The Writings of Robert Motherwell [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9780520940512

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THE W R I T I N G S OF ROBERT MOTHERWELL

T H E D O C U M E N T S OF T W E N T I E T H - C E N T U R Y A R T J A C K F L A M , General Editor R O B E R T M O T H E R W E L L , Founding Editor Volumes available from University of California Press: Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, edited by Barbara Rose Memoirs of a Dada Drummer by Richard Huelsenbeck, edited by Hans J. Kleinschmidt Matisse on Art, Revised Edition, edited by Jack Flam German Expressionism:

Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire

to the Rise of National Socialism, edited by Rose-Carol Washton Long Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary by Hugo Ball, edited by John Elderfield Pop Art: A Critical History, edited by Steven Henry Madoff The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Stephanie Terenzio Conversations with Cézanne, edited by Michael Doran Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, edited by Alan Wilkinson Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History, edited by Jack Flam with Miriam Deutch The Cubist Painters, Guillaume Apollinaire, translated, with commentary, by Peter Read

The Writings ot

Robert Motherwell EDITED BY DORE ASHTON WITH JOAN B A N A C H INTRODUCTION BY DORE ASHTON

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY

LOS A N G E L E S

LONDON

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Art Endowment Fund of the University of California Foundation, which is supported by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the U C Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California Robert Motherwell's writings © Dedalus Foundation, Inc. All illustrations © Dedalus Foundation, Inc., licensed by VAGA, New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Motherwell, Robert. The writings of Robert Motherwell / edited by Dore Ashton with Joan Banach. p. cm. — (Documents of twentieth-century art) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-25047-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-520-25048-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Art, Modern—20th century. II. Banach, Joan. N6490.M75

I. Ashton, Dore.

III. Title.

2007

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2006039174

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CONTENTS

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ix

I N T R O D U C T I O N BY D O R E A S H T O N

1

N O T E S ON M O N D R I A N A N D CHIRICO, 1942

15

R E V I E W OF ART OF THIS CENTURY,

20

ca. 1943

NOTE ON M O D E R N ART, ca. 1 943

23

P R E F A C E TO A P O L L I N A I R E ' S THE CUBIST

PAINTERS,

1944

THE M O D E R N P A I N T E R ' S W O R L D , 1944 P L A T E C A P T I O N IN ABSTRACT ART IN AMERICA,

AND

24 27

SURREALIST

1944

36

R E V I E W OF C A L D E R S THREE YOUNG RATS, 1944

38

P A I N T E R S ' O B J E C T S , 1944

40

P R E F A C E TO M O N D R I A N ' S PLASTIC

ART AND PURE

PLASTIC

ART, 1945

44

P E R S O N A L S T A T E M E N T , 1945

46

R E V I E W OF HENRY MOORE S AND DRAWINGS,

SCULPTURE

1945

48

P R E F A C E TO P A A L E N ' S FORM AND SENSE,

ca. 1945

50

S T A T E M E N T , 1946

53

B E Y O N D THE A E S T H E T I C , 1946

54

S T A T E M E N T , 1947

57

E D I T O R I A L P R E F A C E TO POSSIBILITIES P R E F A T O R Y NOTE TO MAX ERNST:

I, 1947

BEYOND

PAINTING,

58 1948

59

P R E F A T O R Y NOTE TO J E A N A R P ' S ON MY WAY, 1948

61

A TOUR OF THE S U B L I M E , 1948

63

P R E LCUBIST I M I N A R PAINTERS, Y NOTICE TO APOLLINAIRE'S THE 1949

67

P R E L I M I N A R Y NOTICE TO K A H N W E I L E R ' S THE RISE OF CUBISM,

1949

69

P R E L I M I N A R Y NOTICE TO R A Y M O N D ' S FROM BAUDELAIRE

TO SURREALISM,

1949

72

A P E R S O N A L E X P R E S S I O N , 1949

75

R E F L E C T I O N S ON P A I N T I N G NOW, 1949

81

A B S T R A C T ART A N D THE R E A L . 1949

85

B L A C K OR W H I T E , 1950

86

FOR DAVID S M I T H , 1950

88

P R E F A C E TO D U T H U I T ' S THE FAUVIST

PAINTERS,

1950

89

THE N E W YORK S C H O O L , 1950

93

E X P R E S S I O N I S M , ca. 1950

99

A S T A T E M E N T A N D I N T R O D U C T I O N TO THE I L L U S T R A T I O N S IN MODERN

ARTISTS

IN AMERICA,

1951

101

N O T E S ON CY T W O M B L Y , 1951 P R E F A C E A N D I N T R O D U C T I O N TO THE DADA AND POETS,

103 PAINTERS

1951

P R E F A C E [ " T H E S C H O O L OF N E W Y O R K " ] , 1951

104 154

P O S T S C R I P T TO THE P R E F A C E [ " T H E S C H O O L OF N E W Y O R K " ] , 1951 . . . . 156 WHAT A B S T R A C T ART M E A N S TO M E , 1951

158

THE R I S E A N D C O N T I N U I T Y OF A B S T R A C T ART, 1951

160

APROPOS "TRADITIONAL" AND " M O D E R N " METHODS OF T E A C H I N G ART, 1952

162

IS T H E F R E N C H A V A N T - G A R D E O V E R R A T E D ? 1953

166

P R E F A C E TO A J O S E P H C O R N E L L E X H I B I T I O N , 1953

168

S Y M B O L I S M , 1954

170

THE P A I N T E R A N D THE A U D I E N C E , 1954

176

OF FORM A N D C O N T E N T , ca. 1954

180

THE A R T I S T A N D M O D E R N S O C I E T Y , 1955

181

THE A R T I S T ' S L I F E , 1956

185

N O T E S ON B R A D L E Y W A L K E R T O M L I N , 1957

186

THE S I G N I F I C A N C E OF M I R 6 , 1959

188

L E C T U R E WITH C H A R L E S R. H U L B E C K , 1959

194

S T A T E M E N T FOR " C O N V E R S A T I O N S WITH A R T I S T S , " 1960

198

WHAT S H O U L D A M U S E U M B E ? 1 961

202

PAINTING AS EXISTENCE: AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID S Y L V E S T E R , 1962

205

H O M A G E TO F R A N Z K L I N E , 1962

212

A P R O C E S S OF P A I N T I N G , 1964

214

DAVID S M I T H : A M A J O R A M E R I C A N S C U L P T O R , 1965

218

P L A T E C A P T I O N FOR THE S T E D E L I J K M U S E U M CATALOGUE, 1966

222

S T A T E M E N T , 1967

224

ON J A C K S O N P O L L O C K , 1967

225

ON ROTHKO, 1967

230

ON THE " L Y R I C S U I T E , " 1969

232

I N T E R V I E W A N D L E T T E R TO M I C H E L RAGON, 1969

236

S T A T E M E N T ON THE " O P E N " S E R I E S , 1969

243

M O T H E R W E L L M U S E S , 1969

245

T H O U G H T S ON D R A W I N G , 1970

247

ON THE H U M A N I S M OF A B S T R A C T I O N : THE A R T I S T S P E A K S , 1970

250

S T A T E M E N T S B E F O R E C O N G R E S S , 1970

256

T H E U N I V E R S A L L A N G U A G E OF C H I L D R E N ' S ART, A N D M O D E R N I S M , 1970

266

ON ROTHKO, A EULOGY, 1970

271

I N T R O D U C T I O N TO C A B A N N E ' S WITH MARCEL

DUCHAMP,

DIALOGUES

1971

275

S T A T E M E N T ON R A D I C A L I S M IN THE V I S U A L A R T S , 1971

280

A R E C O L L E C T I O N OF DAVID S M I T H A N D THE 1950s, 1972

282

I N T R O D U C T I O N TO THE JOURNAL

OF EUGÈNE

DELACROIX,

1972

286

S T A T E M E N T ON P I C A S S O , 1974

288

T H E NEW YORK S C H O O L (AND S Y M B O L I S M ] , ca. 1976

289

ART A N D R E A L I T Y , ca. 1976

290

P A R I S I A N A R T I S T S IN E X I L E : NEW Y O R K 1 9 3 9 - 4 5 , 1977

291

P R O V I N C E T O W N A N D DAYS L U M B E R Y A R D : A M E M O I R , 1978

308

W O R D S OF T H E P A I N T E R , 1978

312

P R E S E N T A T I O N OF A N A W A R D TO E R I C K H A W K I N S , 1979

315

T H E I N T E R N A T I O N A L W O R L D OF M O D E R N I S T ART, 1980

317

N O T E S FOR A JOYCE S Y M P O S I U M , 1980

319

IN M E M O R I A M : A N T H O N Y S M I T H , 1981

323

J O U R N A L E N T R Y , ca. 1981

325

R E F L E C T I O N S ON A B S T R A C T ART, 1982

327

F O R E W O R D TO W I L L I A M C. S E I T Z ' S EXPRESSIONIST

PAINTING

IN AMERICA,

ABSTRACT 1983

331

K A F K A ' S V I S U A L R E C O I L : A NOTE (FOR D O R E A S H T O N ) , 1983

336

A N I M A T I N G R H Y T H M , 1984

339

R E S P O N S E : W H E N IS A P A I N T I N G F I N I S H E D ? 1985

340

ON NOT B E C O M I N G A N A C A D E M I C , 1986

343

A P E R S O N A L R E C O L L E C T I O N , 1986

346

N O M I N A T I O N OF J A S P E R J O H N S TO THE A M E R I C A N A C A D E M Y OF A R T S A N D L E T T E R S , 1988

351

B I B L I O G R A P H Y C O M P I L E D BY KATY R O G E R S

353

L I S T OF I L L U S T R A T I O N S

367

INDEX

369

PREFACE AND A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

This anthology is the result of a painstaking reconsideration of all written documents produced by Robert Motherwell, including notebooks, sketchbooks, letters, interviews, and essays. The sequence of the texts follows the dates they were written, although publication dates were occasionally later. Many of the writings were included in Stephanie Terenzio's The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, but others were culled from the extensive archive preserved by the Dedalus Foundation in New York. Our intention was to compile a group of writings characteristic of Robert Motherwell, but also to seek as concise a representation as possible, avoiding both prolixity and repetition. To accommodate the restoration of important texts that were abridged in Terenzio, it was decided, with one or two exceptions, to leave out Motherwell's interviews and letters. The interviews are documented in the comprehensive bibliography that follows the writings, and, with the letters, are available for study by specialists at the Dedalus Foundation. Notes to the texts are provided when necessary to clarify essential points of context and circumstance. We have essentially retained Motherwell's original punctuation and capitalization but have corrected or modernized spelling when necessary. Much of the work on this anthology is beholden to the late Stephanie Terenzio, whose The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell provided a prototypical model. Jack Flam's scholarly work with Motherwell's writings was of inestimable value in shaping this new anthology, as was his advice concerning the general format. We wish to thank the following individuals for their unstinting assistance: Morgan Spangle, Alice Stock, Gretchen Opie, Katy Rogers, Tim Clifford, Warren Ng, Kerrigan Kessler, Michael Mahnke, and Jason Paradis.

INTRODUCTION DORE ASHTON

Among the multitude of thinkers Motherwell absorbed, cited, probed, argued with, and, at times, exasperatedly rejected was the twentieth-century Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Early in the century Ortega had declared: "I am myself plus my circumstance." He explained later that "my work is, by essence and presence, circumstantial . . . purposefully so, because without purpose, and even against any contrary purpose, it is obvious that man has never done anything at all in the world that was not circumstantial." Motherwell was keenly aware of the circumstance that affected his "self" as an artist and strived throughout his life to find a historical framework, or, as he said, a creative principle, that would embrace his various and often conflicting impulses. Sometimes he called his findings modernism, sometimes the Holy Grail. He was an indefatigable inquirer, quick to pick up cultural shifts and to assimilate what he heard and what he read to his own incipient insights. His written observations over the years form an intellectual Bildungsroman. In addition, Motherwell's musings, so often circumstantial, offer a vivid account of some preoccupations of the artists he had grouped under the rubric the New York School. Undoubtedly Motherwell's formal study of philosophy, or, more accurately, the history of philosophy,firstat Stanford University, then at Harvard, set him apart from his painting colleagues at the outset. He merged with them, however, by eventually choosing a painter's life of the mind. What I mean is that philosophers often ask either what is man or who is man, but artists most often ask, what does man do (make), and why. For the painter, man is clearly homo faber. Although Motherwell, in his school years, had studied philosophy, he had at the same time filled his heart's coffers with the wisdom of poets and the imagery of painters. His quest, as this compendium of his written thoughts reveals, is that of most visual artists: to find some answer to the perplexing and probably unanswerable question, what is art? Or even, why is art? As will be seen, Motherwell gravitated to those thinkers who held out a promise of answers. Once he found a semblance of an answer, he would carry it with him, returning to question its validity again and again. When, for instance, he fell under the spell of Soren Kierkegaard, as did several of his colleagues among painters in the early 1950s, he admonished himself to take care and memorized Kierkegaard's observation that "it is one thing to think and another to exist in what is thought." Although everything in his background as a child, as he remembered it, conspired against his burgeoning interest in art, Motherwell managed to persuade his banker father that he would devote his sojourn at Harvard to the study of aesthetics— something far more acceptable than a mere art school. Once at Harvard, Motherwell was lucky enough to encounter professors who recognized his artistic proclivities. It

1

was the noted aesthetician Arthur Lovejoy who probably assigned him the study of the nineteenth-century painter Delacroix, one of the most probing of painterly intelligences who, fortunately for Motherwell, rendered his thoughts in the famous Journal. Working on Delacroix, Motherwell was obliged to study Delacroix's most perceptive critic, the great poet Baudelaire who, I believe, more than any other thinker, left permanent traces in Motherwell's formation as a painter. What Baudelaire said about Delacroix—that he was "passionately in love with passion"—could well be said about Motherwell. Some years later, finding his way as a neophyte painter in New York, Motherwell found a companion, William Baziotes, who shared his deepening engagement with French poetry. In later years Motherwell mentioned their singular affinity, always marveling at how two such different temperaments could find so much in common: Motherwell, the self-conscious son of a banker, whose bitterest memories were of his prep-school years, and Baziotes, a son of the working class in Reading, Pennsylvania, who liked to boast of his roughneck adolescent years, and who, unlike Motherwell, was perfectly at home in Manhattan's seedy bars talking to stevedores. Baziotes had had the advantage of working on the WPA (the government's project to employ artists) during the depression years and had formed relationships with other painters, whom he introduced to Motherwell. In his early twenties Baziotes had rejected the political positions often assumed (if only temporarily) by other artists, writing to a friend in March 1935: "I realize I must go into the more aristocratic tastes— it's quite natural." The tastes he considered aristocratic were for the French poets, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, and later Paul Valéry. Motherwell had been cultivating similar tastes and, like Baziotes, did not flinch at the idea of being an intellectual aristocrat. The two young painters formed a close alliance, reflected in their work in the early 1940s. For example, both alluded to Baudelaire in their paintings, or their titles, all their painting lives. (The way a poet's imagery lodges in a painter's imagination can be seen in the fact that a full decade after his immersion in Baudelaire, Motherwell painted The Black Sun, 1959, echoing Baudelaire whose prose poem "The Desire to Paint" contains the line: "I would compare her to a black sun.") Anyone who knew Motherwell could see in conversation how thoughts and images kindled his imagination. His face would change and his eyes light up when suggestive images found their mark. In general, he was faithful to his youthful enthusiasms and carried along his earliest discoveries, modifying them as he matured, but never abandoning them. Baudelaire, as both poet and expositor, never failed him. In the beginning, Motherwell tended to take over the poet's pronouncements directly, as when he used a line from Baudelaire's poem "Le Confiteor de l'artiste" as an epigraph to "Painters' Objects," Partisan Review, 1944: "The study of the beautiful is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before he is vanquished." Writing in Design in April 1946, he opened his essay, "Beyond the Aesthetic," as follows: "For the goal which lies beyond the strictly aesthetic the French artists say the unknown' or the new,' after Baudelaire and Rimbaud." And in 1949, in his introduction to Marcel Raymond's From Baudelaire to Surrealism, he again selected an epigraph from Baude-

2

laire: "The arts aspire, if not to complement one another, at least to lend one another new energies." Throughout his written thoughts are echoes of Baudelaire's vision of the painter of modern life, especially his idea of modern art as "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and immutable." As modern as Motherwell aspired to be, he could not forgo considering the possibilities of the eternal and immutable, any more than his primary literary hero, James Joyce, could, or, for that matter, William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot—poets who left permanent traces in Motherwell's aesthetic history. How closely Motherwell followed his first poetic mentor, Baudelaire, can be gauged in a note, probably written around 1943, found by Joan Banach in one of his books: W h a t is this modem art which has preoccupied seven generations of artists, which has filled them with a profound and silent joy? In the language of the studios this modern art is the union of the eternal and the fleeting, the union of the eternal problem of the artist—the translation of experience into space—with the unique problem, the space of this place and time.

(I suspect that Albert Camus, whom Motherwell and his friends among the painters were reading carefully in the early 1950s, also derived an important principle from the same Baudelaire essay, "The Painter of Modern Life," in which the poet wrote: "Multitude, solitude: equal and convertible terms for the active and fecund poet." Camus concluded one of his best-known stories, "The Artist at Work," with a view of the deranged artist's large white canvas in which a word "in very small characters is written in the center," a word that could be deciphered but without any certainty whether it should be read solitary or solidarity.) In his writings Motherwell sought to consolidate some of his earliest impressions. Even during his university studies he took to heart impressions rather than concepts, responding more as an artist than as a methodical scholar. He searched widely for confirmation of his intuitive belief in the unity of mind and body. At Harvard, he had taken a seminar devoted to Spinoza, who, as Karl Jaspers said, "leaves no doubt as to the unity of mind and body." This unity, essential to Motherwell's development of an artistic framework, he also discovered in one of his most enduring seminal intellectual influences, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, whose wisdom he retrieves throughout his life in his conversations and writings. In 1938, while Motherwell was still at Harvard, where Whitehead had taught, the philosopher published Modes of Thought. It is worth citing a passage that Motherwell certainly read, if not in 1938, then soon thereafter. This particular passage, I think, condenses Whitehead's life's thought and strongly suggests the nature of the impression made on the burgeoning artist: I find myself essentially a unity of emotions, enjoyments, hopes, fears, regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions—all of them subjective reactions to the environment as

3

active in my nature. M y u n i t y — w h i c h is Descartes' 'I am'—is m y process of shaping this welter of materials into a consistent pattern of feelings. T h e individual enjoyment is what I am in my role of a natural activity as I shape the activities of the environment into a new creation, which is myself at this moment; and yet, as being myself, it is a continuation of the antecedent world.

The great allure of Whitehead for an artist is obvious even in Whitehead's diction. For instance, in 1924 in Adventures of Ideas, he speaks of "lines of force," the rise of the field as a "basic element" and "events." In his next book, Process and Reality, he speaks of "situations," "percipient events," and "the effective tone of perception." Motherwell's profound interest in the question of creativity found its provisional answer in Whitehead. In his 1949 "Reflections on Painting Now," Motherwell remarks that "Whitehead describes it beautifully" and quotes the philosopher: "Creativity is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendental fact. It is the flying dart, of which Lucretius speaks, hurled beyond the bounds of knowledge." Most often Motherwell's citations of Whitehead refer to the nature of abstraction—that it is an "emphasis," and "the higher the degree of abstraction, the lower the degree of complexity." These key phrases, or props, keep rising to the surface of Motherwell's mind as he contemplates the concrete works of his favored modernists—Matisse, Mondrian, Picasso, and Mirò—who, very soon after Motherwell's formal education ceased, moved into primary position in his thinking. Unquestionably Motherwell's adventures with ideas accelerated when he moved into a new milieu in 1940. His decision to continue his studies at Columbia University with Meyer Schapiro—already a celebrated, charismatic professor of art history and a voluble intellectual ready to comment on everything from painting to politics to medieval church decor, always with an astounding range of reference—was certainly inspired. As Motherwell frequently recalled, it was Schapiro who recognized the bookish young man's desire to be a painter. He introduced Motherwell to Kurt Seligmann, an erudite refugee from Europe who had absorbed the tenets of Surrealism and knew all the émigré Surrealists who took refuge in New York. Motherwell studied with Seligmann for many months, and although later he made light of those sessions, to Seligmann himself and his wife he wrote: "All the time I am very conscious of how much I learned from Kurt. I am sure I would never have gotten out of my original muddle by myself" (July 1941). As Motherwell repeatedly said, it was probably the young Roberto Matta, one of André Breton's last recruits in Paris before the war, who actively instigated an intellectual shift in Motherwell. Matta was the very model of the artistic bohemian that Motherwell, who thought of himself as a "homely Protestant," longed to become. Julien Levy, the cultured art dealer who had introduced the Surrealists to New York, and whose book, Surrealism, written in 1936, Motherwell owned, wrote: "Matta burst on the New York scene as if he considered this country a sort of dark continent, his Africa, where he could trade dubious wares. . . . He appeared in my 4

gallery confident, exuberant, and mercurial and produced a portfolio of explosive crayon drawings." Motherwell's intellectual kinship with Matta was distinct from his other associations, as he made very clear in numerous interviews, and their friendship survived. Matta's rebellious nature excited Motherwell, and gave him the courage to make his own salto mortale into the cosmic psychic regions Matta so fervendy explored. But Matta's most important contribution to Motherwell's artistic development was probably his enthusiasm for Federico García Lorca, from whose poem, Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, with its refrain "At five in the afternoon," Motherwell derived one of his earliest Spanish elegies, in 1949. Matta had met Lorca in Spain just before the outbreak of the Civil War. The poet asked him to deliver a copy of Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, with a short message inscribed on the jacket, to Dalí, in Paris. Fortified by his errand, Matta, in 1937, had contacted Dalí, who in turn introduced him to André Breton. Both Matta and Gordon Onslow Ford, another late recruit in Breton's circle, arrived in New York brimming with Surrealist ideas, which they spread liberally among their young American colleagues. Motherwell evidently saw in Bretons idea of "psychic automatism" the solution to the body-mind conundrum. Not only did he feel at home with the European thoughts now lodged in New York (after all, Breton, Ernst, Masson, and Tanguy, whom he met through Seligmann and Matta, had cut their eyeteeth on Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé), but his own culture, and extensive reading during his school years, had readied him for this important encounter. With his preternatural alertness, he had gone to the usual sources of twentieth-century intellectual excitement—Marx, Freud, and Jung—and from Freud, especially, had gathered intimations of the meaning of free association. For him, psychic automatism was another aspect of free association. As for Marx, he could not have avoided a serious encounter since Schapiro, in his own youth, had attempted to forge an aesthetic with elements drawn from Marx and had remained faithful, even in the 1940s, to certain Marxian principles. Although Motherwell had been too young to feel the grimness of the Great Depression, as some of his older friends among the painters had, he had responded to currents of thought derived from radical political sources. While still an undergraduate, for instance, he had attended André Malraux's lecture in San Francisco during the height of the Spanish Civil War, when Malraux, fresh from his adventures as a self-appointed squadron commander on the Loyalist side, raced through America to gain support for the beleaguered republic with fiery rhetoric. Years later Motherwell recalled Malraux's electrifying delivery, his rumpled suit, his cigarette dangling to one side, and his littérateur s ability to call up sharp images of the war's devastation. Motherwell, then, was primed, long before arriving in New York, for the vaguely leftist attitudes he would encounter among the artists who had come of age during the 1930s. One can follow in Motherwell's writings the effects of his encounters with brilliant talkers in New York. Aside from Schapiro, there was Harold Rosenberg who could hold forth with wit and passion on many subjects, and who, like Schapiro, had

5

done his Marxist homework. The summers Motherwell spent on Long Island in the company of Max Ernst and Rosenberg, and other painters such as Rothko, were crucial for Motherwell's focus. Add his foraging in bookstores, a lifelong passion, and the picture is almost complete. One of those bookstores was a remarkable institution— a "meeting place for artists, critics, art historians, museum directors, curators and collectors," as the New York Times obituary for George Wittenborn (October 18,1974) described it. The bookstore was run by two youngish Europeans, Wittenborn, born in Hamburg in 1905, and Heinz K. A. Schultz, born in Berlin in 1903. Both Wittenborn, an excitable and infectious enthusiast for modern art, and Schultz, a courtly, kindhearted intellectual, wanted to resurrect the best of European prewar thought and something of the Weimar spirit in their new homeland. Wittenborn, ever watchful, would hover over his stacks of books, measuring each potential customer and identifying genuine enthusiasts. (He was capable of schoolmasterish admonitions. When I, then a graduate student, was examining a book on modern art, he came, snatched it away from me, and scolded: "That is a book for dentists!") I can well imagine Wittenborn's delight with the young Motherwell, an omnivorous browser. It is a tribute to Wittenborn's and Schultz's discernment that they befriended Motherwell and by late 1943 had evolved an immensely significant project, the Documents of Modern Art, with Motherwell at the helm. Motherwell's experience with writing and editing was minimal, but the booksellers recognized his exceptionally broad interests and his boundless enthusiasm. Motherwell was not quite thirty, endowed with exceptional energy, both as a newly recognized avant-garde artist soon to have his first one-man exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery and as a thinker about modern art. During the year that Motherwell got the Documents series under way, he was invited to give a paper in the month-long symposium held at Mount Holyoke College in August 1944. This was an ambitious resurrection of the celebrated conferences that had been held in France for several decades at a Cistercian abbey in Pontigny. The general subject was to be "Art and the Crisis," and André Masson headed the week devoted to the plastic arts. Motherwell's carefully worked paper, even with its contradictions, can be read closely for the credo that underlies all of his future speculations. His ambitious paper "The Modern Painter's World" reflects both his circumstance and his increasingly painterly approach to ideas. It also establishes the motifs that would survive for the rest of his working life. I use the word motif, not theme, deliberately. After 1940, Motherwell thought mostly about painting. A thought was usually valuable to him when it could in some way illuminate his need to paint (it would move him into painting), and the word motif derives from move in ancient languages. Theme, in contrast, comes from a Greek root that means to set or place something. As a creative person, Motherwell could never definitively do that. As early as 1941, in a letter to William Carlos Williams soliciting his participation in the newly founded review VW, Motherwell was organizing his thoughts around the act of painting. "Now I have taken a partisan stand, in the creative sense that the

6

surrealist automatism is the basis of my painting." He speaks of the "felt need" and the "felt content"of the organisms experiencing, and refers to André Breton's demand for a "union between normal consciousness and the unconscious." And with characteristic, even boyish, enthusiasm, speaks of "dynamiting the imagination." Motherwell's concourse with Breton during the turbulent months of preparation for VW were invaluable to his development, having the effect of prying him loose from his highly structured education. In an instance of Breton's enduring influence on him, Motherwell, in a letter written in 1979 to the art historian and curator Edward Henning, recalled a "lesson" when Breton took "a surrealist group into the junk shops and second-hand stores of Third Avenue in the early 1940s and forcefd] us to decide which objects were surrealist and which were not." Breton's own experiences in the Parisian flea market, described in his innovative novel, Nadja, 1928, in which a photograph of an exceedingly peculiar object turns out to be a three-dimensional model of a "statistical device," were recapitulated by Motherwell when, in his discussion of the work of the British sculptor Henry Moore, in 1945, he alludes to "extremely beautiful and complex models made by mathematicians to represent equations." Breton's impress is still felt when Motherwell undertook to compile his thoughts for the Pontigny conference, above all in his declaration of what would be his fundamental, and permanent, stance: "In the greatest painting, the painter communes with himself. Painting is his thought's medium." Those two words—thought and medium—would henceforth constitute Motherwell's painterly universe. His pronouncement at the Pontigny conference that "painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself" remained his ideal no matter how many ways he would later challenge himself by suspending "mind" in the act of painting. In a way, all of Motherwell's thoughts after his seismic encounter with Matta—his trip to Mexico, his discussions with Wolfgang Paalen, his plunge into Surrealism—derive from a tremendous and finally unfathomable excitement in the act of painting. As he had said in his letter to William Carlos Williams, he had previously been "an observer, like a character in James." It is apparent in the Pontigny lecture that Motherwell made halfhearted attempts to deal with social and political aspects of artistic life, and the title alone indicates how much the interests of Schapiro and Rosenberg had engaged him, but it is also already apparent that his reckoning with the world outside the realm of painting is perfunctory. He acknowledges his circumstances, but his "self," his deepest feelings, take precedence, as they would ever after. He could recognize "the contradiction between socialism and individualistic modernism," the received idea amongst his new intellectual friends connected with the journal Partisan Review, and he alluded disparagingly to Stalinism, also a favorite topic of discussion and obloquy, but he reserved his eloquence for what most concerned him: questions nearest the act of creating. Thirty-three years later, in a public interview, he reiterated his view of "the obvious contradiction between socialism and individualistic modernism" and the impossibility of reconciling them, and then moved on quickly to his own artistic issues. Motherwell's experiences with drawing and painting in the early 1940s had released

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him from what he regarded as "academic" issues. He was acquiring what was rightfully his—a new mother tongue, so to speak—and he repeatedly examined this acquisition in many lights. In one of his later public interviews, he fetched up the memory of an unhappy private school experience during his adolescence in California, and with it, his means of survival: I used to copy by the hour Rubens and Rembrandt and Michelangelo . . . A n d baroque drawing, once you have mastered it, you apply it to the subject. You don't look at a horse and then copy the horse. You do the opposite. You already have the gestalt of horse-ness that you apply to the horse in a given picture.

