzio, whose The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell provided a prototypical model. Jack Flams scholarly work with Motherwells writings was of inestimable value in shaping this new anthology, as was his advice concerning the general format. We wish to thank the following individuals for their unstinting assistance: Morgan Spangle, Alice Stock, Gretchen Opie, Katy Rogers, Tim Clifford, Warren Ng, Kerrigan Kessler, Michael Mahnke, and Jason Paradis.

INTRODUCTION

DORE ASHTON

Among the multitude of thinkers Motherwell absorbed, cited, probed, argued with, and, at times, exasperatedly rejected was the twentieth-century Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Early in the century Ortega had declared: I am myself plus my circumstance. He explained later that my work is, by essence and presence, circumstantial… purposefully so, because without purpose, and even against any contrary purpose, it is obvious that man has never done anything at all in the world that was not circumstantial. Motherwell was keenly aware of the circumstance that affected his self as an artist and strived throughout his life to find a historical framework, or, as he said, a creative principle, that would embrace his various and often conflicting impulses. Sometimes he called his findings modernism, sometimes the Holy Grail. He was an indefatigable inquirer, quick to pick up cultural shifts and to assimilate what he heard and what he read to his own incipient insights. His written observations over the years form an intellectual Bildungsroman. In addition, Motherwells musings, so often circumstantial, offer a vivid account of some preoccupations of the artists he had grouped under the rubric the New York School.

Undoubtedly Motherwells formal study of philosophy, or, more accurately, the history of philosophy, first at Stanford University, then at Harvard, set him apart from his painting colleagues at the outset. He merged with them, however, by eventually choosing a painter s life of the mind. What I mean is that philosophers often ask either what is man or who is man, but artists most often ask, what does man do (make), and why. For the painter, man is clearly homo faber. Although Motherwell, in his school years, had studied philosophy, he had at the same time filled his heart s coffers with the wisdom of poets and the imagery of painters. His quest, as this compendium of his written thoughts reveals, is that of most visual artists: to find some answer to the perplexing and probably unanswerable question, what is art? Or even, why is art? As will be seen, Motherwell gravitated to those thinkers who held out a promise of answers. Once he found a semblance of an answer, he would carry it with him, returning to question its validity again and again. When, for instance, he fell under the spell of Søren Kierkegaard, as did several of his colleagues among painters in the early 1950s, he admonished himself to take care and memorized Kierkegaard s observation that "it is one thing to think and another to exist in what is thought."

Although everything in his background as a child, as he remembered it, conspired against his burgeoning interest in art, Motherwell managed to persuade his banker father that he would devote his sojourn at Harvard to the study of aesthetics— something far more acceptable than a mere art school. Once at Harvard, Motherwell was lucky enough to encounter professors who recognized his artistic proclivities. It was the noted aesthetician Arthur Lovejoy who probably assigned him the study of the nineteenth-century painter Delacroix, one of the most probing of painterly intelligences who, fortunately for Motherwell, rendered his thoughts in the famous Journal. Working on Delacroix, Motherwell was obliged to study Delacroix’s most perceptive critic, the great poet Baudelaire who, I believe, more than any other thinker, left permanent traces in Motherwell’s formation as a painter. What Baudelaire said about Delacroix—that he was passionately in love with passion—could well be said about Motherwell. Some years later, finding his way as a neophyte painter in New York, Motherwell found a companion, William Baziotes, who shared his deepening engagement with French poetry. In later years Motherwell mentioned their singular affinity, always marveling at how two such different temperaments could find so much in common: Motherwell, the self-conscious son of a banker, whose bitterest memories were of his prep-school years, and Baziotes, a son of the working class in Reading, Pennsylvania, who liked to boast of his roughneck adolescent years, and who, unlike Motherwell, was perfectly at home in Manhattan’s seedy bars talking to stevedores.

Baziotes had had the advantage of working on the WPA (the government’s project to employ artists) during the depression years and had formed relationships with other painters, whom he introduced to Motherwell. In his early twenties Baziotes had rejected the political positions often assumed (if only temporarily) by other artists, writing to a friend in March 1935: I realize I must go into the more aristocratic tastes— it’s quite natural. The tastes he considered aristocratic were for the French poets, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, and later Paul Valéry. Motherwell had been cultivating similar tastes and, like Baziotes, did not flinch at the idea of being an intellectual aristocrat. The two young painters formed a close alliance, reflected in their work in the early 1940s. For example, both alluded to Baudelaire in their paintings, or their titles, all their painting lives. (The way a poet’s imagery lodges in a painter’s imagination can be seen in the fact that a full decade after his immersion in Baudelaire, Motherwell painted The Black Sun, 1959, echoing Baudelaire whose prose poem The Desire to Paint contains the line: I would compare her to a black sun.)

