Master of Anxiety and Balance

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Buffalo, the magisterial abstractions of Robert Motherwell

One does not usually think of art shows in terms of seasons, but the Robert Motherwell retrospective that opened last week at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo is certainly autumnal: a life's work fully matured, all its lights, smokes and fermentations distinct, its promises ripely fulfilled. The show, organized by Curator Douglas G. Schultz, is not a huge affair in proportion to the size of Motherwell's output. There are, in all, 93 paintings and collages to represent a man whose oeuvre must be ten or even 20 times that size.

Motherwell is 68, the youngest member of the group whose name he coined: the New York School, or, as the history books say, the abstract expressionists. Pollock, Rothko, Still, Newman, Baziotes, Gorky, Smith and Kline are all dead; only Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner and Motherwell are still at work. In the meantime the achievements of the abstract expressionists have become so encased in legend, fetishized by the market and picked over by scholarship that their work, in the eyes of younger generations, has assumed a somewhat fabled air. Like grizzled bison in a diorama, they suggest a lost age of American pioneering. The sheer weight of the cultural appetites their work helped set in motion has turned them into monuments against their will.

This process has proved particularly unfair to Motherwell, because his full maturity as an artist came after the abstract expressionist "period"--in fact, after 1960 -- and his career illustrates the perils of generalizing about decades, groups or movements. Of course there are expressionist elements in Motherwell, and strong ones at that. But the rhythm of this show obliges one to discard the hearty cliche of the abstract expressionist as a kind of existential romantic, flinging pots of paint in the eyes of fate.

What we see is not what legend tells us to see. For Motherwell is a painter of superb though admittedly fitful balance who has managed to raise a magisterial syntax of form over an undrainable pond of anxiety, and the apparent fluctuation of his art between the "expressive" and the "classical" really depends on how much of that water is showing around its foundations. He is not a great sublimator, like Matisse or Braque. Yet in its breadth, grace, discipline and lucidity, as in the standards of self-criticism that are embedded in its patrician rhetoric, his art is genuinely Apollonian. Even its disorder speaks of a nostalgia for order.

That such traits are strengths seems obvious today, amid the lax and clamorous egotism of most neo-expressionist painting. But it was not always so. Twenty years ago, Motherwell's reflective temper, his unabashed reverence for the Parisian past and, above all, his wish to bring modernist writing from Mallarme to Joyce into the ambit of his art made critics uneasy. Surely this was all a trifle historicist, a bit too stylish?

Motherwell never dissembled about his sources. Not only was a sign for the human body like Figure in Black, 1947, with its mask's eyes staring from the bent trapezoid of a head, clearly derived from Picasso, but Motherwell would also write more knowledgeably about Picasso than most of his contemporaries, critics included. If the rectangular opening that kept appearing, as a promise of space beyond the picture plane, in painting after painting from the early '40s to the Open series of the late '60s and early '70s derived its authority from Matisse's Blue Window or View of Notre Dame, Motherwell would be the last to deny it: he was preoccupied with continuity and saw modernism as a tradition.

He meant to claim the same kind of filial attachment to Matisse that Delacroix (another household god) had to Rubens. To those whose idea of modernism was modeled on Oedipal battle, that was not enough. Hence the feeling, not yet dispelled in all quarters of the art world, that Motherwell was too French, too fluent, not hard enough on himself or his viewers. Unlike such Nietzschean contemporaries as Pollock and Still, he was (dreaded word!) "elegant," and the fact that the blackness, raggedness and restrained violence of many of his paintings invoked the tragic only made matters worse.

Today these objections sound like dated cavils. All art is fiction, and the more complex the fiction the better the art is apt to be. Motherwell's elegance is not a matter of style. It comes from deeper wells: mainly from his highly critical and intelligent sense of the accumulated language of modernism and of how his own pictorial impulses relate to that language. It is the elegance of realized thought.

One needs to be fairly naive these days to believe that artists can literally function as shamans or magicians. Certainly Motherwell does not think so. But he fervently believes in the efficacy of signs, the ability of quite simple configurations to carry and release powerful associative cargo. The blue triangle of paint above the ocher and earth-red bars of Summertime in Italy, No. 28, 1962, offers all the sense of being in a landscape: light and wind stream from the blue, heat radiates from the brown. Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic, a lengthy series that lasted some 30 years and ended after the death of Franco and the restoration of parliamentary democracy in Spain, are best seen as an American pendant to Picasso's Guernica, though with different imagery. Black in the hands of some painters--a Manet, a Goya, a Matisse--is a color, not an absence of light; and el negro Motherwell, as the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti called it, sometimes acquires a walloping chromatic power.

