A Sense of Exuberance

By * Robert Hughes

It has been a year for gimmicks and theory-clogged trivia in many fashionable art galleries, so one can only rejoice at a show that demonstrates anew the richness and ethical seriousness of painting. Such an exhibition--modest in scale, exceptional in quality--is now on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis: a group of 16 new pictures by Robert Motherwell.

To speak of a "comeback" by an artist as conspicuous as Motherwell may seem odd, but it has a certain point. At 57, he is one of the last charter members of the New York School of the 1940s to remain alive and painting. Pollock, Gorky, Rothko, Kline, David Smith, Hofmann, Newman and Reinhardt are all dead, and their work has been so long discussed, labeled, ticketed and run through the meat grinder of mass art education that it has already assumed the air of an august period style--the last "heroic" American art. The absurd consequence has been that the group's surviving members,*of whom Motherwell is the youngest, have come to be mistakenly regarded as anachronisms whose work occupies a historical pigeonhole but has only a shadowy relationship to the present.

Being Social. What is more, Motherwell has the mixed fortune of intelligence. As writer, teacher and editor, he has for the past 25 years made essential contributions to the understanding of modern art in America. "It's my way of being social, rather than going to cocktail parties," he says. "It's also an excellent relief from the anguish of painting--an attempt to regain my social equilibrium and to give back to society something of what it has so generously given me: education, respect, dignity, artistic freedom." Thus he is the opposite of the cliche that stuck to Abstract Expressionism--the artist as roaring boy, trapped and goaded by his own tragic energies, armed with much myth but no history, articulate only at brush point.

It has never been possible to make a romantic hero out of Motherwell, with his essentially aristocratic humanism, his finely rinsed conversational palate, his dedication to gastronomy (when he moved to Greenwich, Conn., it was uncharitably rumored that he did so to be near one of his favorite restaurants, La Cremaillere) and his white Mercedes. Motherwell's lifestyle, his thought and his painting are much of a piece, and they have consistently served to remind American viewers that culture is a continuum, not a competitive race for the laurels of mere originality, that art builds on other art and that a "protectionist" attitude against European and specifically French art may be useful as a mask but involves a certain loss as well.

Consequently, Motherwell, despite his genial behavior and his look of a rumpled, adipose bear prodded from hibernation, remains the stone guest at the festivities of American art, reminding the partygoers that modernism did not begin and will not end in New York. "Every intelligent painter," he wrote in 1951, "carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints is both an homage and a critique, and everything he says a gloss."

This basic field begins, for Motherwell, with 19th century France. He wrote a thesis at Harvard on Baudelaire and Delacroix, and he has long had a strong affinity for the symbolist and surrealist traditions of art and literature that emanated from the poets Rimbaud and Mallarme. Mallarme's effect on modern art--and on Motherwell --came from his prophetic insistence that art should use only the means unique to it. When Degas complained that he had ideas for sonnets but could not write one, the poet crushingly retorted that "you don't write sonnets with ideas, Degas, but with words." So too, painting is made of oils and colors, and recognizing this concrete, specific nature of paint involves a faith that a work of art can take an equal place among the other objects that constitute the real world. Art is neither fiction nor illusion. Its power is its directness.

It contains reality. "Like long echoes," wrote Baudelaire, "which from a distance fuse in a dark and profound unity vast as the night and as the radiance of the day, perfumes, colors and sounds respond to each other. There are per fumes fresh as a child's skin, sweet as oboes, green as meadows."

This is the basis of Motherwell's attitude to color. "The 'pure' red of which certain abstractionists speak does not exist," he once declared. "Any red is rooted in blood, glass, wine, hunters' caps and a thousand other concrete phenomena. Otherwise we should have no feeling toward red and its relations, and it would be useless as an artistic element." Hence, even though Motherwell's paintings are not distinctly figurative, they are remarkably accessible -- open ways that lead out into the world. "My blue is the blue of the sky or the sea," Motherwell insists. "My greens 0 are trees, flower and plant greens . . . I have a strong aversion to colors that aren't based on man's pretechnological environment."

One of Motherwell's favorite combinations is the oldest of all: black and white. Elegy for the Spanish Republic, which the painter keeps in his home, is one of the latest in a series that he has been working on since 1949: long, friezelike canvases on which thick black ovoids and slabs of darkness are silhouetted on a white field.

Terrible Death. The images may suggest skins pegged on a wall, Guardia Civil hats, shadows on whitewashed Andalusian buildings, but Motherwell, who was 21 when the Civil War broke out and did not visit Spain until 1958, prefers not to particularize about them. "The Spanish Elegies," he says, "are not 'political,' but my private insistence that a terrible death happened that should not be forgotten."

The pictures are also general metaphors of the contrast between life and death. The luminous, dusty, Apollonian terra cottas and oranges of Great Wall of China equally convey a sense of exuberance, of heat and fruitfulness. The August Sea, 1971, one of a series of paintings that relate to his summers on the coast at Provincetown, Mass., is suffused with a literally oceanic peace: the spreading field of blue, Mallarme's azure, the color of space and of openness, dapple with swift strokes of green, with a black line rising through it like the faintly swaying mast of a ship. In such work, Motherwell's address to sensation is marvelously candid. "In a way," he says, "painting is like wine: it is as old, as sim ple, as primitive and as varied. Like wine, it is a very specific means of ex pression, with a limited vocabulary, but vast in its expressive potential."

Motherwell's best work shows us that conciseness, grace, passion and lucidity are still the paramount virtues of the art of painting.

-Among the most notable: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still.

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