ROBERT MOTHERWELL: OPENS

ROBERT MOTHERWELL: OPENS

ROBERT MOTHERWELL: OPENS William Shearburn Gallery October 21 - November 24, 2021 Essay by Jessica Baran

“Nothing outside can cure you but everything's outside” — Bernadette Mayer, from “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica” Contemporary painter Amy Sillman summarized Abstract Expressionism’s current status best: “the old bird’s gotten the gimlet eye from just about everybody: it’s vulgar, it’s the phallocracy, it’s nothing but an empty trophy, it celebrates bourgeois subjectivity, it’s a cold-war CIA front, and, well, basically, expression’s really embarrassing.”1 Sillman then goes on to write a brilliant defense of the beleaguered mode of making—one in which its expressive “vulgarity” now seems especially well-suited for the kinds of practitioners—queer, non-male, non-white—that the genre once excluded. What then do we do with a series like Robert Motherwell’s Opens and its implicit allure: is there a way to think of this work as useful without necessarily performing a defense of the artist and the movement he helped codify? And can one do so in a way that’s informed by current practitioners like Sillman, who are working to undo dominant heteropatriarchal legacies, without mobilizing their argument to reinscribe Motherwell’s canonical status?

I’m not sure, but I’m interested in the possibility, to which I believe the Open series suggests a way.

The Open series was Motherwell’s second act, begun at the age of 52 amidst the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and after Abstract Expressionism’s first public death at the hands of Pop Art and Minimalism. Motherwell describes the series’ origins as such: The Open series began in March 1967, when I leaned a vertical canvas against a larger vertical canvas (about 6.5’ x 9/5’), which had its ground painted all over, in yellow ochre. It occurred to me that the proportions of the smaller vertical canvas, leaning on the larger vertical canvas, was rather beautiful, and so I outlined the smaller canvas in charcoal (onto the yellow ochre ground of the larger canvas), so that the lines looked like a door—a very abstract one. I had meant to elaborate the painting, but over a period of weeks did not; and now realized that it did not need elaboration, simple as it was. I brought it home from the studio to look at it, and one day decided to turn it upside down, so that the ‘door’ became a window.2 This incidentally discovered compositional strategy—of filling a canvas with a vivid color field of acrylic paint and then inscribing on its upper half a charcoal-drawn rectangle with an open top—would form the basis for seemingly inexhaustible experimentation that Motherwell would continue to re-configure and reenvision over several hundred works made throughout the rest of his life. The wide range of invention within the series, which also includes prints and drawings, is succinctly encapsuled in the seventeen Opens included in this exhibition.

“Open Study No. 1” (1968) is the earliest work featured and appears like a kind of ur-text from which the other works derive. Consisting of a “u” drawn sharply with pencil in the center of the sheet of paper, its right edge falling slightly shorter than its left, it proposes a lopsided, unstable form as the series’ propulsive engine. In “Open Study (In Blue with Pencil Lines)” (1969), a long cerulean blue rectangle is framed by a white sheet of paper, within which it’s situated just right of center; a rectangular charcoal outline is dawn on top and juts into both realms. Nearly inverting this approach, “Open No. 41: Gray with Sienna Band” (1968-70) is consumed by a bluish gray, which fills the entire canvas, while the shape within it is only partially delineated by a painted double line of cerulean blue and black to the left and a thick strip of

sienna on the bottom. Other works in the exhibition explore the tension of forms-within-forms through more radically contrasting color, as in the massively-scaled “Hoppla, wir leben!” (1971/1974-1977). In this painting, a full-bleed orange field is cut into by an ultramarine rectangle, which occupies most of the upper half of the canvas; within this blue intrusion, the “u” shape becomes a “w,” thinly and waveringly drawn in charcoal.

Motherwell ultimately removed any referential terms when describing the series, saying at one point “the window idea is mainly a poetic metaphor,” and that the paintings were in fact about the conflation of inside and outside. This attempt to negotiate the coexistence of the internal and the external within the flattened rhetorical space of the picture plane is characteristic of Motherwell’s abiding belief in painting as “a medium of thought” in which “the mind can actualize itself.”3 All the doubling and layering that occurs across these works enacts a larger dialogic dynamic in which form is deconstructed, resuscitated and played against itself. In that sense, the Opens are to be read as much as seen: if isolated and looked at closely, the drawn gestures in the series become almost calligraphic. The “u” that occasionally becomes a “w” courts being explicitly letter-like and acts like an extension of Motherwell’s self-expressive project and the notion of “openness”—in which the I has the potential to become you and we. Again, inside and outside collapse. But this is not Whitmanesque largess, but, in the spirit of French poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Stephane Mallarmé, who were key influences on Motherwell, it’s more of a Symbolist style of signification, in which the self-as-mind can be emptied out and displaced.