Anyone who knew Motherwell could see in conversation how thoughts and images kindled his imagination. His face would change and his eyes light up when suggestive images found their mark. In general, he was faithful to his youthful enthusiasms and carried along his earliest discoveries, modifying them as he matured, but never abandoning them. Baudelaire, as both poet and expositor, never failed him. In the beginning, Motherwell tended to take over the poet’s pronouncements directly, as when he used a line from Baudelaire’s poem Le Confiteor de l’artiste as an epigraph to Painters’ Objects, Partisan Review, 1944: The study of the beautiful is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before he is vanquished. Writing in Design in April 1946, he opened his essay, Beyond the Aesthetic, as follows: For the goal which lies beyond the strictly aesthetic the French artists say the unknown or the new,’ after Baudelaire and Rimbaud. And in 1949, in his introduction to Marcel Raymond’s From Baudelaire to Surrealism, he again selected an epigraph from Baudelaire : The arts aspire, if not to complement one another, at least to lend one another new energies.

Throughout his written thoughts are echoes of Baudelaire s vision of the painter of modern life, especially his idea of modern art as the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and immutable. As modern as Motherwell aspired to be, he could not forgo considering the possibilities of the eternal and immutable, any more than his primary literary hero, James Joyce, could, or, for that matter, William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot—poets who left permanent traces in Motherwell’s aesthetic history. How closely Motherwell followed his first poetic mentor, Baudelaire, can be gauged in a note, probably written around 1943, found by Joan Banach in one of his books:

What is this modern art which has preoccupied seven generations of artists, which has filled them with a profound and silent joy? In the language of the studios this modern art is the union of the eternal and the fleeting, the union of the eternal problem of the artist—the translation of experience into space—with the unique problem, the space of this place and time.

(I suspect that Albert Camus, whom Motherwell and his friends among the painters were reading carefully in the early 1950s, also derived an important principle from the same Baudelaire essay, The Painter of Modern Life, in which the poet wrote: Multitude, solitude: equal and convertible terms for the active and fecund poet. Camus concluded one of his best-known stories, The Artist at Work, with a view of the deranged artist s large white canvas in which a word in very small characters is written in the center, a word that could be deciphered but without any certainty whether it should be read solitary or solidarity)

In his writings Motherwell sought to consolidate some of his earliest impressions. Even during his university studies he took to heart impressions rather than concepts, responding more as an artist than as a methodical scholar. He searched widely for confirmation of his intuitive belief in the unity of mind and body. At Harvard, he had taken a seminar devoted to Spinoza, who, as Karl Jaspers said, leaves no doubt as to the unity of mind and body. This unity, essential to Motherwell’s development of an artistic framework, he also discovered in one of his most enduring seminal intellectual influences, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, whose wisdom he retrieves throughout his life in his conversations and writings. In 1938, while Motherwell was still at Harvard, where Whitehead had taught, the philosopher published Modes of Thought. It is worth citing a passage that Motherwell certainly read, if not in 1938, then soon thereafter. This particular passage, I think, condenses Whitehead s life’s thought and strongly suggests the nature of the impression made on the burgeoning artist:

I find myself essentially a unity of emotions, enjoyments, hopes, fears, regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions—all of them subjective reactions to the environment as active in my nature. My unity—which is Descartes’ *1 am’—is my process of shaping this welter of materials into a consistent pattern of feelings. The individual enjoyment is what I am in my role of a natural activity as I shape the activities of the environment into a new creation, which is myself at this moment; and yet, as being myself, it is a continuation of the antecedent world.

