Robert Motherwell: Paintings and Collages

Motherwell’s oeuvre remains unique in post-war American Art. Not easily defined within any one school of his contemporaries, his long career is a testament to creating a unique harmony between discipline and abandon. As the artist’s biographer H.H. Arnason has noted, “Motherwell has never belonged with the overall abstract brush-gesture painters such as Pollock or de Kooning, nor on the other hand with the hard-edge color painters such as Kelly and Noland. He is essentially an abstract imagist whose most unified color fields are filled with nuances of brush variations and whose freest brush passages are controlled by a larger structure or unified image.” Beside the Sea and Summertime in Italy, both from 1962 and featured in the exhibition, typify this dialogue between freedom and control. A spontaneous splattered drip becomes a stark iconic image in Beside the Sea, while a loosely delineated open triangle anchors Summertime. His ability to combine intuition and technical sophistication are also evident in other works featured in the show, from Spanish Elegy #18, 1969, to the monumental late work The Big A, 1987.