What should we make of this philosophical debate articulated in paint, apparently wrestling with the capacity and instability of the self? The Open series arose at moment in Motherwell’s life that must have felt like a personal and historical crossroads. Franz Kline had died in 1952. Jackson Pollock had died in 1956. William Baziotes had died in 1963. David Smith had died in 1965. The poet Frank O’Hara—who curated Motherwell’s first career-spanning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965—had died in 1966. Nearly half of his close friends – figures in the once-revolutionary canon he helped codify – had tragically passed away. His own career had been summarized, canonized and made a thing of the past. And the world—to whatever extent it impacted his consciousness—was aflame with a new revolutionary spirit that in fact took dead aim on the failures of the avant-gardes he’d championed and helped establish. In an artist statement written in the 1947, he presciently observed, “A shift in one’s human situation entails a shift in one’s technique and subject matter.”4 It seems obvious, then, why Motherwell would want to put an end to his first act, which is still considered his most significant body of work—Elegy to the Spanish Republic—in order to start something new. The Elegies, begun in 1948, were like the Opens in that they were comprised of hundreds of artworks, primarily paintings but also prints and drawings, that obsessively reimagined and reconfigured their own formal motifs over the span of several decades (he’d in fact continue to periodically revisit the series even after embarking the Opens). Characterized by broad, gestural strokes shaped in alternatingly linear and ovoid forms in black paint against a primarily white background, “an art of opposite weights, and absolute contrast,”5 the series exemplified an expressionistic approach that aligned Motherwell enough with his fellow Ab-Ex “irascibles” while also establishing his differences from them. Motherwell, unlike his peers, was a dedicated intellectual, a fact that he alternately embraced and irritably denied. The series’ title alludes to the death-occasioned poetic form and is indeed a sustained “funeral song” mourning the demise of revolutionary Spain at the hands of fascism, channeling the shared existential confusion of the postwar moment. The inspiration for the Elegies is variously traceable to a poem on the subject by the art critic Harold Rosenberg, with whom Motherwell was friends and often collaborated, as well as a poem by Federico García Lorca, who was killed by a firing squad at the outset of the Spanish Civil War. Motherwell was also someone driven by feelings, as he’d expound upon at length in his writing, where he continually valorized “feeling-content” as art’s primary motive and defense against the verbal hegemony of the intellect.6 “The function of the artist is to express reality as felt,” he asserted.7 A biographical

account of the year in which he began the Elegies relates that, prior to starting the series, his first wife had left him and another woman with whom he’d fallen in love also decided to abandon him, plummeting him into a suicidal state.8 This story suggests a more intimate reading of this work as looking overwhelmingly phallic and serving to lament and reinscribe Motherwell’s lost sense of masculinity after this double romantic rejection. It’s an interpretation Motherwell was well-aware of in his lifetime, and wryly and gamely did not disavow. “That’s alright with me, too,” he said, “sexuality and death are the most basic themes in human existence.”9 While the Elegies were perhaps born of a romantic crisis perceived as a political one and translated through the assimilation of a stylistic zeitgeist, the Opens seem like an effort to release the artist from his socio-cultural lineage in order to reconnect with a more idiosyncratic personal history. This distinction between the two series’ way of reflecting moments of rupture for the artist is sharpened through understanding the Opens’ relationship to Motherwell’s life-long practice as a collagist. Just prior to starting the Opens, a friend of Motherwell’s began providing him with a steady supply of Gauloises cigarettes, the packages for which he’d use as collage materials. (A chain-smoker, his preferred brand for smoking was Lucky Strike.) Motherwell, who had been making collages since 1943, would later inextricably link his attraction to the cerulean blue Gauloises boxes with his attraction to collage as a medium: I used to reflect occasionally, why is it that I took to collage like a duck to water and then I remembered that I spent the year 38-39 in Paris. I stayed with a French family en pension and sometimes after dinner we’d go to the Café des Deaux Magots. Picasso was very often at a corner table surrounded by friends and I realized soon that they were writers and Picasso would scan the room looking at everybody, and while scanning the room without looking at what was in front of him—say the coffee cup and saucer, his package of cigarettes, a piece of silver or two, and a napkin—and he would keep moving them, especially on the surface of the table which had a white table cloth, so that the Gauloises Blues showed vividly and I had never seen a collage but at that moment there was something about the way Picasso left it that really moved my heart irrationally and one day it occurred to me years later, of course I took to it like a duck to water, I had watched the inventor of collage make them at the cafe table.10 The process he observed Picasso engaged in—of ordering actual objects, such as the blue boxes on a white table cloth and assessing them as a visual composition—is one he identifies as fundamentally rooted in collage; it’s also precisely the same one Motherwell himself used when laying that smaller canvas upon the larger one in the discovery of the Open series. It seems no accident that many of the Open paintings— perhaps ones most emblematic of the series—feature Galouises cerulean blue color fields, as several of the works in this exhibition evidence. Similarly, in his prolific collage work at that time, Motherwell was placing flattened or torn portions of cerulean blue Galouises boxes on the white spaces of sheets of paper—smaller rectangles within larger rectangles—in countless iterations. The Open series is therefore intimately tied to his collage practice, which seems like a subconscious way of bypassing the Elegies for a different affective and creative source for this new body of work. As this anecdotal memory makes clear, collage and by extension the Opens are closely bound up with an earlier point in Motherwell’s life, before the emergence of Abstract Expressionism or even his artistic career, when he was studying philosophy and simply admiring European modernists like Picasso from afar.

It’s been well established that the Abstract Expressionists were an artificially assembled group of radically different artists; Motherwell, while accepted among them, was perhaps its greatest outlier. The asthmatic son of a banker, Motherwell was studying at Ivy League universities while many of the others, who were older and predominantly working-class, were barely surviving off of W.P.A. project subsidies. One can imagine that these educational and economic divides created in Motherwell a fair amount of internal conflict. His erudition was not exactly downplayed—a fact evidenced in the Opens’ and Elegies’ many literary references. In this exhibition, for instance, “Hoppla, wir leben!” is named after a 1925 play by

German Expressionist writer Ernst Toller; while “Study for Shem the Penman No. 11,” (1972) references the artist character in James Joyce’s 1939 experimental novel Finnegan’s Wake.11 But Motherwell also took direct issue with his own and others’ literal minded-ness, as alluded to earlier, and would in essays and lectures frequently harangue against a society dominated by language. You can sense this tension in the unsteady “u” that dominates many of the Opens—which seems like a gesture wary of words and the lyric impulse. Or when his first monographic catalogue was published in 1977, he insisted that a dictionary page including every definition of the word “open” be reprinted in its entirety—thereby aligning a kind of meaning ad absurdum with his abstract works.12 Motherwell was an insider who was also an outsider; he was also an abstractionist with a conflicted relationship with literal meaning and, its counterpart, brazen feeling. The Opens were a peculiar synthesis of his many contradictions. Unabashedly nostalgic for the European modernist tradition that Pollock, Kline and his peers often ridiculed him for (they were “Americans”); idiosyncratically linguistic and philosophical in their formal strategies, and therefore more stridently connected to Motherwell’s intellectual pursuits, which began before his artistic career; gorgeously emotional and archly elegiac in their heaven-bound gaze painted in cigarette-brand hues; and a deliberate attempt to conflate and flatten seemingly irreconcilable forces (rather than animate their antipathies)—the Opens feel like a wild gambit at reinvention through the broken parts of a self. Something made of death—the cigarettes that the asthmatic smokes while musing on his youth, the elegy for the Elegies and Abstract Expressionism — but speculatively future-oriented. They’re beautiful but also weird. They’re sentimental. They’re out of time.

They’re expressive. In all these senses, they’re “vulgar” in the ways Sillman defined the term.

What seems useful in thinking about the work this way is that it makes Motherwell just another person who expressed his life in painting rather than as bulwark protecting a hallowed canon. Through this lens, he has no claim on a style that we’ve now come to know proliferated globally and without American influence. He no longer needs to be representative of a kind of Greenbergian quality that no longer has any substantial bearing on how we consider art. We also don’t need to adapt the traditions he loved. It’s a way of not making excuses for anything while at the same time opening up access to Motherwell through something outside of himself – an approach which maybe clears out “a very nice plot of foreclosed real estate that, several generations later, younger artists [can] make use of—especially those who were supposedly barred from the place to begin with.”13 This also allows one to enjoy the Opens on an intuitive level, which is easy: they are as irresistibly appealing as an open window revealing an expanse of cloudless sky.

ENDNOTES

Amy Sillman, “Ab-Ex and Disco Balls: In Defense of Abstract Expressionism II,” Artforum, Summer 2011, https://www.artforum.com/print/201106/ab-ex-and-disco-balls-in-defense-of-abstract-expressionism-ii-28354.

This essay is an “unauthorized sequel” and response to T. J. Clark’s use of the word “vulgar” to describe Abstract Expressionism in his essay “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism,” which was published in October in 1994.

2 Jack D. Flam, Katy Rogers, Tim Clifford, and Robert Motherwell. Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1941-1991, Vol. 2 Paintings on Canvas and Panel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012, 220-222.

3 Robert Motherwell, Dore Ashton, and Joan Banach. The Writings of Robert Motherwell. The Documents of Twentieth-Century Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, 32.