This "gestalt of horse-ness" would later be augmented with views taken from an ancient Chinese manual on brush painting, and his close acquaintance with sketches and thoughts of Delacroix, all of which, distilled, found their way into Motherwell's written commentaries. The "gestalt" came to be expressed in a personal shorthand: the reduction of the sheer experience into the word medium. As early as the talk at the Pontigny conference, Motherwell had focused on the idea that painting is the artist s thought s medium, using the word in an almost literal way: that it is in the middle between the thinker and the concrete product of his thought. Sometimes he used the word in straightforward reference to his own particular medium, paint, as when he referred to the artists tools as brushes, paint, and even the studio environment: "I think the deepest discoveries in art have to do with the artist's materials, the liquids, grounds, instruments, brushes, sticks, palette knives, pen points, whatever." At times Motherwell defined the artist as "someone who had an abnormal sensitivity to a medium." Or he referred to the "marriage of the painter and his medium." In 1971, he offered his credo, that "the art of art is its specific use of a medium," adding, in a letter to a composer late in his life, in 1984: "When I paint, I do not paint a picture of something—paint itself becomes activated, and I would not have the imagery that I do have if it were not for some inherent characteristics of manipulated paint." Sometimes, as when he speaks almost rapturously of Matisse's brush, "the most subtle since Cezanne's, the most complicated and invariably right in its specific emphases," Motherwell is certainly expressing his own deepest aspirations: "What a miracle it is! It is as though the brush could feel, breathe and sweat and touch and move about, as though sheer being contacted, sheer being and fused." Motherwell was always attuned to the properties of a medium in any art form, as when he spoke of James Joyce's "piles of words." He even reproached psychoanalysis, which, in his later years was of great personal importance to him, for being deaf and blind to the various languages of the mind: "To put it in a more simple-minded way, there cannot be any expression of the human spirit that is not in a specific medium." If, as he declared, painting was his thoughts medium, Motherwell did not leave it at that. Throughout his life he expressed as precisely as possible what he thought about thought. Or rather, about the question, what is thinking in painting? 8

In a statement, "Beyond the Aesthetic," 1946, still tinctured with his academic studies, he nevertheless exclaims: "What an inspiration the medium is! Colors on the palette or mixed in jars on the floor, assorted papers, or a canvas of a certain concrete space—no matter what, the painting mind is put into motion, probing, finding, completing." The mind in motion is not so easy to catch up with. Motherwell pursues it conscientiously, sometimes drawing in other minds to speak for him. He cites, for instance, the mathematician Poincaré in 1954, "Thought is only a flash between two long nights," which he then tests against his own experience, coming up with an insight about himself of considerable importance: "I have never had a thought about painting while painting, but only afterwards. In this sense one can only think in painting while holding a brush before a canvas, and this symbolization I trust much more than . . . the words about it." The painting mind in motion often went, in Motherwell's contemplative moments, toward what one of his interviewers referred to as a metaphysics. The interviewer quotes to Motherwell a long passage from the philosopher Karl Jaspers that he thinks comes very close to Motherwell's feelings: The urge of man's metaphysical thinking is towards art. His mind opens up to that primary state when art was meant to be in earnest and was not mere decoration, play, sensuousness but chijfre reading. Through all the formal analysis of its works, through all narration of its happenings, in the history of the mind, through the biography of its creators, man seeks that something which perhaps he, himself, is not, but which, as existence questioned, saw and shaped in the depth of being that which he, too, is seeking. "Absolutely," Motherwell exclaimed with emphasis. "I feel a shock of recognition." Motherwell was not alone during the 1950s in endowing the painter with moral aspirations. For a time, for instance, he collaborated closely with Ad Reinhardt, who was, among other things, a serious investigator of moral precepts as he found them in Zen Buddhist writers and in mystics such as St. John of the Cross. The broadest background for postwar speculations among the more thoughtful artists of the New York School, however, was the florescence of European existentialism. The literary and artistic sources stressed by such living thinkers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were familiar to many artists who had, in their youth, already discovered Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka. Above all, the postwar existentialists had invigorated discussions of the work of Kierkegaard. Translations of his works had been multiplying since the 1930s. By the mid-1950s the eminent poet W. H . Auden had edited a selection of his writings, which I believe was the volume Motherwell and two of his most probing colleagues, Mark Rothko and Philip Guston, discussed together at that time. In one of his most important lectures, "Symbolism," 1954, Motherwell presented the fruits of these intense conversations, saying he believed that painters' judgments of painting are first ethical and then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgment flowing from an ethical context. 9

Motherwell had already injected the preoccupation with ethics in his first public attempt to define the New York School in 1950, expressing opinions commonly held among artists as discrete as Rothko and de Kooning. De Kooning's more colorful pronouncements were often parallel, as when he derided the old saw that the artist's task was to bring order out of chaos, declaring that in fact the artist's main task was to put order in himself. He and many others shared Motherwell's belief that "the major decisions in the process of painting are made on the grounds of truth, not taste," recapturing philosophy as a presence in the studio. Motherwell and his colleagues' delectation of Kierkegaard was undoubtedly heightened by the superb writing of the Scandinavian theologian, who was also a poet and storyteller. Motherwell, throughout his life, registered and drew on Kierkegaard's pithy comments, as in the observation I quoted earlier, that "it is one thing to think and another to exist in what is thought." Motherwell instinctively hoarded Kierkegaard's statements for hard times in the studio, as he did many other references garnered in moments of what Kierkegaard had called "aesthetic despair." (Such references came readily to Motherwell, as I can attest. Once in a meandering conversation over lunch, he suddenly fetched up a quotation from Kierkegaard to the effect that "you can always make a wild goose into a tame goose, but you can never make a tame goose into a wild goose.") The lingua franca of the existentialist years in New York was liberally sprinkled with locutions drawn partly from Kierkegaard by way of theoreticians such as Sartre. The ideas of risk, choice, self-deception (mauvaisefoi), and individual responsibility were ingested, and, more important, certain painters tried to live by them, at least in the studio. The echoes of Motherwell's thoughts, germinated in the studio, resound in his writings. He tried to be true by observing his own and other artists' actual procedures— actions as simple as adding one stroke to another, or canceling one with another. He called the decisions, stroke by stroke, a kind of ethics. As he told David Sylvester in i960, "the process of painting is a series of moral decisions about the aesthetic," emphasizing the importance of "authenticity of expression," and stating that people are "essentially ethical by nature." (Such thoughts occur to many artists and writers. Amos Oz writes in a memoir, for instance: "If you write an 8o-thousand word novel, you have to make about a quarter of a million decisions.") Motherwell, in his notes and published writings, often tested studio decisions against what he referred to as "reality." More than once he cited Wallace Stevens's thoughts about the "pressure of reality," and, in a joint statement for Modern Artists in America, Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt quoted Stevens: "It is not that there is a new imagination but that there is a new reality." In 1946, Motherwell had spoken of "different patterns . . . , which constitute reality," and in the years thereafter, he often tried to define for himself the nature of his own reality. His strong response to the work of Matisse seems to have settled the matter, at least in terms of painting. Matisse had written on several occasions that painting, and therefore reality, was basically about relations. Relational structures were what Motherwell persistently sought. His thoughts about such structures

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were inspired by the act of looking as much as they were incited by the act of reading. He felt deeply and strongly that painting is a universe, and in one of his choice selections of quotations, deferring as he often did to art history, he quoted G. Jeanniot writing on Manet in 1907: "You cannot explain art any more than you can learn it. Manet, whom I knew, also said: 'Art is a circle, one is either inside it or outside.'... no one person in the circle resembles his neighbor, but at the same time they are all brothers." It was certainly this brotherhood that Motherwell craved—a cenacle of kindred spirits not only in his own neighborhood but also in the world at large, going back to the painting cavemen, with whom he felt a kinship as well. Like Wallace Stevens, who had suggested in 1951, at the Museum of Modem Art, that poets and painters filled the breach in a world that had lost religion, Motherwell believed in what he had early determined to be spiritual values, but, like every other modernist, found them exceedingly difficult to define. Stevens, in his speech, later issued by the Museum of Modern Art as a pamphlet that most New York artists read closely, said that the paramount relation between painting and poetry, between modern man and modern art is simply this: "that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost." The forlornness of which the existentialists had spoken edged Motherwell's inner being. He knew only that he wanted to be within the circle and to that end had early "taken a stand." For him, the invention of papier collé by Braque and Picasso represented a hallmark of modernism precisely in its disparateness, its separations in medium. It represented a strictly modern view of existence, enabling him to talk about both James Joyce and Picasso as collagists—modern sensibilities that could put together disparate things, displacing traditional systems of thinking about reality. In fact, Motherwell had an abiding fondness for ideas that had occurred to him when hefirststepped into the circle. In his earliest statements he naturally drew upon his education in ideas and rather self-consciously fetched them up in the service of his new identity. For example, when he concludes his essay on the sublime in 1948 by stating, "One experiences the Sublime or not, according to ones fate and character," he echoed what he had learned of pre-Socratic philosophy from Heraclitus: "Character is fate." But in later years the scholastic memory fades, and he strikes out boldly on his own. Only occasionally, then, did he have recourse to a few singular sources. There were ideas that he liked as one likes another person. He liked, for instance, the idea of "indirection," as he said in his preface to Kahnweiler in 1949: "Nothing of deep interest can be spoken of save by indirection." He linked his own predilection for indirection with the idea of abstraction, drawn originally from Whitehead and acted out in his work, but also, of course, from Mallarmé, one of the gods of modernism. He could talk about "existential doubt," but when he talked about an important group of late paintings, In Plato's Cave, he spoke first of the "blackness" suggested by the cave title, and of the paint itself, and only after of his association