The great allure of Whitehead for an artist is obvious even in Whitehead’s diction. For instance, in 1924 in Adventures of ideas, he speaks of lines of force, the rise of the field as a basic element and events. In his next book, Process and Reality, he speaks of situations, percipient events, and the effective tone of perception. Motherwell’s profound interest in the question of creativity found its provisional answer in Whitehead. In his 1949 Reflections on Painting Now, Motherwell remarks that Whitehead describes it beautifully and quotes the philosopher: Creativity is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendental fact. It is the flying dart, of which Lucretius speaks, hurled beyond the bounds of knowledge. Most often Motherwell’s citations of Whitehead refer to the nature of abstraction—that it is an emphasis, and the higher the degree of abstraction, the lower the degree of complexity. These key phrases, or props, keep rising to the surface of Motherwell’s mind as he contemplates the concrete works of his favored modernists—Matisse, Mondrian, Picasso, and Miró—who, very soon after Motherwell’s formal education ceased, moved into primary position in his thinking.

Unquestionably Motherwell’s adventures with ideas accelerated when he moved into a new milieu in 1940. His decision to continue his studies at Columbia University with Meyer Schapiro—already a celebrated, charismatic professor of art history and a voluble intellectual ready to comment on everything from painting to politics to medieval church decor, always with an astounding range of reference—was certainly inspired. As Motherwell frequently recalled, it was Schapiro who recognized the bookish young man’s desire to be a painter. He introduced Motherwell to Kurt Seligmann, an erudite refugee from Europe who had absorbed the tenets of Surrealism and knew all the emigré Surrealists who took refuge in New York. Motherwell studied with Seligmann for many months, and although later he made light of those sessions, to Seligmann himself and his wife he wrote: All the time I am very conscious of how much I learned from Kurt. I am sure I would never have gotten out of my original muddle by myself (July 1941).

As Motherwell repeatedly said, it was probably the young Roberto Matta, one of André Breton’s last recruits in Paris before the war, who actively instigated an intellectual shift in Motherwell. Matta was the very model of the artistic bohemian that Motherwell, who thought of himself as a homely Protestant, longed to become. Julien Levy, the cultured art dealer who had introduced the Surrealists to New York, and whose book, Surrealism, written in 1936, Motherwell owned, wrote; Matta burst on the New York scene as if he considered this country a sort of dark continent, his Africa, where he could trade dubious wares. … He appeared in my gallery confident, exuberant, and mercurial and produced a portfolio of explosive crayon drawings.

Motherwell s intellectual kinship with Matta was distinct from his other associations, as he made very clear in numerous interviews, and their friendship survived. Mattas rebellious nature excited Motherwell, and gave him the courage to make his own salto mortale into the cosmic psychic regions Matta so fervently explored. But Mattas most important contribution to Motherwells artistic development was probably his enthusiasm for Federico Garcia Lorca, from whose poem, Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejias, with its refrain At five in the afternoon, Motherwell derived one of his earliest Spanish elegies, in 1949. Matta had met Lorca in Spain just before the outbreak of the Civil War. The poet asked him to deliver a copy of Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejias, with a short message inscribed on the jacket, to Dali, in Paris. Fortified by his errand, Matta, in 1937, had contacted Dali, who in turn introduced him to André Breton.

Both Matta and Gordon Onslow Ford, another late recruit in Bretons circle, arrived in New York brimming with Surrealist ideas, which they spread liberally among their young American colleagues. Motherwell evidently saw in Bretons idea of psychic automatism the solution to the body-mind conundrum. Not only did he feel at home with the European thoughts now lodged in New York (after all, Breton, Ernst, Masson, and Tanguy, whom he met through Seligmann and Matta, had cut their eyeteeth on Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé), but his own culture, and extensive reading during his school years, had readied him for this important encounter. With his preternatural alertness, he had gone to the usual sources of twentieth-century intellectual excitement—Marx, Freud, and Jung—and from Freud, especially, had gathered intimations of the meaning of free association. For him, psychic automatism was another aspect of free association. As for Marx, he could not have avoided a serious encounter since Schapiro, in his own youth, had attempted to forge an aesthetic with elements drawn from Marx and had remained faithful, even in the 1940s, to certain Marxian principles.

Although Motherwell had been too young to feel the grimness of the Great Depression, as some of his older friends among the painters had, he had responded to currents of thought derived from radical political sources. While still an undergraduate, for instance, he had attended André Malraux s lecture in San Francisco during the height of the Spanish Civil War, when Malraux, fresh from his adventures as a self-appointed squadron commander on the Loyalist side, raced through America to gain support for the beleaguered republic with fiery rhetoric. Years later Motherwell recalled Malraux s electrifying delivery, his rumpled suit, his cigarette dangling to one side, and his littérateur s ability to call up sharp images of the war s devastation. Motherwell, then, was primed, long before arriving in New York, for the vaguely leftist attitudes he would encounter among the artists who had come of age during the 1930s.

