Preface

Flam, Jack; Rogers, Katy; Clifford, Tim

Save Cite Share

Free

Preface

Jack Flam (Editor), Katy Rogers (Editor), Tim Clifford (Editor)

Description: Robert Motherwell: Paintings and Collages (A Catalogue Raisonné,...

Robert Motherwell: Paintings and Collages (A Catalogue Raisonné, 1941–1991)

THIS BOOK IS FOR ME THE CULMINATION OF A DIRECT ENGAGEMENT WITH ROBERT MOTHERWELL and his work that goes back over thirty years.

Author

Jack Flam (Editor), Katy Rogers (Editor), Tim Clifford (Editor)

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00105.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-18260

Preface

JACK FLAM

This book is for me the culmination of a direct engagement with Robert Motherwell and his work that goes back over thirty years.

I had known and admired Motherwell’s paintings since my student days, when he already had a kind of legendary status as both an artist and a thinker. So when we first arranged to meet, in January 1979, after a mutual friend put us in touch, I expected him to be a rather austere and remote figure.

But the man who met me at the Greenwich train station that cold, sunny day was surprisingly down-to-earth. Tall, slightly stooped, physically awkward in an oddly graceful way, and with an engagingly open face, he had a very particular way of speaking: calm, measured, with more pauses than most people, but also with a kind of lilting rhythm that was paradoxically both rather flat in tone and extremely animated. After we had greeted each other and started to walk toward his car, I realized that he had skipped the usual small talk and instead we immediately began to discuss a number of subjects of mutual interest: what could be understood about an artist from his writings, the relative virtues of mixed and unmixed colors, the importance of touch in modern painting. He was also disarmingly candid about very personal matters, his professional problems, and problems with his family and his marriage, which he talked about in a most matter-of-fact and unembarrassed way. By the end of the twenty-minute drive from the train station to his studio, I felt as if I’d known him for years.

We soon became close friends and worked together on a number of projects, beginning with the revival of the Documents of Twentieth Century Art, the series of historical anthologies that Motherwell had founded in 1943–44 as the Documents of Modern Art. In all our conversations, he was remarkably straightforward and candid about what was on his mind, and about what was going on in his life. As I got to know him better, I realized that his remarkable openness came from his deeply held belief that we all share the same problems of existence, and so are bound to be open with each other about our anxieties, doubts, and paths to joy.

Motherwell was an exceptional man as well as a great artist. He literally radiated intelligence, but he was also quietly plainspoken—and quite knowledgeable—about an enormous range of subjects. He was also a very special kind of friend—constantly interested in what was happening to you, what you were thinking about, what you were working on, and what you were going to do next. And because he was so judicious, it was only natural that from time to time you would seek his advice. His response to those requests was revealing. Most people love to tell others what they should do. But he did not. Instead, he would listen very carefully to your account of your situation. And then he would begin to tell you something that seemed to have absolutely nothing at all to do with what you had been talking about, but which you would gradually realize was being offered as—not exactly advice, in terms of a specific course of action, but something much more valuable—a sober analysis of your situation, seen clearly, free of illusion and self-delusion. The raw material with which to make your own decision. Sometimes he capped off what he had to tell you with a general principle, always modestly but firmly stated, such as, “One of the things that I’ve learned from psychoanalysis is not to invent false moral conflicts.”

He was one of the most direct and clearheaded people I have ever known, a man who consistently told you what was on his mind, gracefully but in the most forthright way possible. He was also perpetually fascinated by the complexity of events and people. So when he told a story (as when he gave advice), he loved to go off on long tangents about things that seemed completely unrelated to what he was telling you about. And then, just when you were sure that he had lost the thread—or maybe that there wasn’t any thread to begin with—he would come zooming back to the main point with an intensity and a richness of insight that were positively awe-inspiring. In fact, his digressions were an integral part of what he wanted to convey to you. They allowed you to see not only his conclusions but the complexities behind them; as in his paintings, he wanted you to understand how the process of saying something was an essential aspect of what was being said.

Nothing was simple to him, and nothing was simple for him. He struggled with inner demons all his life, and he made no bones about it. This was the struggle that gave his paintings much of their force, and that gave him the kind of ethical and spiritual weight he had, his unwavering sense of the necessity for right action. Nowhere was this more evident than in his pictures and in the demands that he placed on himself when he worked. Many people who worked with him had the experience of watching him finish something and then, at the last minute, decide that it wasn’t finished after all—sometimes, even, that it had to be started all over again—no matter the cost in time, energy, money. He himself was such an open-minded person, so tolerant of imperfection in the world around him, that it seems odd to say that he was a perfectionist. But he was, especially in his work.

In fact, I think he was a perfectionist in everything that concerned him directly. He wanted to get things exactly right, and he worked at them until he did. One of the most impressive things about him was the absolute consistency between himself as a man and as an artist. Looking at his paintings and talking to him, for example, were continuous experiences. His vision of the world—the level to which he pitched his thoughts and feelings—was consistently on a very high plane, though also always humane, supple, and decent. Although he could make charming small talk when he had to, most of his conversation was something like the opposite of small talk. In his conversation, as in his painting, he concentrated on what really mattered—putting together clear, often basic insights and making them into something rich and profound.

Everyone who knew him well knew that Motherwell had a deep and long-standing preoccupation with death. And this, too, was reflected in his work. In the months just before he died, especially, the imminence of his end seemed to weigh more heavily on him than it had previously. He was too clear-sighted for it to be otherwise. Several times, he proposed that we go to his warehouse together so that he could “edit” his earlier works; by which he clearly meant, destroy those that he felt did not rise to the standard he had for himself. (This was an issue on which he was deeply conflicted: there were works that he thought would be best destroyed, but it was very hard for him to destroy any of his work.) The last time he proposed such a warehouse visit was in the late spring of 1991, just a few months before he died. When the visit had to be postponed to the fall because he was not feeling well, he said to me that if something happened to him before the fall, I should go out to the warehouse and edit the work myself. I told him, as he no doubt knew I would, that it would be humanly, professionally, and ethically impossible for me to do that without him. He nodded, but did not say anything. That was the last time I saw him.

That day, after he and I had spent the afternoon together in his studio, I asked him how he was feeling. He hesitated for a while, one of those long silences that he often lost himself in when you asked him about something important. Then, very quietly, he told me that he felt like someone engaged in reading a very long and very absorbing novel in several volumes. And now, he said, he was aware of having picked up the final volume. “As with any book you love, you don’t want it to end,” he said, “but of course it has to.” I was struck by the serenity of his voice, by the even calm that perhaps for the first time implied acceptance. It was a serenity, I think, that was fed by his sense of having been able to work with full concentration right to the very end, and of having created a body of work that counted for something important among human accomplishments.

Certain artists and writers have such active social lives that we marvel at how they got so much work done. Hemingway was like that, and so was Picasso. Motherwell was like that, too. Especially during the years he was in New York, he had a lively and varied social life, and he seemed to know every artist, writer, thinker, and theater person worth knowing. But the reality was that he spent most of his time working; the social events, and the lunches and dinners with friends or professional acquaintances, were respites from the long hours of work. Just how much he worked is made apparent in this catalogue raisonné, which includes almost three thousand individual paintings and collages. If the drawings had been added, the size of the total body of work would have been increased by around 50 percent.

If he worked so much, it was because he worked in order to keep alive—in order to keep from going mad or destroying himself. He suffered, but he had an aristocratic reserve about his suffering, as well as about his enthusiasms. At social gatherings, he was surprisingly shy, and people often mistook his shyness for aloofness. And because he had taken on the role of spokesman for his generation as far back as the 1940s, a number of people resented his prestige and what they saw as his power within the politics of the art world. For many years, he was a juror for the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation’s fellowships for artists. After it was known that Motherwell and I were friends, a number of people came up to complain, “Your friend Motherwell didn’t give me a Guggenheim.” More rarely, something like the opposite happened, as when a colleague whose kind of painting Motherwell did not particularly care for told me that he knew Motherwell liked his work because he had received a Guggenheim fellowship. All of these people ignored the fact that the Guggenheim fellowship jury had four other members on it, who, like Motherwell, were each allowed to cast one vote. (And I can say from my own later experience on that jury that the results of the voting were rigorously followed.) The myth, though, was that from behind the scenes Motherwell controlled everything with which he was in any way involved.

Motherwell was a dedicated teacher. When he was hired by Hunter College in 1951, he founded one of the first graduate programs in modern art in the United States. Even after he retired from Hunter in 1959 in order to paint full time, he continued to lecture, and to support younger artists. He respected, above all, courage in artists. As early as 1951, he wrote a crucial essay about the paintings of Cy Twombly, which helped launch Twombly’s career. And I remember Motherwell expressing admiration for Julian Schnabel during the early 1980s because of the freedom and daring behind the smashed plates in Schnabel’s paintings of the time.

Finally, I would like to recall an anecdote that casts an oblique but interesting light on Motherwell’s artistic procedure. During August 1982, my wife and daughter and I went to Provincetown for a few days to join Bob and Renate Motherwell for their tenth wedding anniversary. On the last day we were there, we accompanied Renate in one of her favorite pastimes: antiquing. At one of the many shops we visited that afternoon, my four-year-old daughter Laura found a large straw hamper made in Thailand, for which the cover was a highly stylized straw horse’s head with brightly colored marbles for eyes. It was a striking object, at once charming and rather spooky: the marble eyes produced the effect of a strong but vacant stare. Laura loved it for its odd mixture of spookiness and charm—like the image of a semi-tame fairy-tale monster.

As we prepared to leave Provincetown, we went to say good-bye to Bob, who was sitting on the deck behind his house. He walked toward us with a smile on his face, then stopped dead in his tracks, and backed up half a step, as though he had been slapped. He had been caught by the stare of the marble-eyed straw horse. He quickly recovered himself, and we took our leave.

At the end of the summer, when I made my annual visit to the Greenwich studio to see what he had done in Provincetown, I was surprised to find a handful of small paintings of the same straw horse that I had now been living with for a couple of months (see P1055–P1057, C681). His dealer, Bob told me, had recently come by and found these paintings weird, and did not want to show them. Bob rather liked them, though, even though he conceded that they were quite unusual for him. He wondered why that particular image had come to him, and said it was like something that would come to a child, or in dream. “Why, it’s Laura’s straw horse,” I said. “Remember, the one with the marbles for eyes?” He paused for a moment, then replied, “Of course, that’s what it was.”

I recount this story because it indicates how alert Motherwell the artist was to what was going on around him, how open he was to catching experience on the fly, especially if it dealt with a subject that connected to the part of him that was primitive or childlike.

It was a great privilege to have known and worked so closely with Robert Motherwell, and I believe that he would be pleased to know that our collaboration has in a sense been continued beyond his lifetime by my engagement with this catalogue raisonné of his paintings and collages. I also know that he would be greatly pleased to see that the force and complexity of his work have been so well understood by a younger generation of scholars, so well exemplified in the enthusiasm and dedication that my coauthors Katy Rogers and Tim Clifford have brought to every phase of this project.

Previous chapter Next chapter

Base text size -

Chapter images ()