The basic shapes that make up the Elegies, held between bars or strung like meat on a skewer across the canvas, could hardly be simpler: black ovals or ragged beam-shaped forms that bear a resemblance to bullfighters' hats, black frames that evoke the deep shadow of doors in light-struck village walls. But out of these signs Motherwell has fashioned a resonant and funereal sequence of images that, despite its repetitions (when in doubt, paint an Elegy), is one of the few sustained tragic utterances in post-Picassoan art. He has always been faithful to the abstract expressionist dictum (which he helped formulate) that subject matter is crucial.

The colors of Elegies are, as he put it, "an equivalence of the ferocity of the whole encounter." This is perhaps what Mallarme refers to in his famous phrase about describing not the object itself but the effect it produces. To speak of "Motherwell black" or "Motherwell blue" is not to identify a particular hue--there are many blacks in his work and a near infinite range of blues, from creamy cerulean to wine-dark--but rather to evoke the way these colors work, as stable characters in a plot of sensation.

This is especially true of the Open paintings, which consist of broad fields of color whose only additional feature is an HANSNAMUTH incomplete rectangle or trapezoid, formed by three or four lines of charcoal or black paint, that seems to give access to a field behind the field. This enclosure may be strict-edged or fuzzily tremulous, but it always conveys the impression of architectural form--a window or a door, a passage from inside to outside. A painting like Summer Open with Mediterranean Blue, 1974, creates a strikingly concise yet opulent impression of landscape by these pared means. The passages of tone in the paint, the variations of blue depth, drench the eye in sea light without offering a glimpse of horizon; it is as though a part of nature had been taken down to its barest essence--discarding the thing but leaving the nuances--and then contrasted with an equally reduced emblem of culture: three lines, the platonic ghost of a building, humanizing the blue and saving the eye from getting lost in it.

But Motherwell's color is never descriptive. Even the more recent arrivals on his palette, like the soft greens and grayed browns of "Irish" paintings like Riverrun, 1972, an homage to Joyce's meditations on Dublin's river, the Liffey, soon acquire this fixed quality. Color in Motherwell is not an adjective, but a noun.

It is the collages that most clearly represent the "French" aspect of his work. He put this explicitly in the title of an early one, The French Line, 1960. Its main element is the top of a diet-toast package torn and shaded into a shape vaguely suggestive of a liner at sea seen bow-on. Its stripes suggest deck chairs and awnings, and they convey one into the atmosphere of luxury and fine-tuned bodies that was part of the fantasy raised by the S.S. France, and first-class ocean travel in general, two decades ago. The diet wafers, the label tells us, are "the faithful friends of your ligne"--a word that means figure, but also shipping line and, of course, line, as in drawing. This elegant triple-en-tendre is meant to be read as a pledge of Parisian allegiance.

Motherwell has never used collage as a means of surrealist shock treatment. His work sits squarely in the formal tradition of early Braque, not in the poetic irrationality of Ernst. But its play between form and meaning is no accident. The "found" element in Unglueckliche Liebe (Unhappy Love), 1974, is a fragment of sheet music whose words apostrophize the miseries of passion: "Begone, begone, ye children of Melancholy!" But set on its dark ground, with a rectangle of slaty blue and a marvelous, soaring shape of white paper--Mallarme's swan, making a personal appearance--its stilted sentiment turns into a concise image of sorrow and relief.

Motherwell's collages amount to a definition of their medium. It is the nature of glued paper to look flat, frontal and spreading; to build its image in planes; to set up counterpoints between word and shape; to make one focus on texture and edge. In pieces like In Memoriam: the Wit-tenborn Collage, 1975, Motherwell draws by tearing, and the implied violence of the torn edge (which looks and feels very different from the clean-cut edges of Braque's newsprint or Matisse's scissored paper) plays, in collage, the same role as the ejaculatory splattering of paint in his paintings. It is chance, fixed: no one can say how a piece of paper will go when it is torn. This combination of violence and reflection, along with the easel size of the images, is Motherwell's basic addition to the art of collage. In making it, he became the only artist since Matisse in the '50s to alter significantly the syntax of this quintessentially modernist medium.

His collage is social encounter; it uses the flotsam of everyday life--cigarette packets, labels, brown paper--to pass us through abstraction and back to common experience. His painting is natural or mythic encounter; one traverses its condensations and gestures to arrive, on the other side, among the ochers of Italy and California, the blues of Nice and Provincetown. In moving between these two poles, Motherwell has become for some people the greatest abstract painter alive, and for others not an abstract artist at all. --By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.