One can follow in Motherwell s writings the effects of his encounters with brilliant talkers in New York. Aside from Schapiro, there was Harold Rosenberg who could hold forth with wit and passion on many subjects, and who, like Schapiro, had done his Marxist homework. The summers Motherwell spent on Long Island in the company of Max Ernst and Rosenberg, and other painters such as Rothko, were crucial for Motherwells focus. Add his foraging in bookstores, a lifelong passion, and the picture is almost complete. One of those bookstores was a remarkable institution— a meeting place for artists, critics, art historians, museum directors, curators and collectors, as the New York Times obituary for George Wittenborn (October 18,1974) described it. The bookstore was run by two youngish Europeans, Wittenborn, born in Hamburg in 1905, and Heinz K. A. Schultz, born in Berlin in 1903. Both Wittenborn, an excitable and infectious enthusiast for modern art, and Schultz, a courtly, kindhearted intellectual, wanted to resurrect the best of European prewar thought and something of the Weimar spirit in their new homeland. Wittenborn, ever watchful, would hover over his stacks of books, measuring each potential customer and identifying genuine enthusiasts. (He was capable of schoolmasterish admonitions. When I, then a graduate student, was examining a book on modern art, he came, snatched it away from me, and scolded: That is a book for dentists!) I can well imagine Wittenborns delight with the young Motherwell, an omnivorous browser. It is a tribute to Wittenborns and Schultzs discernment that they befriended Motherwell and by late 1943 had evolved an immensely significant project, the Documents of Modern Art, with Motherwell at the helm. Motherwells experience with writing and editing was minimal, but the booksellers recognized his exceptionally broad interests and his boundless enthusiasm.

Motherwell was not quite thirty, endowed with exceptional energy, both as a newly recognized avant-garde artist soon to have his first one-man exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim s Art of This Century gallery and as a thinker about modern art. During the year that Motherwell got the Documents series under way, he was invited to give a paper in the month-long symposium held at Mount Holyoke College in August 1944. This was an ambitious resurrection of the celebrated conferences that had been held in France for several decades at a Cistercian abbey in Pontigny. The general subject was to be Art and the Crisis, and André Masson headed the week devoted to the plastic arts. Motherwells carefully worked paper, even with its contradictions, can be read closely for the credo that underlies all of his future speculations.

His ambitious paper The Modern Painter s World reflects both his circumstance and his increasingly painterly approach to ideas. It also establishes the motifs that would survive for the rest of his working life. I use the word motif, not themef deliberately. After 1940, Motherwell thought mostly about painting. A thought was usually valuable to him when it could in some way illuminate his need to paint (it would move him into painting), and the word motif derives from move in ancient languages. Theme, in contrast, comes from a Greek root that means to set or place something. As a creative person, Motherwell could never definitively do that.

As early as 1941, in a letter to William Carlos Williams soliciting his participation in the newly founded review VW, Motherwell was organizing his thoughts around the act of painting. Now I have taken a partisan stand, in the creative sense that the surrealist automatism is the basis of my painting. He speaks of the felt need and the felt contentof the organisms experiencing, and refers to André Bretons demand for a union between normal consciousness and the unconscious. And with characteristic, even boyish, enthusiasm, speaks of dynamiting the imagination. Motherwell’s concourse with Breton during the turbulent months of preparation for VW were invaluable to his development, having the effect of prying him loose from his highly structured education. In an instance of Bretons enduring influence on him, Motherwell, in a letter written in 1979 to the art historian and curator Edward Henning, recalled a lesson when Breton took a surrealist group into the junk shops and second-hand stores of Third Avenue in the early 1940s and force[d] us to decide which objects were surrealist and which were not. Bretons own experiences in the Parisian flea market, described in his innovative novel, Nadja, 1928, in which a photograph of an exceedingly peculiar object turns out to be a three-dimensional model of a statistical device, were recapitulated by Motherwell when, in his discussion of the work of the British sculptor Henry Moore, in 1945, he alludes to extremely beautiful and complex models made by mathematicians to represent equations. Bretons impress is still felt when Motherwell undertook to compile his thoughts for the Pon- tigny conference, above all in his declaration of what would be his fundamental, and permanent, stance: In the greatest painting, the painter communes with himself. Painting is his thoughts medium. Those two words—thought and medium—would henceforth constitute Motherwells painterly universe. His pronouncement at the Pon- tigny conference that painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself remained his ideal no matter how many ways he would later challenge himself by suspending mind in the act of painting. In a way, all of Motherwells thoughts after his seismic encounter with Matta—his trip to Mexico, his discussions with Wolfgang Paalen, his plunge into Surrealism—derive from a tremendous and finally unfathomable excitement in the act of painting. As he had said in his letter to William Carlos Williams, he had previously been an observer, like a character in James.

