Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Robert Motherwell
American (1915-1991)
GAULOISES ON BLUE AND GREEN #2 (1972)
collage with acrylic on board
23.5” x 9.75”

STYLE: ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

  

Robert Motherwell differs from many contemporary artists in that his education has included many years of critical and philosophical study (at Harvard and Columbia) as well as fine art training (at Otis Institute and the California School of Fine Arts). Motherwell has written extensively on contemporary art as well as created it. Motherwell had his first solo show in Paris and his artmaking accelerated when he met and traveled with Surrealist artist Roberto Matta and then became associated with Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollack, and others in New York in the forties. He is known as one of the most prominent and influential Abstract Expressionist artists. His major paintings, though abstract, generally contain large, suggestive forms, particularly the Elegy series, which suggest death and sadness, though they do not literally portray anything. Motherwell’s work has been featured in many major exhibitions internationally and is in any significant museum collection of contemporary art.

Motherwell worked in collage throughout his career. It gave him an opportunity to experiment with shapes and media in a more intimate format. The artist was also fascinated with cigarettes and their packaging. Although he ocassionally used other packaging, he used Gauloises most frequently, not because he smoked them--he smoked other brands--but because he was attracted to the blue of the label.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Robert Motherwell, statement from An Exhibition of the Art of Robert Motherwell, Smith College, 1963
" About collage. For example, the labels in my collages from ‘Gauloises,’ ‘Players:’ I sometimes smoke them . . . The papers in my collages are usually things that are familiar to me, part of my life . . . Collages are a modern substitute for still-life . . . Traditional still-life seems funny in America, but in Europe completely natural since you see one at the end of each meal. In collage there are a lot of ready-made details, for when one wants details. My painting deals in large simplifications for the most part. Collage in contrast is a way to work with autobiographical material -- which one wants sometimes . . . I do feel more joyful with collage, less austere. A form of play. Which painting, in general, is not, for me, at least . . .”

Gregory Gilbert, Art Journal, Fall, 2001
" Motherwell's prose style reveals his adherence to collage as a broader creative principle that also extended to literary structures, specifically the use of literary collage techniques in the writings of T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and John Dos Passos. Scholars have generally only cited Motherwell's interest in the visual principles of Cubist collage, overlooking the fact that his commitment to collage needs to be understood in the broader context of both literary and artistic collage practices within the American avant-garde of the 1930s and 1940s."
Vivien Raynor, New York Times, 8/13/01
“The found materials that are the stuff of collage ‘paraphrase,’ Mr. Koenig says, the conflicting sights, sounds, beliefs, customs and attitudes shaping the 20th-century world, adding that Mr. Motherwell ‘has made what for me is the definitive use of collage in our time.’
With ‘our time’ Mr. Koenig rules out the contributions of earlier masters like Schwitters and Ernst. And it is just as well, for their work has a malevolent edge, while Mr. Motherwell's is the embodiment of elegance and intellectual poise, the very qualities that keep some observers at a distance from this, the last of the great Abstract Expressionists. As the century nears exhaustion, sweat, real or simulated, grows ever more popular, and none is visible in Mr. Motherwell's art, which does not, of course, mean that none was expended on it.”