4 Motherwell, The Writings of Robert Motherwell, 57.

5 Motherwell, The Writings of Robert Motherwell, 212. This statement was written in reference to Franz Kline’s paintings, but I believe it also applies to Motherwell’s sense of his own series Elegies, which bore a resemblance to Kline’s style.

6 Motherwell, The Writings of Robert Motherwell, 46.

7 Motherwell, The Writings of Robert Motherwell, 27.

8 Dedalus Foundation, Chronology, [Late Autumn-Early December 1948], https://www.dedalusfoundation.org/motherwell/chronology/detail?field_chronology_period_tid=28 9 Catherine Tatge. Robert Motherwell & the New York School: Storming the Citadel. Multiple Formats. USA: Kultur Video, 1991.

10 Jack D. Flam, Katy Rogers, Tim Clifford, and Robert Motherwell. Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1941-1991, Vol. 3 Collages and Paintings on Paper and Paperboard. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012, 118.

11 Jack D. Flam, Katy Rogers, Tim Clifford, and Robert Motherwell. Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1941-1991, Vol. 2 Paintings on Canvas and Panel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012, 322. The catalogue has an interesting note about Ernest Toller’s play (titled in English, “Hoppla, we’re alive!”), which it describes as being about “a revolutionary [who] kills himself after he leaves a mental hospital and finds that his once radical friends have become complacent bourgeoisie who now accept the same values they once so vehemently opposed. Motherwell may have had Mark Rothko in mind when he painted this picture.”

12 Robert Motherwell, and Robert Saltonstall Mattison. Robert Motherwell: Open. London: 21 Publishing, 2009, 108.

This page shows a facsimile of Motherwell’s copy of The Random House Dictionary, on which all the definitions for “open” appear.

13 Amy Sillman, “Ab-Ex and Disco Balls: In Defense of Abstract Expressionism II.” 1

Open Study (Charcoal with White No. 1), 1972 Acrylic and charcoal on Upson Board 17 1/4 x 23 1/4 inches

2

Open No. 94, 1969 Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 72 x 42 inches

4

Open Study No. 1, 1968 Charcoal on paper 22 x 30 1/2 inches

6

Hoppla, wir leben!, 1971/1974 - 1977 Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 107 1/2 x 119 7/8 inches

8

Study for Shem the Penman No. 11, 1972 Acrylic on charcoal on Upson board 9 x 12 inches

10

Brushy Open on Buff Ground, ca. 1983 Acrylic on paper 18 x 26 inches

12

Open Study in Charcoal on Grey, #3, 1974 Acrylic and charcoal on canvasboard 18 x 30 inches

14

Open No. 40: In Gray on Sienna, 1968 Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 24 x 36 inches

16

Open No. 41: Gray with Sienna Band, 1968 - 1970 Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 30 x 24 inches

18

Red Open with White Line, 1979 Aquatint and soft-ground etching on Georges Duchene Hawthorne of Larroque handmade paper 18 1/2 x 35 5/8 inches Edition 10/56

20

Untitled, 1973 Acrylic on paper 29 1/2 x 41 1/2 inches

22

Open in Grey with White Edge, 1971 Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 88 x 122 inches

24

Open No. 147: Blue on Beige, 1970 Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 12 x 16 inches

26

Open Study (In Blue with Pencil Lines), 1969 Acrylic, ink and graphite on paper 28 x 31 1/2 inches

28

Untitled, 1971 Acrylic on canvas 15 3/4 x 11 1/2 inches each

30

Untitled, 1971 Acrylic and graphite on canvas paper 11 3/4 x 15 1/2 inches each

32

Untitled (Open), 1968 Acrylic and graphite on paper 11 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches

34

Open Study (B), 1968 Graphite on paper 31 1/2 x 22 1/2 inches

36

Motherwell in his studio, ca. 1962. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah.

Robert Motherwell was an American artist and seminal Abstract Expressionist painter. Influenced by the automatism prescribed by Surrealist poets and writers, Motherwell’s practice was characterized by an intuitive approach to painting. He is perhaps best known for his iconic Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, in which the artist painted over 150 variants of large black forms onto white backgrounds. “Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought,” he reflected. “Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.”

Born on January 24, 1915 in Aberdeen, WA, Motherwell moved to New York to study at Columbia University with the art historian Meyer Schapiro, who encouraged Motherwell to make paintings.

During the early 1940s, the artist entered the milieu of artists in the city, including William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others who were part of the New York School. In 1951, Motherwell taught Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg at the famed Black Mountain College.

He continued to lecture and publish on art history for the rest of his career. Motherwell died on July 16, 1991 in Cape Cod, MA. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London, among many others.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

ROBERT MOT HER WELL: OPENS October 21 - November 24, 2021

Essay by Jessica Baran All images copyright © 2021 Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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