It is apparent in the Pontigny lecture that Motherwell made halfhearted attempts to deal with social and political aspects of artistic life, and the title alone indicates how much the interests of Schapiro and Rosenberg had engaged him, but it is also already apparent that his reckoning with the world outside the realm of painting is perfunctory. He acknowledges his circumstances, but his self, his deepest feelings, take precedence, as they would ever after. He could recognize the contradiction between socialism and individualistic modernism, the received idea amongst his new intellectual friends connected with the journal Partisan Review, and he alluded disparagingly to Stalinism, also a favorite topic of discussion and obloquy, but he reserved his eloquence for what most concerned him: questions nearest the act of creating. Thirty-three years later, in a public interview, he reiterated his view of the obvious contradiction between socialism and individualistic modernism and the impossibility of reconciling them, and then moved on quickly to his own artistic issues.

Motherwells experiences with drawing and painting in the early 1940s had released him from what he regarded as academic issues. He was acquiring what was rightfully his—a new mother tongue, so to speak—and he repeatedly examined this acquisition in many lights. In one of his later public interviews, he fetched up the memory of an unhappy private school experience during his adolescence in California, and with it, his means of survival:

I used to copy by the hour Rubens and Rembrandt and Michelangelo … And baroque drawing, once you have mastered it, you apply it to the subject. You don’t look at a horse and then copy the horse. You do the opposite. You already have the gestalt of horse-ness that you apply to the horse in a given picture.

This gestalt of horse-ness would later be augmented with views taken from an ancient Chinese manual on brush painting, and his close acquaintance with sketches and thoughts of Delacroix, all of which, distilled, found their way into Motherwells written commentaries. The gestalt came to be expressed in a personal shorthand: the reduction of the sheer experience into the word medium.

As early as the talk at the Pontigny conference, Motherwell had focused on the idea that painting is the artist s thought’s medium, using the word in an almost literal way: that it is in the middle between the thinker and the concrete product of his thought. Sometimes he used the word in straightforward reference to his own particular medium, paint, as when he referred to the artist’s tools as brushes, paint, and even the studio environment: I think the deepest discoveries in art have to do with the artist’s materials, the liquids, grounds, instruments, brushes, sticks, palette knives, pen points, whatever.

At times Motherwell defined the artist as someone who had an abnormal sensitivity to a medium. Or he referred to the marriage of the painter and his medium. In 1971, he offered his credo, that the art of art is its specific use of a medium, adding, in a letter to a composer late in his life, in 1984: When I paint, I do not paint a picture of something—paint itself becomes activated, and I would not have the imagery that I do have if it were not for some inherent characteristics of manipulated paint. Sometimes, as when he speaks almost rapturously of Matisse’s brush, the most subtle since Cézanne s, the most complicated and invariably right in its specific emphases, Motherwell is certainly expressing his own deepest aspirations: What a miracle it is! It is as though the brush could feel, breathe and sweat and touch and move about, as though sheer being contacted, sheer being and fused.

Motherwell was always attuned to the properties of a medium in any art form, as when he spoke of James Joyces piles of words. He even reproached psychoanalysis, which, in his later years was of great personal importance to him, for being deaf and blind to the various languages of the mind: To put it in a more simple-minded way, there cannot be any expression of the human spirit that is not in a specific medium. If, as he declared, painting was his thoughts medium, Motherwell did not leave it at that. Throughout his life he expressed as precisely as possible what he thought about thought. Or rather, about the question, what is thinking in painting?

In a statement, Beyond the Aesthetic, 1946, still tinctured with his academic studies, he nevertheless exclaims: What an inspiration the medium is! Colors on the palette or mixed in jars on the floor, assorted papers, or a canvas of a certain concrete space—no matter what, the painting mind is put into motion, probing, finding, completing.

The mind in motion is not so easy to catch up with. Motherwell pursues it conscientiously, sometimes drawing in other minds to speak for him. He cites, for instance, the mathematician Poincaré in 1954, Thought is only a flash between two long nights, which he then tests against his own experience, coming up with an insight about himself of considerable importance: "I have never had a thought about painting while painting, but only afterwards. In this sense one can only think in painting while holding a brush before a canvas, and this symbolization I trust much more than … the words about it."

The painting mind in motion often went, in Motherwells contemplative moments, toward what one of his interviewers referred to as a metaphysics. The interviewer quotes to Motherwell a long passage from the philosopher Kari Jaspers that he thinks comes very close to Motherwells feelings:

The urge of man’s metaphysical thinking is towards art. His mind opens up to that primary state when art was meant to be in earnest and was not mere decoration, play, sensuousness but chiffre reading. Through all the formal analysis of its works, through all narration of its happenings, in the history of the mind, through the biography of its creators, man seeks that something which perhaps he, himself, is not, but which, as existence questioned, saw and shaped in the depth of being that which he, too, is seeking.

Absolutely, Motherwell exclaimed with emphasis. I feel a shock of recognition. Motherwell was not alone during the 1950s in endowing the painter with moral aspirations. For a time, for instance, he collaborated closely with Ad Reinhardt, who was, among other things, a serious investigator of moral precepts as he found them in Zen Buddhist writers and in mystics such as St. John of the Cross. The broadest background for postwar speculations among the more thoughtful artists of the New York School, however, was the florescence of European existentialism. The literary and artistic sources stressed by such living thinkers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were familiar to many artists who had, in their youth, already discovered Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka. Above all, the postwar existentialists had invigorated discussions of the work of Kierkegaard. Translations of his works had been multiplying since the 1930s. By the mid-1950s the eminent poet W. H. Auden had edited a selection of his writings, which I believe was the volume Motherwell and two of his most probing colleagues, Mark Rothko and Philip Guston, discussed together at that time. In one of his most important lectures, Symbolism, 1954, Motherwell presented the fruits of these intense conversations, saying he believed that painters’ judgments of painting are first ethical and then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgment flowing from an ethical context.

Motherwell had already injected the preoccupation with ethics in his first public attempt to define the New York School in 1950, expressing opinions commonly held among artists as discrete as Rothko and de Kooning. De Koonings more colorful pronouncements were often parallel, as when he derided the old saw that the artist s task was to bring order out of chaos, declaring that in fact the artist’s main task was to put order in himself. He and many others shared Motherwell’s belief that the major decisions in the process of painting are made on the grounds of truth, not taste, recapturing philosophy as a presence in the studio. Motherwell and his colleagues’ delectation of Kierkegaard was undoubtedly heightened by the superb writing of the Scandinavian theologian, who was also a poet and storyteller. Motherwell, throughout his life, registered and drew on Kierkegaard’s pithy comments, as in the observation I quoted earlier, that "it is one thing to think and another to exist in what is thought." Motherwell instinctively hoarded Kierkegaards statements for hard times in the studio, as he did many other references garnered in moments of what Kierkegaard had called aesthetic despair. (Such references came readily to Motherwell, as I can attest. Once in a meandering conversation over lunch, he suddenly fetched up a quotation from Kierkegaard to the effect that you can always make a wild goose into a tame goose, but you can never make a tame goose into a wild goose.) The lingua franca of the existentialist years in New York was liberally sprinkled with locutions drawn partly from Kierkegaard by way of theoreticians such as Sartre. The ideas of risk, choice, self-deception (mauvaise foi), and individual responsibility were ingested, and, more important, certain painters tried to live by them, at least in the studio.

