The Brooklyn Rail

“There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald bitterly lamented; he was mistaken. An art market no longer obsessed with the new working in tandem with museums has stepped in to provide that second act to artists who might otherwise slip into oblivion. Recent exhibitions of Franz Kline, Cy Twombly, Louise Bourgeois, and Helen Frankenthaler confirm the point, as will the combined show of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock to open at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in October.

It is now Robert Motherwell’s turn for artistic resurrection. Olney Gleason has compressed twenty-five years, roughly 1950–75, of Motherwell’s career in a dense show of sixteen lithographs, drawings, and paintings, augmented by a vitrine filled with photographs and documents, including a draft of Motherwell’s 1963 lecture “A Process of Painting,” delivered at the Eighth Annual Conference of the American Academy of Psychotherapists. This wonderful show shares a common feature with those dedicated to the artists mentioned above: self-imposed limitations. These are not retrospectives but segments of careers long enough to fall into discrete phases. Careful selection enables us to grasp a significant phase in an oeuvre without that moment being engulfed in the work of a lifetime.

This matters a great deal in the case of Robert Motherwell (1915–91) because he had his first New York show in 1944 at the age of 29 and exhibited regularly until his death. So, in his 1963 talk, almost nel mezzo del cammin with regard to the years covered here, Motherwell can look back and explain how he came into himself: “I began 22 years ago with the Parisian surrealists . . . The surrealists had a theory of creativity called ‘psychic automatism’ and what psychoanalysts would call ‘free association,’ about what in its most common visual term in everyday-life would be called ‘doodling.’” Here is the means whereby the highly educated, self-aware Motherwell, the man Clement Greenberg famously urged to “stop thinking instead of painting himself through” could liberate himself from self-consciousness. It also enacts the idea Stéphane Mallarmé includes in his famous 1897 poem Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance)” the idea that the drop of ink, the blob of paint is a point of departure subject to infinite revision.

Black Still Life (1950), the earliest piece in the show, is all about revision. Motherwell looks back on a tradition of still life painting from the Dutch 17th century to Picasso and the Cubists, appreciates their phenomenology of vision and blots it out. Representation for Motherwell is, as he says in his 1963 talk, “a predetermined conclusion” which can only yield academic art. So, this modest, 40 by 48 inch piece is a kind of manifesto in action. It raises the issue of art as having a subject outside itself and paints it out of existence, negates it. The same is true of Untitled (Elegy) (1975). Instantly recognizable as one of the possibly 200 works on this theme that Motherwell produced between 1948 and the end of his life. This work is indeed an elegy for the dead, not only those who died in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) but also for the death of the subject. The flowing black paint is nullifying something below: history, contingency, life outside the canvas.

Revision also comes to the point of The Forge (1965–66/1967–68). The host of dates indicates Motherwell’s unwillingness to declare the work finished, and in the vitrine appear two photographs of intermediate states, amazing testimony to Motherwell’s ability to edit himself. Why this painting is called The Forge invites speculation. The center of the composition is an obliquely placed isosceles triangle; its pinnacle pointed toward lower left. Surrounding it, a blue square, itself surrounded by a black rectangle whose blackness is interrupted by a lighter segment. It looks like a Minimalist composition until we place it next to a possible source: Francisco de Goya’s The Forge (ca. 1815–20) in the Frick Collection.

Motherwell realizes that Goya’s composition is based on a play of isosceles triangles: the legs of the man swinging the sledgehammer, the arms and legs of the man holding the iron in place, the entire ensemble. Motherwell once again sets aside representation and winnows away circumstance leaving only Goya’s artistic essence. Motherwell’s piece is an autobiographical statement about what he thought art was in the twentieth century. This superb show is a resounding hymn to his greatness as an artist.