A LEGACY LOOMS LARGE

ROBERT MOTHERWELL’S RETROSPECTIVE AT THE MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH THOUGHTFULLY PRESENTS A TITAN OF ABSTRACTION.

BY EVE HILL-AGNUS

You may, if you are like most people, know Robert Motherwell for his brooding series of massive, blackand-white paintings titled Elegy for the Spanish Republic. Created over more than 40 years, they juxtapose ominous, shaggy, pitch-black ovoid and rectilinear shapes on a white background, like a calligraphy of violence and lyricism. Imbued with dense, emotionally emotive and rhythmic gestures and daunting ratios, the works are part of what inscribed Motherwell within the post-WWII American movement dubbed abstract expressionism, and they followed him throughout his long career.

But the exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting , intersperses the Elegies (a handful of them) chronologically throughout an installation that covers broader ground. And while it restricts itself to paintings, as its title suggests, the exhibition also showcases the vastness of Motherwell’s aesthetic sensibility.

The show comes about as a result of a triangulation among guest curator Susan Davidson, who has specialized partly in abstract expressionist artists; the Dedalus Foundation, which stewards Motherwell’s legacy; and the museum, whose director, Marla Price, made major acquisitions in two periods after Motherwell’s death in 1991 and is responsible for the institution having one of the largest and most significant holdings of his work. This retrospective will be the first in more than 30 years—the first, in fact, since a major exhibition, also held at the Modern, shortly after the artist’s death.

Both monumental in scale (as most of Motherwell’s works are) and modest in number (around 50 pieces), the exhibition is punctuated by idiosyncratic moments. Erudite, Motherwell was Stanford and Harvard educated and had his first New York solo show at Peggy Guggenheim’s then-gallery. While he was the youngest in the abstract expressionist group by 10 or 15 years—its luminaries by then included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman—he would later become its sage and “elder.”

Meanwhile, as Davidson points out in the exhibition catalogue, he had also been nourished by European modernism, Dada, and surrealist painters and poets. Known for bringing surrealist techniques to abstract expressionism, he brushed elbows with the European avant-garde—André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian—in New York during and after the war.

As someone who did a “deep dive” into Motherwell’s early collages more than 10 years ago, Davidson had worked with the artist’s elegantly lyrical, playful compositions made from ephemera for a show at the Guggenheim in New York. But it was fascinating, she says, to see how the works gathered for this exhibition “translate the cut-and-paste moments into full-fledged abstraction.” She was, in particular she says, “blown away by his handling of paint”—the scale and command of it.

In this historically significant show, you’ll see the establishment of his palette in cadmium reds, blacks, and yellows ochres.

In the 1950s, he was making easel-size work, and by the ’70s his massive, frieze-like canvases could measure 20 feet long. Over his more than 50-year career, Motherwell worked in studios in Lower Manhattan and Uptown Manhattan as well as Long Island; Provincetown, Massachusetts; and finally Greenwich, Connecticut, where in a carriage house divided into three studios—for collage, painting, and printmaking, respectively—he moved among his trifecta of talents.

You’ll see the development of Motherwell’s oeuvre, too, and note the rich textures that lend it such a startling presence.

The ponderous Elegies are interrupted by the Open series, which spanned a handful of years in the late ’60s and early ’70s—quieter, often more ethereal and atmospheric, with their distinctive “U” shape. There are representations from the gossamer Je T’aime series and Hollow Men series. Highlights include Two Figures with Cerulean Blue Stripe, with its lightning bolt of color; a few somber, nearly midnight-hued Iberia paintings, inspired by the bullfights Motherwell witnessed in Spain, a place with which he had such rapport; Je T’aime No. III with Loaf of Bread, with its luscious surface; Face of the Night (For Octavio Paz), an extraordinary late work and one of the canvases he named after writers or poets. Almost all black with color coming through, it galvanizes. Some early works that have not been exhibited in a while will, Davidson hopes, create surprises.

And within this panoply, the handful of Elegies figures. “I was keen to have a few Elegies punctuate a particular moment,” Davidson says. But she was also keen to make sure they didn’t get too much space. Instead, she hopes to show their development in relation to other work. They act as grace notes. “I was very conscious about not overloading the exhibition with Elegies,” Davidson says. “That was essential.”

A powerful, magnetic abstraction imbues Motherwell’s work in such a way that it shatters and moves the viewer. He called the paintings “laments, dirges, elegies—barbaric and austere.” They took up causes such as the Spanish Civil War. And while reading them in terms of historical equivalency would be reductive, “he was so concerned with the atrocities that were going on in his time,” Davidson points out. His ability to broach violence abstractly in a time of tumult is what makes him relevant—now as much as ever. Charismatic, powerful, violent, sober, imposing, the work presents stark contrasts. It broaches issues of humanity, although you never lose sight of the physical act of painting. He is able to hold conflicting forces; he’s a master of controlled turbulence. (Some have taken his work as a dialectic between the conscious and unconscious. Others read it as a Rorschach test.)

In his essay “What Abstract Art Means to Me” from 1951, Motherwell wrote that abstract art comes from a modern need for experience, which is “intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.” Bring that litany with you and stand before the last Elegy painting, which he finished in 1990, a year before his death. To him, he said in a 1960 BBC interview, a work was complete when “everything that is necessary is there and nothing more is there.” See the Elegy looming, its darkness illuminated, and judge for yourself. P