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with Plato, and with the "superb poem" of his contemporary the poet Delmore Schwartz. Oddly but understandably, Motherwell comments on the cave parable that Plato had conceived to describe reality by substituting the word art for reality. Another idea he liked was what the French call a jeu d'esprit. For him, the spirit of play arrived as a consequence of his experiments with psychic automatism at the outset of his painting life—the kind of spontaneous drawing he also called "doodling," which enabled him to get started. There was a deep need in him to overcome his reading culture; to expel the troubled "self" that sent him into psychoanalysis. The bodily engagement in the act of painting appeared to be one of his most significant discoveries, freeing him, like the ancient Chinese painters, to transcend his "self." He had embarked on four different occasions on purely automatist adventures, literally throwing himself into them. In 1982, he wrote of his extensive Beside the Sea series: "I made the painted spray with such force that the strong rag paper split." He spoke of the "full force of my shoulder, arm, hand and brush," adding: "One might say that the true way to 'imitate' nature is to employ its own processes." Three years later, he produced the Lyric Suite, which begins spectacularly, with a thousand sheets of Japanese rice paper that he approached, he reported, with "unadulterated automatism." The ink, he said, "spread itself like a spot of oil on a smooth surface so that the images are half as they 'grew' themselves." Two years later, in 1967, he tried similar techniques with ink, but on parchment, in drawings that turned into his Rimbaud se.ries, and in 1971, the adventures with ink give way to acrylic in the Samurai series. During his lifetime, Motherwell demonstrated his ability to probe the history of his century with exceptional skill. The best example of his agility lies in the saga of his gathering the testimony for his celebrated book on Dada artists. The well-known fractiousness of these enfants terribles never flagged. It required great patience, as well as scholarly judgment, for Motherwell to endure their quarrels so that he could distill the excellent anthology that eventually emerged. He displayed notable courage in the face of the explosive squabbling among the necessary participants. This editorial courage was demonstrated on many occasions, most especially when he refused a poorly written submission by the powerful art critic Clement Greenberg—a step that was certainly not to his advantage as an exhibiting artist. In later years, Motherwell withdrew from editing, and to some degree from writing, but he never ceased trying to organize his thoughts about his own primary activity, painting. He sustained his romantic side—his belief in belief—despite frequent bouts of uncertainty and suspicion. When he titled a group of paintings Chi Ama Crede, he was enunciating the credo that had kept him going. He enjoyed the exercise of the mind, but he found refuge in the thought that there is a faculty— perhaps alien to the mind—that is the unconscious, which could never find adequate explanation except perhaps in the making of a work of art. Jack Flam has pointed out that everything Motherwell wrote was solicited, even his editing of books on modern art and literature: "The consistency of his total literary and public effort rested more in his emphasis on certain underlying values than

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in the systematic progression of ideas; his commitment to the modernist aesthetic remained inviolable." Motherwell had begun with the conviction that the artist forms "a kind of spiritual underground" in modern life, and, in the ellipse of his own life, he never altered that belief. In one of his late lectures he reiterated his early insights into "the aesthetic called modernism." He further refined his early view, but in no way altered it except, perhaps, in emphasis. Now, he looked back and saw the rebellion of the modernists as a "new investigation into what constitutes art" and recognized that "modernism is a desperate and gallant attempt at a more adequate and accurate view of things now." He emphasized that he was not talking about "mere aesthetics": "I am talking about shaped meaning, without which no life is worth living." In one of his most graceful essays, Motherwell paid homage to a great writer, Franz Kafka, concluding: "To read him is to be marked for life—as he was—marked by the reality of inwardness, that most sacred of modern domains of which he is a vivid witness." In his written comments throughout his adult life, many of which are gathered in this book, Motherwell himself emerges as a vivid witness. His testimony that a life of the mind need not be exclusive to professional philosophers rings true. His eloquence, his occasional inspired remarks cast casually into his writing, and his frequent recourse to poetic imagery (as when, for instance, he defines drawing as "a racing yacht, cutting through the ocean," while "painting is the ocean itself") all serve both to illumine his own work and to open the way into the works of his contemporaries.

NOTES The sources for various quotations not in this volume are listed below: p. 6 "Now I have taken . ..": Letter to William Carlos Williams, December 3,1941, Motherwell archives, Dedalus Foundation, New York, p. 7 Breton took "a surrealist group . . L e t t e r to Edward Henning, May 15,1979, Motherwell archives. p. 8 "I used to copy by the hour . . .": Introduction to Joan Banach, Robert Motherwell: A Painter's Album (Barcelona: Fundaci6 Antoni Tapies, 1996). "I think the deepest discoveries...": Introduction by Dore Ashton, in H. H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell, rev. ed. (New York: Harry Abrams, 1982), p. 202. "When I paint. . .": Letter to "Monte" (Dr. Montague Ullman), June 4,1984, Motherwell archives, p. 9 "The urge of man's metaphysical thinking . . . " : Interview with Richard Wagener, June 14,1974, in The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Stephanie Terenzio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 218. p. 12 Motherwell comments on the cave parable: in Arnason, Motherwell, p. 180. "I made the painted spray.. .": in ibid., pp. 147,154. The consistency . ..": Jack Flam, Introduction, in Collected Writings, ed. Terenzio, p. 3. p. 13 "In one of his late lectures: Robert Motherwell, "Remarks," October 30, 1982, in Collected Writings, ed. Terenzio, pp. 259, 262.

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NOTES ON MONDRIAN AND CHIRICO 1 942

The following notes are excerpts from a work on the direction of modern painting which I have in preparation. They are by no means in the final form I intend, but since it may be some time before I can again set my hand to them, I am presenting them as they are, in the hope that they may be of interest to at least a few persons. My preoccupation with the direction of painting accounts for the particular emphasis the notes have; they are taken from an article which was originally meant to be a chronicle of the season's exhibitions, hence their reference to the recent exhibits of Mondrian and Chirico; and though they appear without the other reviews, which would have given them more points of reference and comparison, perhaps they are able to stand alone.

I. T H E A R T OF A B S T R A C T I O N : P I E T M O N D R I A N it is not worthwhile suffering so much if he is not to go far Jean Hilion

T h e most exact, and at the same time comprehensive description of science's work is that it has consisted of the formulation of relations and abstract relational structures. In the most exact sense, therefore, Mondrian's work 1 can be called scientific, since it consists of just the formulation of color-relations, and more important, spatial relations arising from a division of space. T h e scientific analogy is further confirmed by the fact that Mondrian clearly employs a hypothesis about the nature of reality, of which his work is an attempt at experimental confirmation. His hypothesis holds that it is possible to fulfill the artist's function, which is the expression of the felt quality of reality, with concrete color-spaces which contain no reference to the external world, either through representation or through the more condensed and ambiguous meanings of the image. After this preliminary statement, important things to say about Mondrian are these: i. For many years he has indomitably and

"Notes on Mondrian and Chirico," V W i (June 1942): 59-61. VW, or Triple V, as it was called, was a review founded by André Breton. It appeared from June 1942 until February 1944. Motherwell was for a time on the editorial board, along with Nicholas Calas, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Breton. Written for the inaugural issue of VW, Motherwell's notes on Mondrian followed his viewing of the first solo exhibition of Mondrian's work at the Valentine Gallery in New York and "The Masters of Abstract Art" at the New Art Center, New York, in 1942. Motherwell's notes on de Chirico followed his viewing of the artists solo exhibition at the Perls Gallery, New York, in March 1942.

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tenaciously maintained the freedom of the artist, both in permitting his work to be less subject to the pressures of the outside world than any other 20th century painter of comparable consequence, and in freeing every artist, if he liked, of any felt necessity for representation or the image. 2. Moreover, as Meyer Schapiro had remarked of modern art in general, Mondrian's work has the value of a demonstration. He brought abstract art into being at a moment when its nature was the object of much speculation, based on the unsatisfactory data of trying to view representational art of the past abstractly. His work has the value, like that of the experimental scientist, whether it is successful or not, of showing us with permanent objectivity what lies in a certain direction. 3. But in seizing the laboratory freedom of the scientist, Mondrian has fallen into the natural trap—loss of contact with historical reality; or, more concretely, loss of the sense of the most insistent needs (and thus of the most insistent values) of a given time and place. He has spent his life in the creation of a clinical art in a time when men were ravenous for the human; he created a rational art when art was the only place where most men could find an irrational, sensual release from the commonsense rationalism and disciplines of their economic lives. 4. Furthermore, and this is painful to say, Mondrian's experiment is a failure in its own terms. His terms were, remember, that it is possible to express the felt quality of reality (reality being just what we are aware of) in non-referential spado-color structures. The premise cannot be proved false a priori, for we know that color and space are able to communicate feeling, as when, to take banal instances, a green room is felt as more cool and peaceful than an orange one; or as when certain activity is felt more appropriate in a small room than in a large one. But is it possible to say a posteriori that Mondrian failed, with his restricted means, to express enough of the felt quality to deeply interest us. The aesthetic grounds of his failure are plain:2 a bare abstraction, like the simple wooden cross of the church triumphant, is too bare, insufficiently concrete and specific to determine a complete mental-feeling state in the observer. Nor does the perfectly valid proposition 2 x 2 = 4 in itself interest anyone long. Neither the abstract aesthetic presentation nor the bare mathematical proposition are complex enough even to suggest the complexities of that reality with which we are overwhelmed. No one denies that the artist's function involves giving form (i.e., intelligibility, a form being just what is intelligible to us) to that complexity; but after a certain degree of abstraction the form becomes simpleminded, no matter how perfect. No one can meet hostile reality with the simple proposition that 2 + 2 = 4. The proposition is true, but it is not enough. Yet it must be insisted that it is still not a priori demonstrable that mere spatio-color relations cannot express the full felt quality of reality, as pitch relations in music of course do.