The echoes of Motherwell’s thoughts, germinated in the studio, resound in his writings. He tried to be true by observing his own and other artists’ actual procedures— actions as simple as adding one stroke to another, or canceling one with another. He called the decisions, stroke by stroke, a kind of ethics. As he told David Sylvester in 1960, the process of painting is a series of moral decisions about the aesthetic, emphasizing the importance of authenticity of expression, and stating that people are essentially ethical by nature. (Such thoughts occur to many artists and writers. Amos Oz writes in a memoir, for instance: If you write an 80-thousand word novel, you have to make about a quarter of a million decisions.) Motherwell, in his notes and published writings, often tested studio decisions against what he referred to as reality. More than once he cited Wallace Stevens’s thoughts about the pressure of reality, and, in a joint statement for Modern Artists in America, Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt quoted Stevens: It is not that there is a new imagination but that there is a new reality. In 1946, Motherwell had spoken of different patterns …, which constitute reality, and in the years thereafter, he often tried to define for himself the nature of his own reality. His strong response to the work of Matisse seems to have settled the matter, at least in terms of painting. Matisse had written on several occasions that painting, and therefore reality, was basically about relations. Relational structures were what Motherwell persistently sought. His thoughts about such structures were inspired by the act of looking as much as they were incited by the act of reading. He felt deeply and strongly that painting is a universe, and in one of his choice selections of quotations, deferring as he often did to art history, he quoted G. Jean- niot writing on Manet in 1907: You cannot explain art any more than you can learn it. Manet, whom I knew, also said: Art is a circle, one is either inside it or outside.’… no one person in the circle resembles his neighbor, but at the same time they are all brothers.

It was certainly this brotherhood that Motherwell craved—a cenacle of kindred spirits not only in his own neighborhood but also in the world at large, going back to the painting cavemen, with whom he felt a kinship as well. Like Wallace Stevens, who had suggested in 1951, at the Museum of Modern Art, that poets and painters filled the breach in a world that had lost religion, Motherwell believed in what he had early determined to be spiritual values, but, like every other modernist, found them exceedingly difficult to define. Stevens, in his speech, later issued by the Museum of Modern Art as a pamphlet that most New York artists read closely, said that the paramount relation between painting and poetry, between modern man and modern art is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. The forlornness of which the existentialists had spoken edged Motherwell’s inner being. He knew only that he wanted to be within the circle and to that end had early taken a stand. For him, the invention of papier collé by Braque and Picasso represented a hallmark of modernism precisely in its disparateness, its separations in medium. It represented a strictly modern view of existence, enabling him to talk about both James Joyce and Picasso as collagists—modern sensibilities that could put together disparate things, displacing traditional systems of thinking about reality.

In fact, Motherwell had an abiding fondness for ideas that had occurred to him when he first stepped into the circle. In his earliest statements he naturally drew upon his education in ideas and rather self-consciously fetched them up in the service of his new identity. For example, when he concludes his essay on the sublime in 1948 by stating, One experiences the Sublime or not, according to one’s fate and character, he echoed what he had learned of pre-Socratic philosophy from Heraclitus: Character is fate. But in later years the scholastic memory fades, and he strikes out boldly on his own. Only occasionally, then, did he have recourse to a few singular sources. There were ideas that he liked as one likes another person. He liked, for instance, the idea of indirection, as he said in his preface to Kahnweiler in 1949: Nothing of deep interest can be spoken of save by indirection. He linked his own predilection for indirection with the idea of abstraction, drawn originally from Whitehead and acted out in his work, but also, of course, from Mallarmé, one of the gods of modernism. He could talk about existential doubt, but when he talked about an important group of late paintings, in Plato’s Cave, he spoke first of the blackness suggested by the cave title, and of the paint itself, and only after of his association with Plato, and with the superb poem of his contemporary the poet Delmore Schwartz. Oddly but understandably, Motherwell comments on the cave parable that Plato had conceived to describe reality by substituting the word art for reality.

Another idea he liked was what the French call a jeu d’esprit. For him, the spirit of play arrived as a consequence of his experiments with psychic automatism at the outset of his painting life—the kind of spontaneous drawing he also called doodling, which enabled him to get started. There was a deep need in him to overcome his reading culture; to expel the troubled self that sent him into psychoanalysis. The bodily engagement in the act of painting appeared to be one of his most significant discoveries, freeing him, like the ancient Chinese painters, to transcend his self.

He had embarked on four different occasions on purely automatist adventures, literally throwing himself into them. In 1982, he wrote of his extensive Beside the Sea series: I made the painted spray with such force that the strong rag paper split. He spoke of the full force of my shoulder, arm, hand and brush, adding: One might say that the true way to ‘imitate’ nature is to employ its own processes. Three years later, he produced the Lyric Suite, which begins spectacularly, with a thousand sheets of Japanese rice paper that he approached, he reported, with unadulterated automatism. The ink, he said, spread itself like a spot of oil on a smooth surface so that the images are half as they ‘grew’ themselves. Two years later, in 1967, he tried similar techniques with ink, but on parchment, in drawings that turned into his Rimbaud series, and in 1971, the adventures with ink give way to acrylic in the Samurai series.

