Page 10 - Motherwell

Yet from these he is able to create what H.H. Arnason called ’a special binding light’ and to allow this light
to take on rich emotional resonances, from the clear confrontation of In White with Blue Hole to the quiet
melancholy of the Night Music suite. These latter collages were the last of his open-ended and at times
overlapping series, the most important of which were the Elegies and the Opens. (9)
A very different meeting of line and colour exists in Motherwell’s Opens from that he established in his collages.
However, the initial impulse behind the Opens could be described as a type of collage, in that Motherwell was
struck by the effect of a canvas leaning against a larger one, liked the relationships and drew the outline of the
smaller on the larger (though he later changed from the ’door’ shape this left to a ’window’). Where his Elegies
gain their power from an overloaded imagery the Opens are effective because of the way line controls and
makes potent an empty expanse. Though he believed that their ’felt content’ was of most importance, he was
also interested in the wider resonances of the state of being ’open’. The 1977 Arnason monograph reproduces
in full the eighty-two entries under ’open’ in the Random House dictionary. For Motherwell this was like a
’poem… most beautiful, filled with all kinds of associations, all kinds of images’. Though they have an order and
calm not so overtly present elsewhere in his work, Motherwell cautioned about seeing too great an opposition
between the Opens and his more manifestly automatist works; ’It is not commonly understood that the linear
so-called ’window’ shapes of the Open series are as much a one-shot throw of the dice, in execution, as my
more gestural works… the lines in the Opens are not measured or mathematically proportioned but purely
intuitional and immediate’. (10)
FOOTNOTES
1. R.M., ’Beyond the Aesthetic’, 1946, reprinted in Ashton (ed.), The Writings of Robert Motherwell, University of California
Press, 2007, p. 54
2. All quotations in this paragraph from ’Beyond the Aesthetic’, except the last from R.M., ’What Abstract Art Means to Me’,
Writings…, p. 159
3. R.M., ’Preface’, 1951, Writings…, pp. 154-156
4. R.M., ’A Process of Painting’, Writings… p. 216; Barbaralee Diamonstein, ’An Interview with Robert Motherwell’, in H.H.
Arnason, Robert Motherwell , (2nd edition), Harry N. Abrams, 1982, p. 228; ’Beyond the Aesthetic’, p. 54
5. Kenneth Cavander, Robert Motherwell: Storming the Citadel , (film), Phaidon Press, 1992
6. ’An Interview with Robert Motherwell’, p. 228
7. R.M., ’On the “Lyric Suite”’, 1969, Writings…, pp. 232-235; Cavander, 1992
8. ’Beyond the Aesthetic’, p. 55
9. R.M. in Arnason, p. 129; Arnason p. 10
10. R. M., «Statement on the “Open” Series», 1969, Writings…, pp. 243-244 ; R. M. in Arnason, pp. 163 et 171
Robert Motherwell, Greenwich, Connecticut, novembre 1990.
Photographie Jean-Marie del Moral.
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