Storming the Citadel Print

"Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content." "Each brushstroke is a decision." "It was not exactly a heroic journey. In fact, it was filled with desperation and depression." "Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail." "Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it." "Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss." "The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely?" "If one were to ask a painter what he felt about anything, his just response - though he seldom makes it - would be to paint it, and in painting, to find out" "In the history of all art, there was never a movement as hated as abstract expressionism." "I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world." "One's art is just one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union." "A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium." "It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it." "I feel most real to myself in the studio." "Troy was the establishment, and from that standpoint, the abstract expressionists were the Greeks laying seige to the Citadel." -Robert Motherwell Robert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an American abstract expressionist painter, printmaker, and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School, which also included Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Trained in philosophy, Motherwell became an artist, regarded as among the most articulate of the abstract expressionist painters. He was known for his series of abstract paintings and prints which touched on political, philosophical and literary themes, such as the Elegies to the Spanish Republic. In 1940, Motherwell moved to New York to study at Columbia University, where he was encouraged by Meyer Schapiro to devote himself to painting rather than scholarship. Schapiro introduced the young artist to a group of exiled Parisian Surrealists (Max Ernst, Duchamp, Masson) and arranged for Motherwell to study with Kurt Seligmann. The time that Motherwell spent with the Surrealists proved to be influential to his artistic process. After a 1941 voyage with Roberto Matta to Mexico—on a boat where he met Maria Emilia Ferreira y Moyeros, an actress and his future wife—Motherwell decided to make painting his primary vocation. The sketches Motherwell made in Mexico later evolved into his first important paintings, such as The Little Spanish Prison (1941) and Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (1943). Matta introduced Motherwell to the concept of "automatic" drawing or automatism, which the Surrealists used to tap into their unconscious. The concept had a lasting effect on Motherwell, further augmented by his meeting with the artist Wolfgang Paalen. Motherwell's encounter with Paalen prompted him to prolong his stay in Mexico for several months, in order to collaborate with him. Motherwell's noted Mexican Sketchbook visually reflects the resulting change: while the first drawings are influenced by Matta and Yves Tanguy, later drawings associated with Motherwell's time with Paalen show more plane graphic cadences and details distinguished from the earlier period. Paalen also introduced Motherwell to André Breton, via a letter. Motherwell's seminal trip to Mexico has been described as a little-known but important factor in the history and aesthetics of abstract expressionism. In 1991, shortly before his death, Motherwell remembered a "conspiracy of silence" regarding Paalen's innovative role in the genesis of abstract expressionism. Upon return from Mexico Motherwell spent time developing his creative principle based on automatism: "What I realized was that Americans potentially could paint like angels but that there was no creative principle around, so that everybody who liked modern art was copying it. Gorky was copying Picasso. Pollock was copying Picasso. De Kooning was copying Picasso. I mean I say this unqualifiedly. I was painting French intimate pictures or whatever. And all we needed was a creative principle, I mean something that would mobilize this capacity to paint in a creative way, and that's what Europe had that we hadn't had; we had always followed in their wake. And I thought of all the possibilities of free association—because I also had a psychoanalytic background and I understood the implications—might be the best chance to really make something entirely new which everybody agreed was the thing to do." Thus, in the early 1940s, Robert Motherwell played a significant role in laying the foundations for the new movement of abstract expressionism (or the New York School): "Matta wanted to start a revolution, a movement, within Surrealism. He asked me to find some other American artists that would help start a new movement. It was then that Baziotes and I went to see Pollock and de Kooning and Hofmann and Kamrowski and Busa and several other people. And if we could come with something. Peggy Guggenheim who liked us said that she would put on a show of this new business. And so I went around explaining the theory of automatism to everybody because the only way that you could have a movement was that it had some common principle. It sort of all began that way." In 1942 Motherwell began to exhibit his work in New York and in 1944 he had his first one-man show at Peggy Guggenheim's "Art of This Century" gallery; that same year the MoMA was the first museum to purchase one of his works. From the mid-1940s, Motherwell became the leading spokesman for avant-garde art in America. His circle came to include William Baziotes, David Hare, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, with whom he eventually started the Subjects of the Artist School (1948–1949). In 1949 Motherwell divorced Maria and in 1950 he married Betty Little, with whom he had two daughters. Motherwell was a member of the editorial board of the Surrealist magazine VVV and a contributor to Wolfgang Paalen's journal DYN, which was edited from 1942-44 in six issues. He also edited Paalen's collected essays Form and Sense in 1945 as the first issue of Problems of Contemporary Art. The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s and 1960s in New York City. They often drew inspiration from surrealism and the contemporary avant-garde art movements, in particular action painting, abstract expressionism, jazz, improvisational theater, experimental music, and the interaction of friends in the New York City art world's vanguard circle. Frank O'Hara was at the center of the group before his death in 1966. Because of his numerous friendships and his post as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, he provided connections between the poets and painters such as Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers (who was O'Hara's lover). There were many joint works and collaborations, particularly between poets such as O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashberry, and James Schuyler: Rivers inspired a play by Koch, Koch and Ashbery together wrote the poem "A Postcard to Popeye", Ashbery and Schuyler wrote the novel A Nest of Ninnies, and Schuyler collaborated on an ode with O'Hara, whose portrait was painted by Rivers. Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan both came to the group from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Koch, O'Hara, Schuyler, and Ashbery were quite different as poets, but they admired each other and had much in common personally: Except for Schuyler, all overlapped at Harvard University, Except for Koch, all were homosexual, Except for Ashbery, all did military service, Except for Koch, all reviewed art, Except for Ashbery, all lived in New York during their formative years as poets. All four were inspired by French Surrealists such as Raymond Roussel, Pierre Reverdy, and Guillaume Apollinaire. David Lehman, in his book on the New York poets, wrote: "They favored wit, humor and the advanced irony of the blague (that is, the insolent prank or jest) in ways more suggestive of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg than of the New York School abstract expressionist painters after whom they were named.” Source: Wikipedia Note: Like “See You At The Party, Richter!” and ‘Yayoi', I was inspired to try something a little different after re-watching (“sometimes she spells the hyphen”) a highly recommended art documentary on Robert Motherwell called ‘Robert Motherwell & the New York School: Storming the Citadel’ (1990). This film profiles American artist Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) in the context of Modernism and reviews the past fifty years of his creative life. It presents archival footage, photographs, and film clips in a collage, rather than chronological, format. The film discusses the origins of Abstract Expressionism, its links with Surrealism, and its struggle for recognition. Included are scenes of artists Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Joseph Cornell, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Roberto Matta, and Larry Rivers. Interviews with art critics and historians, including Clement Greenberg, William Rubin, Henry Geldzahler, and Jack Flam, and gallery owner Sidney Janis, are featured; with scenes from a major retrospective of Motherwell's work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. American Masters series. Source: