The Brooklyn Rail

Robert Motherwell: At Home and in the Studio at the New York Public Library is a focused show presenting selections of a recent gift from the Dedalus Foundation. Featuring prints from all periods of the artist’s thematic activity as well as books from his personal library of nearly 4,000 volumes, the exhibition’s given context of text and image unexpectedly reveals much about Motherwell’s graphic impulse without reducing it as illustrative of these volumes’ content.

Two vitrines hold a handful of books opened to show Motherwell’s annotations, showcasing his well-known interest in poetry, philosophy, and modernist classics such as James Joyce’s Ulysses. On the surrounding walls of the small rectangular gallery, the prints are hung salon style. Loosely chronological, they move from his first mature attempts at printing with the lithographic variations on “Poet” made with Robert Blackburn at Universal Limited Art Editions in 1961, and conclude with a posthumously published, untitled etching from 1991, a sensuous evocation of his ink on paper drawings. Across this thirty-year timeline of activity, those familiar with Motherwell’s oeuvre will easily recognize his vocabulary of images, such as the outline of an Elegy (1975), the “charcoal” lines of the Open form (1981), his torn collaged edges, and even his primeval black painterly “monsters.”

His prints are all collaborations—the work of a printmaker offering their own savior faire in anticipation of Motherwell’s proclivities. This is what I understand he means when describing his prints as those of a painter. They are technically flawless and stunningly masterful: the blacks of the etchings are velvety and chthonic, the half-tones in the lithographs hold a planar tension and transparency that belie the medium’s commercial impulse towards severity. He knew where he wanted to arrive in the printed image despite lacking the technical means to travel there. As a painter, the most important aspect for Motherwell was when to stop, his own awareness of when the discovery had been exhausted. As he put it himself in a 1949 lecture, “I dislike painters who talk as though they were carpenters or some other kind of craftsman, who speak as though art is not a question of inspiration—of something in you that rises as simply, beautifully, and unpredictably as the flight of a bird.”

For Motherwell, abstraction was something precise: a thing selected, tragically, in the face of all other choices. It is something sensed, something close at hand. His embrace of automatism does not betray his own authority of choice. In fact, his use of the more vital Jungian term “unconscious” for his inspired autonomous activity is more fitting than this show’s curatorial use of the Freudian “subconscious” in the wall-text, implying a subordinated stratum driving conscious action by repressed desires.

His fluency in his own purposeful visual language allowed for his work to be powerfully translated. To better conceptualize this process, Walter Benjamin offered in his “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” that “the communication of all mental meaning is language.” Given painting is a language, when it is moved into printmaking by the attuned painter, it can be understood as part of an ongoing process of translation, where, according to Benjamin it:

Attains its full meaning in the realization that every evolved language (with the exception of the word of God) can be considered as a translation of all the others…Translation is the removal from one language into another through a continuum of transformations. Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract areas of identity and similarity.

The best translations, I would think, preserve this inner relationship rather than prize accuracy. The prints here relay an echo more than they attempt to communicate a meaning, much in the same way content reverberates throughout Motherwell’s work.

This show, curated by Clare Bell, the Associate Director for Art, Prints, and Photographs, creates its context through the juxtaposition of Motherwell’s printmaking alongside the literary evidence in the text-filled vitrines. For example, the underlined copy of Degas, Dance, Drawing by Paul Valéry (1948) is displayed open to a page where Valéry retells Stéphane Mallarmé’s reply to Edgar Degas’s professed difficulty in composing a sonnet—“But Degas,” he responds, “one does not write verses with ideas, but with words.” However, Motherwell’s prints argue for this position stronger than the sum of this specific exhibition. It is certainly a worthy venture to unpack the thought embedded in his project, but at what point does abstraction need to be continually justified? That is to say, presenting a selection of his books—along with the gratuitous inclusion of videos of Motherwell printing, the audio loop of a Mozart recording he selected for a project at the Guggenheim, and the wall-sized photographs of the man himself all competing for scarce real estate in the compact gallery—seem to take the library-going public as one whose hand needs to be held and convinced that these are not mere ink blots but rather the work of someone who was well-cultured. In the end, it is a testament to the strength of his own work that Motherwell’s “words” survive this “idea” of the curator.