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first flowered in late nineteenth century Paris. A student of modernism almost as much as a proponent of it, he
saw the promise of the ’unknown’ in the Symbolist poetry of Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Mallarmé as a source
of constant succour, whilst his painterly hero was undoubtedly Matisse.
(4)
Motherwell visited Paris in 1935 during a tour of Europe with his father, where he happened upon a copy of
James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, which from then on was a constant companion. He spent the academic year 1938-39
studying there, staying with a family in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and holding his first solo exhibition at the
Left Bank gallery of fellow Californian Raymond Duncan. He later partly attributed his love of collage, which
he called the modern equivalent of still life, to sitting in a Parisian café and watching its originator Picasso
compulsively arranging and re-arranging the objects on his table.
(5)
These early trips to Europe left Motherwell particularly open to the influx of European culture into the
United States. Collections such as the Museum of Modern Art meant there was, as he later put it, ’more great
modern art publicly displayed in New York in 1940 than in the rest of the world put together’. More vital was
Motherwell’s contact with the émigré artists, in the particular the Surrealists, who throughout the thirties and
forties fled a persecuting, then a war-torn Europe.
(6)
Via an introduction made by art historian Meyer Schapiro, Motherwell met many European émigrés before
he came in contact with the young Americans who would later become the Abstract Expressionists.
He took part in André Breton’s transpositions of games of
objet trouvaille
from Parisian flea-markets
to New York backstreets, played chess with Max Ernst and made prints alongside André Masson and
Yves Tanguy at Atelier 17, which the English printmaker William Stanley Hayter had uprooted from near
Montparnasse when war broke out. Important above all was Motherwell’s contact with the relatively
minor Surrealists Roberto Matta and Wolfgang Paalen, who in 1941 gave him contrasting lessons in
Surrealist automatism. Automatism, its sense of spontaneity and risk, and the promise it seemed to
hold for a simultaneous move into the unknown and deeper into oneself, would permeate the whole of
Motherwell’s art.
The
Lyric Suite
is Motherwell’s most sustained single investigation of automatism. They were painted in April
and May 1965, partly to avoid a creeping self-consciousness caused by the preparations for a retrospective
at the MoMA that autumn. On a whim, purchasing a block of a thousand sheets of Japanese rice paper, he
decided that they could help him break through his problems. He later paraphrased his intentions; ’Paint the
thousand sheets without interruption, without
a priori
traditional or moral prejudices or
a posteriori
ones…