Later on, viewing the exhibition of "The Masters of Abstract Art" at Mme Rubinstein's establishment, one wonders if this judgment of Mondrian is not too harsh.

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Even after one has admitted the purity and integrity of his intention, perhaps one has not admitted enough. His actual accomplishment is extraordinary too. With one or two exceptions, the best artists in the exhibition are not abstract artists, in the common and strict sense of the term. But besides Mondrian, there are many strictly abstract painters; and beside him they seem dark and confused. He alone among the completely abstract painters holds his own with the other great painters there. Despite his lack of the image reinforcing his meanings, despite the simplicity of his hypothesis, despite the dehumanized treatment of his pictures (as though they had been made with a mechanical tool), despite the arbitrariness of his self-imposed limitations, despite all this and more, a definite and specific and concrete poetry breaks through his bars, a poetry of constructiveness, of freshness, of tenacity, of indomitability, and, above all, of an implacable honesty, an honesty so thoroughgoing in its refusal to shock, to seduce, to surprise, to counterfeit, that in spite of one's self, one thinks of Seurat and Cézanne. Beside Mondrian the other abstractionists seem dull and gray.

2. THE ART OF REACTION: THE LATE CHIRICO a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgment Aristotle, Poetics, XIII

Standing before these late (1939) gouaches3 a la mode, who finds any stimulus to remembrance of Chirico's early scenic stage? Not the empty stage of his subsequent imitators, where the tragic action has already taken place, and we are presented with no more than the scene of the crime; but Chirico's stage, where the strange symbols have an irresistible attraction for one another, where if they do not interact before us, they will after we are gone. They are filled with incredible potentialities. Or, more specifically, what remains now of the expressiveness in that work of 1914 symbolizing the content of The Child's Brain, with its father-image? Yes, the father! Shockingly naked but unrevealed, hairy, immovable, inescapable, standing like a massive rock on the silent shore of the unconscious mind, a rock unseeing, with its closed eyes, but a rock resisting all attempts to pass beyond, a rock to burrow into, if that is the only possibility of getting beyond, but a rock eternally waiting, waiting for when it will be at once judge and executioner, judge of the guilt inherent in killing the origin of one's being in order to be, and executioner by virtue of one's fear of being free.4 What remains of that? Nothing. Nothing but the problem of how this awful degeneration came about. Was it, as I suppose, the consequence of a tragic action, the result of choice between irreconcilable values; or was the actual circumstance as banal as Dali's? Mr. Soby's otherwise admirable The Early Chirico (1941) gives us no hint. Certainly the conventional thesis (which holds that Chirico's genius simply burned itself out) explains nothing; it merely remarks the phenomenon to be ex-

17

plained . . . The evidence of his works suggests a hypothesis which, if not complete, does dispel the mystery in part; and the hypothesis has the advantage of being tested, just as it is suggested, by the works themselves. From them the central fact is plain enough: c. 1910-1917 young Chirico produced a quantity of pictures, of which the majority are indubitable masterpieces, pervaded by a binding poetry: the paintings after that date are filled with meaningless classic paraphernalia, and a plasticity expressly designed for contemporary taste. The few other relevant facts are well known: Chirico's great period corresponds to cubism's great period, of which Chirico was either in ignorance, or to which he was indifferent. At any rate, his own historical influence came (c. 1920) as the poetic opposition to cubism's architectonics; and he was made influential largely through the interest in his work of Breton, critic and poet, and Ernst, painter and poet, which is not surprising in view of Chirico's essentially poetic, rather than essentially plastic gift. His particular plastic inventions, like the shadow cast by an object unseen in the picture (a device later to be exploited by Dali), derivefrom poetic insight, i.e., the remarkable intensity of feeling in the early work arises more from the nature and juxtaposition of his symbols than from their formal relations to one another, adequate as the latter may be. The emphasis on his poetry has important outside evidence: years after the decline of his painting into an incredible academicism, Chirico was still able to produce his superbly poetic novel Hebdomeros... Now it is scarcely plausible to suggest, as Mr. Soby does, "that Chirico's genius died a lingering death, that at times, as in certain paintings and his novel Hebdomeros, it has raised itself in bed." It is more plausible to suppose that something happened to alter Chirico's conception of painting something radical enough to cause the poetry to disappear from it. It so happens that Chirico first became interested in Parisian painting at a moment when it was turning from many years of experiment to a normative authoritarianism, to a painting relying on the weight of traditional images understood by everyone, as in the "classic" period of Picasso, Derain, and so on. It is not difficult to suppose that Chirico was ravished by the "objective" authority of such painting, and determined to participate in its creation. His pictures after 1918, being failures, are generally ignored by critics, but they afford the clue. The intention of the later pictures is authoritarian, the observer from below up to white horses, as he must look up to an equestrian monument; traditional, the subject-matter being reminiscent of antiquity, with its "classic" columns, and its treatment of personages and horses in shades of white, like ancient statues; normative, being intelligible to any normal person, since it depends on neither personal sensitivity nor insight, but on associations commonly known in the Occident; and (no doubt most important in Chirico's mind) plastic, the attempt to have the painting itself constitute the "meaning," as in cubism, not poetic insight, hence the fat impasto, the simplification of forms, the color by local areas, the importance of contour, the emphasis of surface texture, and the other devices in the contemporary taste. Of course he was foredoomed to failure in his effort to create such painting, because his gift was not normative, authoritarian, and plastic, but in actuality the precise opposite, unique,

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personal, and poetic. And it is unforgivable that these later works are not even an honest attempt to enlarge his experience, and ours; they are instead deliberate attempts to cater to the luxury trade. Like all such works, they are unnecessary; they fulfill no genuine need. If this later work is the result of a deliberate choice, as I suppose, the choice represents a moral action, the choice between two irreconcilable values; and where the action becomes tragic is in his pursuit of that thing Chirico chose as the final good, to the necessary exclusion of other goods, so that whatever value the original good may have had for him ends in a final evil, as other goods are vanquished in the struggle. His tragic flaw reveals itself as his arrogance, his refusal, in relation to his true gift, to accept his limitation, and admit his error. He defended himself against the bitter attack of the surrealists in the '20s by replying that at least he painted like the old masters. He was bound finally to dupe himself. He grew to believe in the authoritarian; the petrifaction of his talent, plus his alliance with those states which alone could accept his later work, represent the material consequences of his action. Understood so, Chirico becomes one of the clearest examples of the historic issues of our time. His sterility and that of the authoritarian state have the same origin, fear and contempt of the human. It is only just that, as that state will, so has Chirico brought about his own ruin.

NOTES 1. Valentine Gallery. V W i (June 1942): 59-61. 2. The late Bosanquet has fully treated the point in one of his aesthetical essays—the devastating one on Croce, if I remember rightly. 3. Perls Gallery, 30 March-25 April 1942. 4. But cf. Robert Melville's Apocalypse in Painting: "Even the naked man in 'The Child's Brain' is a wax-work, with a wig and false moustaches," etc. So it is, when regarded plastically; but the real meaning is in the poetry: there is no question of what Chirico himself means by the picture; he has described his most important dream in these terms: " . . . It is my father who thus appears in my dream, and yet when I look at him, he is not at all as he was when I saw him alive, in the time of my childhood. Nevertheless, it is he. There is something far-off in the whole expression of his face, something which perhaps existed when I saw him alive and which now, after more than twenty years, strikes me with full force when I see him again in a dream." La Revolution Surrealiste, no. 1,1924 (quoted by Sobey).

1?

REVIEW OF ART OF THIS

CENTURY

ca.1943

This volume, considerably the most important on contemporary art to be published recently in America, contains biographical information about, personal statements by, and reproductions of the work of nearly every artist in our time preoccupied with l'art moderne. It contains, moreover, three introductions, by Breton, Arp, and Mondrian respectively; and as appendices thefirstpublication in this country of the texts of "Manifesto of the Futurist Painters" (1910), the Realistic Manifesto (1920) of Gabo and Pevsner, Max Ernsts Inspiration to Order (1932), and Ben Nicholsons Notes on Abstract Art (1941). Knowledge of the book's contents is important to anyone interested in the nature and intentions of the great international collaboration which has, as its main task, the crystallization and clarification of the character and direction of the modern spirit. I should like to say a few words about the three introductions, which constitute the book's most original contribution to our knowledge. I shall take them in reverse order, because I find it more convenient to do so.

Mondrian's short introduction, Abstract Art, reiterates ideas he has stated elsewhere at length. His general position may be perhaps adequately summarized by the beliefs that works of art in the past have contained values other than plastic values, as well as plastic values, that the abstract artist can isolate and retain only plastic values, that these plastic values are not "subjective"—mere self-expression—but objectively expressive of the nature of reality itself, just as a formula in physics is; (a) that the step abstract art has taken is a logical one; and (b) that abstract art's particular form of expressiveness is most in "conformity with modern times." Handwritten in two parts: on three sheets of drawing paper; on one and a half pages of graph paper. A draft of a book review of Art of This Century: Objects, Drawings, Photographs, Paintings, Sculpture, Collage, if 10-1942, edited by Peggy Guggenheim (New York: Art of This Century, 1942). This was the first catalogue published by Peggy Guggenheim. André Breton researched each artist in the collection and was responsible for the selection of statements and manifestoes by the Futurists, texts by Gabo and Pevsner, and Ernst's 1932 text, "Inspiration to Order," which were included at the back of the catalogue. Motherwell is writing about three texts included in the front of the catalogue: Arp's "Abstract Art—Concrete Art"; Bretons "Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism" (1941), in which Breton discusses Duchamp's early work and its relation to Futurism; and Mondrian's "Abstract Art." Mondrian's text was written especially for this catalogue. (See "Parisian Artists in Exile: New York 1939-45," pp. 298-99, for an expanded historical context of the volume.) Previously unpublished.

