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‘Motherwell’ exhibit gives glimpse into artist’s studio life

Although he was the youngest member of the Abstract Expressionists, painter Robert Motherwell (1915-91) emerged as a leader within what is widely considered this country’s first purely American art movement

His intense approach to making art led to a prolific career in drawings, collages and prints, as well as paintings collected by museums the world over. So it is no surprise that, at the moment, we have an exhibit of the late artist’s work here in our region. “Robert Motherwell: Lost in Form, Found in Line,” at the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts in New Castle, explores the artist’s working process and spirit that existed in his studio through more than 50 works on paper, including a handful of “uniques” and a number of bold collages.

Most people who view any artist’s work have no visual image or snapshot of the artist’s studio life. For Motherwell, his working environment was a sanctuary, which was self-sustaining at times: continually expansive, pregnant with the possibilities of how a word, a phrase or a poem provided a whole language of movements and reactions for the artist. The idea of this exhibit is to paint a picture of that feeling.

“Surrounded by Motherwell’s art on a daily basis, I’ve developed a unique relationship with it. In putting this exhibit together, I was most interested in trying to provide a portal into that experience,” says exhibit curator Michael Mahnke, who organized this traveling exhibit with assistance from the Jerald Melberg Gallery in Charlotte, N.C., and the Turchin Center for the Visual Art, in Boone, N.C.

Mahnke also is collections manager at New York City’s Dedalus Foundation, which was founded by Motherwell during his lifetime in order to foster public understanding of modern art and Modernism. Its office houses Motherwell’s archives of original documents and photographs and substantial portions of Motherwell’s extensive library.

Since his death in 1991, Motherwell’s place in the history of 20th-century art has become more clear. A PBS special acclaimed him as the most important of the Abstract Expressionists whose heroic vision of art dominated the 1950s and 1960s and continues to withstand the claims of its later rivals (Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, etc.)

Born in Aberdeen, Wash., in 1915, Motherwell had first set out to become a philosopher, which led to him receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy in 1937 from Stanford University and completing one year of a philosophy doctorate at Harvard a year later.

American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead first challenged Motherwell with the notion of abstraction as a process of discarding the inessential and focusing on the necessary. Motherwell dropped out of the doctoral program and pursued art history at Columbia University in 1940 under the tutelage of celebrated art history professor Meyer Shapiro. It was Shapiro who introduced him to emigre painter and writer Kurt Seligmann, who was deeply versed in the tenets of Surrealism. Turning his attention to painting, Motherwell ultimately met up with Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta, who most actively engaged Motherwell’s intellect, pushing him off on a journey to uncover his own original creativity as a painter.

A major turning point for Motherwell came in the summer of 1941, which he spent with Matta in Mexico. Matta introduced him to “automatism” (i.e. free association), and this led Motherwell to adopt a loose technique he called “artful scribbling.” It became the starting point for all of his future work.

Possessing a keen mind and intensely intellectual outlook, Motherwell found the process of accessing spontaneity to be a perfect foil to his natural impulse to reason. Thus, his paintings became characterized by loose, free flowing forms and lines that denied any formal musings and instead favored tapping into deep subconscious connections.

In speaking about the possibilities in his works, the artist once said: “I think a lot of my work has to do with correspondences that are not at all literal. I mean that my orange picture is not merely pure orange (though the purest orange I could get). It also has to do with fruit, with the sun, with skin, lots of things I’m not even aware of, maybe a house I saw in Mexico once, 40 years ago — who knows what? Ideally, all the reverberations orange could have.”

Dark and heavily textured shapes on thick deckled paper might allude to the monuments in Stonehenge, while Spanish crimson red and the bold, yet elegant brushed gesture nods to the matador’s sweeping cape across the approaching bull.

Motherwell’s studio was a converted carriage house that was spacious and bright. A row of skylights drew in the best-quality light, and sliding glass doors opened out to an expanse of grass and trees. The sound of water from the nearby brook was within earshot of the active painting space. He often sat in the aged leather sofa in his painting studio, contemplating his work and reading any one of the hundreds of books in his library. Writers like Joyce, Baudelaire and Rimbaud played into the narrative of his work again and again.

“Mothewell found no limitation in ideas or materials, or in extending ideas with materials or materials with ideas,” Mahnke says. “The artist’s use of line and form creates a window though which we can see an atmosphere of rich activated space connecting to deep moments of time and place.”

Surprisingly, as regimented as print-making can be, Motherwell found it to be fertile ground for innovation, and often acknowledged that the collaborative aspect of printmaking helped to inform his work overall. The artist produced more than 500 editions throughout his career, working in concert with a host of workshops and printers both in the United States and beyond.

As a natural extension of Motherwell’s tendency to work with variations of a theme, nearly every image from his body of editions is linked to subjects he began to explore early in his career — such as “Elegies to the Spanish Republic” and “Hollow Men” celebrated in paint. Likewise, visual fragments that became signature elements in his collage work — cigarette packages, wine labels, sheet music, and specialty papers — also appeared in print reiterating his artistic intentions.

A thumb through the school curriculum created by the Hoyt to accompany the exhibit includes timelines, biographies and lesson plans that might be beneficial both before and after a free tour through the galleries.

Source: www.pittsburghlive.com