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Robert Motherwell, Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (1943). © Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA. New York, NY
Last year marked the centenary of the birth of the Abstract Expressionist artist Robert Motherwell, who died in 1991. Over the past several years, a host of publications and exhibitions devoted to the artist have proven to be important and welcome additions to the somewhat sparse field of Motherwell studies, offering new perspectives on his career. Yet, in a more discouraging way, they also largely repackage and recirculate existing perceptions about the artist.There is a lingering and conservative monographic aura around Motherwell scholarship, which has tended to lag behind the more rigorous interdisciplinary research on other Abstract Expressionists. Motherwell was one of the few artists of his generation who received a university education, graduating in the 1930s fr om Stanford University, where he studied American Pragmatist philosophy, Modernist poetry and psychology. He later pursued graduate training in philosophy and art history at Harvard and Columbia universities. The numerous philosophical, political and literary influences on his art and writings have yet to be fully examined. His disparate oeuvre deserves to be analysed within these more complex aesthetic and cultural contexts.
Throughout his career, Motherwell experimented with diverse modes and materials. His art lacked the signature style and symbolic conventions of Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko and Franz Kline, which has hindered the critical and scholarly reception of his work. Although Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster have argued that Motherwell’s “plastic automatism” tamed Surrealism’s anarchic subjectivity into an autographic and marketable serial manner, the opposite is true. Motherwell deviated from Abstract Expressionism’s canonical norms, which makes his oeuvre especially worthy of revisionist consideration. It also reveals that Abstract Expressionism was not the cohesive monolith still promoted in many art history surveys. With his knowledge of Pragmatist fallibilism, the eclecticism of his art may have been a willful effort to challenge overly narrow and prescriptive definitions of the New York School. In the 1950s and 1960s, his art did not fit the predominant formalist criteria and teleological theories promoted by Clement Greenberg. Critical estimations of his art have fared no better during an age of postmodern theory.
The most noteworthy of the museum and gallery exhibitions around Motherwell’s centenary was the Guggenheim’s 2013 show Robert Motherwell: Early Collages, which was organised by Susan Davidson. The once-in-a-lifetime gathering of fragile pieces, a large number of which are still in private collections and rarely on public display, cemented the significance of Motherwell’s early collages. These are some of his most inventive and distinctive works, with their bold easel scale, experimental methods of fabrication, radical disjunctive designs and vibrantly colored papers (many of which have since faded, an important discovery made by conservators in preparing the exhibition).
Despite the virtues of the show, the catalogue presented relatively few new insights on Motherwell’s collages. With the important exception of noting the influence of Joan Miró’s and Jean Arp’s Surrealist collages, the authors explain Motherwell’s technique largely as an isolated practice driven by his own aesthetic interests. His early collages need to be examined in the broader context of collage trends in the 1940s, which has itself been virtually unstudied. Within the New York avant-garde of the time, collage was everywhere: in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore and Benjamin Peret, as well as in the work of artists like Gerome Kamrowski, Ad Rinehart and Hananiah Harari. The trend was recognised in the curator Dorothy Miller’s exhibition Collage at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948. This show is now largely forgotten. It has been overshadowed by the museum’s more famous 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage, which has created the misperception that, after a fallow period, collage was revived in the 1950s as an outgrowth of Neo-Dada.
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