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I find all of the above propositions valid. The objections to it, as to abstract art itself, are not to what is insisted on but to what is not. The program, like the art, is true but inadequate. Nearly every abstract artist—Mondrian is a notable exception— not only creates his expression by solely plastic means, but also expresses mere plasticity, the beauty of this shape with that, and that size with this. No painter can object to the contention that the expressiveness of a picture should derive from strictly plastic means. But any painter can—and should—deny that plasticity is the only thing expressing Mondrian's own work; intense and perfect and expressive as it indubitably is, [it] has an expressive range still too limited to fulfill wholly the requirements of the accurate and complete language for expressing reality which we all seek. In this limitation Mondrian is characteristic of all abstract artists. No one is against abstract art. But nearly everyone is against forms of it too impoverished to reflect the complexities of our basic needs and desires.

Arp's introduction, Abstract Art—Concrete Art, is scarcely his best. In it he maintains his convictions that the overevaluation of "reason" has brought the present deplorable situation, that man must return to a greater accord with "nature," that the work he admires seeks "to reach beyond human values and attain the infinite and the eternal." Even with the most extraordinary sympathy with Arp's life and work, it is impossible to accept his present statement. In blaming "reason" for our contemporary difficulties, he commits the now classic dadaist error of confusing "reason" as it has served the interests of the social status quo for the methodv/bich reason in fact is; to suggest as Arp does that modern social problems can be solved by being unreasonable, by merely an "instinctive" and therefore blind drive forward is only to suggest what the Germans have actively tried to do. "Reason" is an instrument of the human bodymind, and if it is sometimes directed to evil ends, it is never because of the intrinsic nature of reason, but as the consequence of an evil moral choice. "Reason" can equally well be directed to good ends. Arp's second proposition, that man should live in accord with "nature," is somewhat vague. If he means by "nature" that man should live in accord with his own nature, the truth of the proposition no one can deny. But it scarcely touches on the genuine problems of just what man's nature is and just how conditions can be brought about which satisfy his nature's basic needs and desires. But if he means by "nature" only the physical world, as the romantics did, the proposition is wholly irrelevant to the problems confronting men living in civilization. His final proposition, that his art seeks "to reach beyond human values and attain the infinite and eternal," is meaningless to a naturalist. Values are things valued; in order for anything to possess value, it must satisfy the needs of a valuer: in short, there must be a valuer. Certainly, an animal values the things of reality differently from a man; a spittoon has no value for a dog at all; and no doubt a god values things differently, too. But for Arp to suggest that he values something which goes "beyond

21

human values" is to imply logically that he is not human at all, that he employs an inhuman scale of values instead. No one can be unsympathetic to Arp's disgust with contemporary life, with desire for simple, authentic creation in its place. But to suggest that a general liberation of creativity in people is blocked by the methods of "reason"—the methods of intelligence—comes close to irresponsibility, though whether morally, or merely in the case of words, it is difficult from the present piece to tell.

Probably the article of greatest interest for the American reader is André Breton's rather lengthy survey of the "Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism," since the tenets of Mondrian and Arp are considerably better understood here than those of surrealism. It is generally conceded that Breton speaks with more authority than anyone else about surrealism; therefore his article may be regarded as the final judgment, from a surrealist point of view, on the intuitions and accomplishments of surrealism until now. Discussion of surrealism from another point of view would be out of place, no doubt, in W V It ought [to] be remarked as an aside, however, to the American painter struggling with the problems of l'art moderne in that terrible isolation inevitably the lot in this country that he ought to note, as a by-product of Breton's larger thesis, but one of cardinal interest to us here, how numerous are the advantages of collaboration. Modern art, like any research, is an empirical business, a matter of exploring this intuition or that, of constant poetical verification. Many minds are better for the task than one. Their steady intercourse serves as a curative goad to action, as a relentless guide to the central problem, and as a constantly alive if sometimes sadistic public. From Breton's article surrealism emerges as more consequential than any surrealist; just as its predecessor romanticism was greater than any of the romantics. Any of the participating individuals would have been less effective without surrealism. It may even be that collaboration such as this frees the mind to an extent that the persecutions within the group which collaborations always involve are secondary. The difficulty in regard to American painters is not that they cannot paint, though one in despair pretends to think so. The difficulty is that American painters have never seen the modern problem; and having never seen the problem, by definition have never been able to contribute to its visual symbolization. The problem is seldom by virtue of talent alone, no matter how great. It is more normal to learn it from collaboration, from collaboration such as surrealism represents. But I hold it axiomatic that, to the degree that it may attempt to infringe on the integrity or dignity of the individual, any collaboration must be rejected, no matter what its advantages. In the face of love, one gives; in the face of hate, one defends.

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NOTE ON MODERN ART ca.1943

What is this modern art which has preoccupied seven generations of artists, which has filled them with a profound and silent joy? In the language of the studios this modern art is the union of the eternal and the fleeting, the union of the eternal problem of the artist—the translation of experience into space—with the unique problem, the space of this place and time.

Handwritten on one sheet of note paper, ca. 1943. First published in Joan Banach, Robert Motherwell: A Painter's Album (Barcelona: Fundaci6 Antoni T&pies, 1996), p. 11.

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P R E F A C E TO A P O L L I N A I R E ' S THE CUBIST

PAINTERS

1944

Historical: It can be remarked of Guillaume Apollinaires The Cubist Painters (subtitled Aesthetic Meditations): i. It is a book greatly admired by 20th century painters, perhaps more so than any other critical book we have; ii. it is as close to an accurate account of the felt ideas of an important group of painters at the moment of their greatest innovations as can be reasonably expected, apart from writings by the painters themselves; iii. the book's authenticity is owing to the circumstance that Apollinaire, as a cubist poet, participated in the generation and formulation of cubism as a point of view; cubism was inspired by the new rationale of French poetry (the symbolist tradition) which came to it via Apollinaire, as well as by previous developments in painting (Cézanne); iv. the book still exerts a certain influence as a statement of some of the more general aims of modern painting, and as a model for subsequent poets (e.g., André Breton) in writing of contemporary painters. Apart from its historical value, the chief virtue of The Cubist Painters—as of its leading character, Picasso—is inspirational, a delight in creativity, no matter what new form. The book suffers from its journalistic nature, but its main weakness lies in the direction of a certain irresponsibility. Actual: Many of the most interesting developments in modern painting since circa 1910 have been inspired by cubism: the futurists' desire to portray the motion of objects (e.g., Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase") was directly suggested by the cubist dissolution of the "object" into its "process"; the major non-figurative painters, Kandinsky and Mondrian, developed the implied annihilation of representation in cubism—Mondrian, the so-called "intellectual " painter, fell in love atfirstsight with

Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations 1913, The Documents of Modern Art, no. 1 (New York: Wittenborn, 1944), pp. 5-6. (Second revised edition, 1949.) This is the first volume in the Documents of Modern Art series. Bibliography by Bernard Karpel. Translated from the French by Lionel Abel. In addition to the preface, Motherwell supplied the paragraph headings and editor's notes for this edition. Speaking at the Seventh Annual Conference of the Committee on Art Education, Central High School of Needle Trades, New York, on March 19,1949, Motherwell described his objectives for the series as follows: "The statements of artists themselves constitute the literature that is most inspiring to others, and especially younger artists, as though dreams related were a more direct route to another's mind than an analysis of behavior; and it is young artists and poets, not scholars or historians, whose wants I have had in mind in editing the Documents of Modern Art series" (in Stephanie Terenzio, ed., The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], p. 60).

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cubism's structure, the linear division of the picture-surface; the dadaists' (e.g., Arp, Duchamp, Ernst, Schwitters) principal medium was an ironic use of the greatest of the cubist discoveries, the papier collé, the trend of certain artists (e.g., Arp, Brancusi, Calder, Giacometti, Moore, Mondrian) towards replacing a "picture" of the world by an "object" in the world derives from the cubist papier collé, wherein an object, instead of being represented, is itself glued on to the picture; the most painterly of the surrealist artists (e.g., Masson, Mirò) have brought to the surrealist subject-matter the cubist formal means; the effect of cubism can be seen in some of the most beautiful work of Henri Matisse (ca. 1912—17); and finally the cubist structure remains the basis of the form of the later work of the greatest of the cubists, Braque, Gris, Léger and Picasso. "Guernica," for instance, is constructed on the principles of the papier collé. Biographical: Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzki), one of the most interesting poets of the period in France, was born in Rome, the 26th of August, 1880, apparently an illegitimate child of a woman who may have been the daughter of a Polish general. Apollinaire was raised and educated on the Riviera in easy circumstances, and after some travel in Belgium, Holland, and Germany settled, as a young man, in Paris. There, after having been a member of Alfred Jarry's circle, he met Picasso and his bohemian friends, and the relationship between them (beginning ca. 1905) ultimately produced cubism. Cubism was primarily concerned with plastic problems, but at the same time it is possible that, without Apollinaire's lack of inhibitions in regard to painting—after all, he was not a painter—without his remarkable dexterity in rationalizing cubisms direction, and without his enthusiastic and even courageous leadership, grounded in an extraordinary personal vitality and charm, cubism might not have dared to have gone so far toward the unknown. The Cubist Painters, published in 1913, was apparently written in 1911—in any case, before 1912, the year in which Apollinaire made some dated additions to it. Shortly before his death, he invented the word 'surréalisme,' literally 'superrealism,' as a descriptive subtitle for a play he had written. He died on the 10th of November, 1918, of the so-called Spanish influenza, after having been wounded on the Western front as a soldier of France. Bibliographical (English): A less satisfactory translation of The Cubist Painters ran serially in the Little Review (N.Y.) in the early '20s. There are English versions of Apollinaire's fantasy, The Poet Assassinated (NX., 1923), of a brief notice on Henri Matisse (in Henri Matisse, Cahiers d'art, Paris and N.Y., 1931), and of several poems, in the anthology European Caravan (London and N.Y., 1931). There is an admirably detailed discussion of Apollinaire in Georges Lemaître's From Cubism to Surrealism in French Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), though markedly hostile because middleclass in point of view; this book contains an adequate French bibliography. René

25

Lalou's Contemporary French Literature (London and N.Y., 1924) somewhat unsympathetically analyzes Apollinaire's poetry. The standard works in English on cubism are: Cubism (London, 1913) by Gleizes and Metzinger; Cubists and Post-Impressionism (Chicago, 1914) by Eddy; The Foundations of Modern Art (London and N.Y., 1931) by Ozenfant; Cubism and Abstract Art (N.Y., 1936) by Barr; and Modern French Painters (London and N.Y., 1939) by Wilenski. There is an excellent bibliography in Barr's systematic book.