During his lifetime, Motherwell demonstrated his ability to probe the history of his century with exceptional skill. The best example of his agility lies in the saga of his gathering the testimony for his celebrated book on Dada artists. The well-known fractiousness of these enfants terribles never flagged. It required great patience, as well as scholarly judgment, for Motherwell to endure their quarrels so that he could distill the excellent anthology that eventually emerged. He displayed notable courage in the face of the explosive squabbling among the necessary participants. This editorial courage was demonstrated on many occasions, most especially when he refused a poorly written submission by the powerful art critic Clement Greenberg—a step that was certainly not to his advantage as an exhibiting artist.

In later years, Motherwell withdrew from editing, and to some degree from writing, but he never ceased trying to organize his thoughts about his own primary activity, painting. He sustained his romantic side—his belief in belief—despite frequent bouts of uncertainty and suspicion. When he titled a group of paintings Chi Ama Crede, he was enunciating the credo that had kept him going. He enjoyed the exercise of the mind, but he found refuge in the thought that there is a faculty— perhaps alien to the mind—that is the unconscious, which could never find adequate explanation except perhaps in the making of a work of art.

Jack Flam has pointed out that everything Motherwell wrote was solicited, even his editing of books on modern art and literature: The consistency of his total literary and public effort rested more in his emphasis on certain underlying values than in the systematic progression of ideas; his commitment to the modernist aesthetic remained inviolable. Motherwell had begun with the conviction that the artist forms a kind of spiritual underground in modern life, and, in the ellipse of his own life, he never altered that belief. In one of his late lectures he reiterated his early insights into the aesthetic called modernism. He further refined his early view, but in no way altered it except, perhaps, in emphasis. Now, he looked back and saw the rebellion of the modernists as a new investigation into what constitutes art and recognized that modernism is a desperate and gallant attempt at a more adequate and accurate view of things now. He emphasized that he was not talking about mere aesthetics: I am talking about shaped meaning, without which no life is worth living. In one of his most graceful essays, Motherwell paid homage to a great writer, Franz Kafka, concluding: To read him is to be marked for life—as he was—marked by the reality of inwardness, that most sacred of modern domains of which he is a vivid witness.

In his written comments throughout his adult life, many of which are gathered in this book, Motherwell himself emerges as a vivid witness. His testimony that a life of the mind need not be exclusive to professional philosophers rings true. His eloquence, his occasional inspired remarks cast casually into his writing, and his frequent recourse to poetic imagery (as when, for instance, he defines drawing as a racing yacht, cutting through the ocean, while painting is the ocean itself) all serve both to illumine his own work and to open the way into the works of his contemporaries.

NOTES

The sources for various quotations not in this volume are listed below:

p. 6 "Now I have taken..Letter to William Carlos Williams, December 3,1941, Motherwell archives, Dedalus Foundation, New York.

p. 7 Breton took "a surrealist group..Letter to Edward Henning, May 15,1979, Motherwell archives.

p. 8 "I used to copy by the hour..Introduction to Joan Banach, Robert Motherwell: A Painter’s Album (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1996).

I think the deepest discoveries…: Introduction by Dore Ashton, in H. H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell, rev. ed. (New York: Harry Abrams, 1982), p. 202.

When I paint…: Letter to Monte (Dr. Montague Ullman), June 4,1984, Motherwell archives, p. 9 The urge of mans metaphysical thinking…: Interview with Richard Wagener, June 14,1974, in

The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Stephanie Terenzio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 218.

p. 12 Motherwell comments on the cave parable: in Arnason, Motherwell, p. 180.

I made the painted spray…: in ibid., pp. 147,154.

The consistency…": Jack Flam, Introduction, in Collected Writings, ed. Terenzio, p. 3.

p. 13 In one of his late lectures: Robert Motherwell, Remarks," October 30, 1982, in Collected Writings, ed. Terenzio, pp. 259, 262.

NOTES ON MONDRIAN AND CHIRICO

1942

The following notes are excerpts from a work on the direction of modern painting which I have in preparation. They are by no means in the final form I intend, but since it may be some time before I can again set my hand to them, I am presenting them as they are, in the hope that they may be of interest to at least a few persons. My preoccupation with the direction of painting accounts for the particular emphasis the notes have; they are taken from an article which was originally meant to be a chronicle of the seasons exhibitions, hence their reference to the recent