‘Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting’ Review: Giving Form to an Abstractionist’s Career

Fort Worth, Texas

‘Among the advancedAmerican artists of his generation, the abstract painter Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) was also the most deeply grounded in European culture,” writes Jack Flam, director of the Dedalus Foundation that Motherwell founded to support an appreciation of modern art, in the catalog of a new exhibition here. Considered either the youngest of the first-generation Abstract Expressionists or the oldest of its second-generation cohort, Motherwell was the most academically educated of them. He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Stanford, then undertook graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard, followed by graduate coursework in art history at Columbia. He also edited an authoritative anthology of the Dada painters and poets. Understandably, as Mr. Flam notes, Motherwell “advocated for paintings that were abstract but not necessarily nonobjective”—meaning that although they weren’t representational in the conventional sense, they somehow alluded, if only in their titles, to things and events in the real world.

The new retrospective curated by Susan Davidson (with an unlikely subtitle, given the above)—“Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting,” at the cavernous Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth—covers the artist’s 50-year career as a painter, which began in 1939 and ended only with his death. It contains 56 works, 30 of them giant canvases approaching the size of murals. Except for the inclusion of a few painted words, Motherwell’s oeuvre is entirely abstract. The question lurking in this stately exhibition is: How good a painter, both historically and aesthetically, was Motherwell? “Pure Painting” answers the question with, in effect, a verdict of very, very good, often great, but on occasion somewhat precious or grandiloquent.

Motherwell traveled to Europe early and often, and he absorbed the modernist lessons of everyone from Matisse to Mondrian. He was most attracted to Surrealism, however—not the hand-painted, realistic dream paintings of Salvador Dalí, but rather the unconscious “automatic writing” approach to art espoused by the poet André Breton and his circle. Motherwell’s leftist politics (the catalog says he considered “the tragedy of the Spanish Republic [and its defeat by Franco] as emblematic of the idea of tragedy in our time”) were ubiquitous among modernists of his era.

Couple Motherwell’s attempt to balance improvisation and just-rightness with his politics and you have “The Little Spanish Prison” (1941-44), a deceptively profound abstraction of a cell’s bars. Employing that same sensibility in sweeping painterly gestures—the New York School’s grandchild of automatic writing—Motherwell gives us his magnificent black-and-white “Elegy to the Spanish Republic” series. He painted more than 100 of them from 1948 to 1990 and—crisp, symbolically durable, and visually hard to forget—they are Motherwell’s most memorable paintings. “Unlike the rest of my work,” Motherwell once said, “the Elegies are, for the most part, public statements.” He meant that the works are, pictorially, as overtly political as he ever got.

In 1945 Motherwell signed a contract, which included a monthly stipend in return for a rather hefty 75 works a year, with the then-cutting-edge Samuel Kootz Gallery in New York. (He’d had his first gallery exhibition in 1939 in Paris.) By 1960—after many shows at any number of galleries, including his first retrospective, at hyper-progressive Bennington College in Vermont—Motherwell was able to quit his teaching job at Hunter College and live from the sales of his paintings alone.

Motherwell’s personal life was fluctuant. He was married four times, the first to Maria Emilia Ferreira y Moyers, whom he met on a ship bound for Mexico. When Motherwell went to Reno, Nev., where he was being sued by Maria for divorce due to his heavy drinking (a lifelong problem), he met Betty Little, whom he subsequently wed and with whom he had two daughters. In 1957, after seven years of matrimony, Betty and the children moved out. A year later, Motherwell married the abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler ; their artistically beneficial union survived for a dozen years. Finally, he married German-American photographer Renate Ponsold, a marriage that lasted until Motherwell’s death.

In 1967, Motherwell traced the physical outline of a smaller painting leaning against a larger one. The minimalist drawing constituted an upside-down “U” that Motherwell subsequently turned back to right side up. Out of this somewhat Dada-like coincidence came the artist’s second-most well-known group of paintings, the “Open” series, which the catalog says “grew out of Motherwell’s desire to achieve a kind of Zen-like austerity.” While they carry the artist’s characteristic compositional élan and delicate touch, and the monochrome canvases—mainly blue, orange, or ocher—are elegant, the “Open” paintings seem more self-conscious than passionate.

The observation—which nowadays amounts to an indictment—that, as the catalog puts it, “Motherwell articulated a male-dominated, Euro-North American, and generally white aesthetic canon” might be true. But it’s close to meaningless; every artist articulates his or her own cultural and artistic grounding. A bit more telling is the observation in Artforum in 1965 by the painter and critic Sidney Tillim that Motherwell’s work “comes too late to be topical, too soon to be historical”—that is, his paintings are neither groundbreaking Abstract Expressionism in the manner of Jackson Pollock or Barnett Newman,

—Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in Connecticut.