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Robert Motherwell by Sam Cornish
’But in this stage of the creative process, the strictly aesthetic – which is the sensuous aspect of the world –
ceases to be the chief end in view. The junction of the aesthetic instead becomes that of a medium, a means
for getting at the infinite background of feeling in order to condense it into an object of perception.’
Robert Motherwell,
Beyond the Aesthetic
(1)
Written only five years after Robert Motherwell had decided to dedicate himself to painting, his
Beyond the
Aesthetic
of 1946 laid out attitudes which would remain central to his art until his death forty-five years later.
Though a key figure in the progression of abstract art, in this text he declared that the abstract was a ’means’
not an ’end’, a way of re-arranging and adding ’emphasis’ to ’patterns’ or ’structures’ of reality, within which
everyone is differently implicated. He regarded the ’pictorial structures’ created by Cézanne as capturing the
artist’s particular ’feeling’ and poignantly continued ’if all his pictorial structures were to disappear from the
world, so would a certain feeling’. Between the slight air of fragility this remark contains and the claim he
made elsewhere that abstraction ’vivifies life’, much can be said about Motherwell’s art. At times involved with
violence and grandeur, as apparent are tenderness and candour, an elegance circumscribed by authenticity
and strengthened with a sense of its own transience.
(2)
Motherwell was the youngest of the group of artists who worked in loose confederation during the forties
and fifties and who are now known as the Abstract Expressionists. He was born in 1915, grew up in California
and was educated in philosophy at Stanford and Harvard. Historically aware and immensely articulate, he
was seen by many as a sort of unofficial spokesman for Abstract Expressionism, and was the first to call the
tendency the School of New York.
(3)
Despite the later use of his rubric in propaganda, it would be wrong to see Motherwell as too directly involved
with the chauvinistic claims, made in the wake of World War II, that the capital of world culture had shifted
from Paris to New York. He was at heart an internationalist and an individualist, one who saw the progression
of modern art as a ’silent collaboration among a score of studios between New York and Rome and Tokyo’. Of
all his peers he was the most dedicated to the art and culture of Europe in general and France in particular.
Though identifying ’the huge scale, the enormous energy, and the sheer daring of the lower depths of
Abstract Expressionism’ as specifically and positively American, he was ever conscious that modern art had