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Give up one’s being to the enterprise and see what lies within, whatever it is. Venture. Don’t look back. Do not
tire. Everything is open’. At first only using black inks he later added colour. The studio was sweltering hot
and at times he worked naked, his glasses fogged and here and there his sweat dripping to mingle with the
ink. Rapid progress was brought to an abrupt halt by news of the death of his very close friend the sculptor
David Smith, so that only five hundred and sixty five of the projected thousand were made. The
Suite
are
characterized by the way in which the ink bleeds into the thin paper. Despite their liveliness and the hint some
give of aggressive thrusts of the brush, this is tempered by a muffled quality, as if they transcribed events
taking place in a vacuum or at a great distance.
(7)
Elsewhere in this exhibition French culture is evident, if somewhat literally, in the collaged packets of
Celtique and Gauloises cigarettes, in his inscription across
Je t’aime
and in the two late collages that
stem for a commission to provide an illustration for Georges Sora’s three volume
Grande Histoire de la
Révolution Française
, published to celebrate the bicentenary year of 1989. More visually, though perhaps
with as much certainty, this immersion can be seen in the development Motherwell’s collages make from
the
papier collés
with which Picasso and Braque formed synthetic Cubism, and in the manner in which
his
Opens
take Matisse’s pictorial elegance and obsession with the motif of a window to a higher degree
of abstraction.
Motherwell made his first collages alongside Jackson Pollock for a 1943 show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of
This Century Gallery, where their work was displayed alongside the pioneers of the medium, including Picasso,
Braque, Schwitters and Arp. Pollock did not take to the medium but for Motherwell it was a revelation, and
he became arguably the most important exponent of collage in the second half of the twentieth century.
It enabled him to quickly change the colour and arrangements of his compositions, whilst its directness
confirmed his attitude toward the abstract. As he put it in
Beyond the Aesthetic
; ’the sensation of physically
operating in the world is very strong in
papier collé
or collage… One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes,
and sometimes tears off and begins again… without reference to likeness, it possesses feeling because the
decisions in regard to it are ultimately made on the grounds of feeling.’
(8)
The range of ways in which Motherwell is able to use line to impress, integrate or release shape against a
background is crucial to his collages and he felt that the torn (as opposed to the cut) edge was his ’personal
contribution’ to the art form. His sense of colour works in conjunction with his mastery of line. Unlike the
involved and complex improvisation of a painter such as his second wife Helen Frankenthaler, colour in
Motherwell’s collages has a detached quality, the result of a small number of carefully judged decisions.