26

T H E MODERN P A I N T E R ' S WORLD 1944

I must apologize for my subject, which is that of the relation of the painter to a middleclass world. This is not the most interesting relation by which to grasp our art. More interesting are the technical problems involved by the evolution of artistic structure. More fundamental is the individual problem, the capacity of an artist to absorb the shocks of reality, whether coming from the internal or external world, and to reassert himself in the face of such shocks, as when a dog shakes off water after emerging from the sea. The twentieth century has been one of tremendous crises in the external world, yet, artistically speaking, it has been predominantly a classic age. In such epochs it is architecture, not painting or poetry or music, which leads. Only modern architecture, among the great creations of twentieth-century art, is accepted quite naturally by everyone. Both Surrealist and "non-figurative" painting, with which I am concerned in this lecture, are the feminine and masculine extremes of what, when we think of the post-impressionists, the fauves, the cubists, and the art which stems, in conception, from them, has been a classic age. Great art is never extreme . . . Criticism moves in a false direction, as does art, when it aspires to be a social science. The role of the individual is too great. If this were not so, we might all well despair. The modern states that we have seen so far have all been enemies of the artist; those states which follow may be, too. Still, the social relation is a real one, and perhaps the little geography that I have made, in the text which follows, of the contemporary painter's response to a property-loving world is not without value. But I cannot introduce my argument without having first remarked on the strict limitations of the subject, without having admitted how oversimplified this geography is. The function of the artist is to express reality asfelt. In saying this, we must remember that ideas modify feelings. The anti-intellectualism of English and American artists has led them to the error of not perceiving the connection between the feeling of modern

"The Modern Painters World," Dyn i, no. 6 (November 1944): 9-14. Written early in August 1944 and presented as a lecture at the "Pontigny en Amérique" conference at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, on August 10,1944. The conference was divided into four sessions. Motherwell spoke at the third session, titled "Arts Plastique," which was moderated by André Masson. Other participants included Robert Goldwater, Stanley William Hayter, Jean Hélion, José Luis Sert, and Ossip Zadkine. The lecture text was originally titled "The Place of the Spiritual in a World of Property." It was retitled for publication in Dyn.

27

forms and modern ideas. By feeling is meant the response of the "body-and-mind" as a whole to the events of reality. It is the whole man who feels in artistic experience as when we say with Plato: "The man has a pain in his finger" ( The Republic, 462 D), and not, "The finger has a pain." I have taken this example from Bosanquet, who goes on to say: "When a 'body-and-mind' is, as a whole, in any experience, that is the chief feature . . . of what we mean by feeling. Think of him as he sings, or loves, or fights. When he is as one, I believe it is always through feeling . . . " (Three Lectures on Aesthetic.) The function of the modern artist is by definition the felt expression of modern reality. This implies that reality changes to some degree. This implication is the realization that history is "real," or, to reverse the proposition, that reality has a historical character. Perhaps Hegel was the first fully to feel this. With Marx this notion is coupled with the feeling of how material reality i s . . . It is because reality has a historical character that we feel the need for new art. The past has bequeathed us great works of art; if they were wholly satisfying, we should not need new ones. From this past art, we accept what persists [as] eternally valuable, as when we reject the specific religious values of Egyptian or Christian art, and accept with gratitude their form. Other values in this past art we do not want. To say this is to recognize that works of art are by nature pluralistic: they contain more than one class of values. It is the eternal values that we accept in past art. By eternal values are meant those which, humanly speaking, persist in reality in any space-time, like those of aesthetic form, or the confronting of death. Not all values are eternal. Some values are historical—if you like, social, as when now artists especially value personal liberty because they do not find positive liberties in the concrete character of the modern state. It is the values of our own epoch which we cannot find in past art. This is the origin of our desire for new art. In our case, for modern art... The term "modern" covers the last hundred years, more or less. Perhaps it was Eugène Delacroix who was the first modern artist. But the popular association with the phrase "modern art" like that of medieval art, is stronger than its historical denotation. The popular association with medieval art is religiousness. The popular association with modern art is its remoteness from the symbols and values of the majority of men. There is a break in modern times between artists and other men without historical precedent in depth and generality. Both sides are wounded by the break. There is even hate at times, though we all have a thirst for love. The remoteness of modern art is not merely a question of language, of the increasing "abstractness" of modern art. Abstractness, it is true, exists, as the result of a long, specialized internal development in modern artistic structure. But the crisis is the modern artists' rejection, almost in toto, of the values of the bourgeois world. In this world modern artists form a kind of spiritual underground. . .

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Modem art is related to the problem of the modern individual's freedom. For this reason the history of modern art tends at certain moments to become the history of modern freedom. It is here that there is a genuine rapport between the artist and the working-class. At the same time, modern artists have not a social, but an individualist experience of freedom: this is the source of the irreconcilable conflict between the Surrealists and the political parties of the working-class.

The social condition of the modern world which gives every experience its form is the spiritual breakdown which followed the collapse of religion. This condition has led to the isolation of the artist from the rest of society. The modern artist's social history is that of a spiritual being in a property-loving world. No synthesized view of reality has replaced religion. Science is not a view, but a method. The consequence is that the modern artist tends to become the last active spiritual being in the great world. It is true that each artist has his own religion. It is true that artists are constantly excommunicating each other. It is true that artists are not always pure, that some times they are concerned with their public standing or their material circumstance. Yet for all that it is the artists who guard the spiritual in the modern world. The weakness of socialists derives from the inertness of the working-class. The weakness of artists derives from their isolation. Weak as they are, it is these groups who provide the opposition. The socialist is to free the working-class from the domination of property, so that the spiritual can be possessed by all. The function of the artist is to make actual the spiritual, so that it is there to be possessed. It is here that art instructs, if it does at all.

In the spiritual underground the modern artist tends to be reduced to a single subject, his ego . . . This situation tells us where to expect the successes and failures of modern art. If the artist's conception, from temperament and conditioning, of freedom is highly individualistic, his egoism then takes a romantic form. Hence the Surrealists' love at first sight for the Romantic period, for disoriented and minor artists: individualism limits size. If the artist, on the contrary, resents the limitations of such subjectivism, he tries to objectify his ego. In the modern world, the way open to the objectivization of the ego is through form. This is the tendency of what we call, not quite accurately, abstract art. Romanticism and formalism both are responses to the modern world, a rejection, or at least a reduction, of modern social values. Hence the relative failure of Picasso's public mural of the Spanish Republic's pavilion in the Paris Exposition, The Bombing of Guernica. Hence Picasso s great successes, given his great personal gifts, with the formal and emotional inventions in cubism, the papier

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colli, and even in many of the preliminary drawings for Guernica; here it is a question of Picasso's own genius. In the public mural, it is a question of his solidarity with other men. Picasso is cut off from the great social classes, by the decadence of the middle-class and the indifference of the working-class, by his own spirituality in a property-ridden world. Guernica is therefore a tour de force. It expresses Picasso's indignation, as an individual, at public events. In this it is akin to Goya's Los Desastres de la Guerra. The smaller format of etchings, or even of easel paintings is more appropriate. We see this in the greater effective horror of Picasso's Girl with a Cock. The mural form, by virtue of its size and public character, must speak for a whole society, or at the very least, a whole class. Guernica hangs in an uneasy equilibrium between now disappearing social values, i.e., moral indignation at the character of modern life—what Mondrian called the tragic, as opposed to the eternal and the formal, the aesthetics of the papier colU. We admire Picasso for having created Guernica. We are moved by its intent. Yet how accurately, though intuitively, art measures the contradictions of life. Here a contradiction exists. So long as the artist does not belong, in the most concrete sense, to one of the great historical classes of humanity, so long he cannot realize a social expression in all its public fullness. Which is to say, an expression for, and not against. The artist is greatest in affirmation. This isolation spiritually cripples the artist, and sometimes gives him, at present, a certain resemblance to Dostoyevsky's idiot.

The history of Picasso, from one point of view, is that of his effort not to be limited to the strictly aesthetic, not to strip his art bare of a full social content, and contemplate her merely under the eternal aspect of beauty. He would not so impoverish himself. It is an aesthetician's error to suppose that the artist's principal concern is Beauty, any more than the philosopher's principal concern is Truth. Both are technical problems, which the artist and the philosopher must solve, but they do not represent the end in view. To express the felt nature of reality is the artists principal concern. Picasso wills therefore the retention of social values, at any cost, just as Masson strives with a kind of desperation, like Delacroix, to raise modern painting out of the petty relations of modern life to the level of our great humanist past. But since Picasso, no more than any artist, can accept the values of a middle-class world, he must, in retaining them, treat them with a savage mockery, like Joyce. Here somewhere is the ground of Picasso's otherwise unparalleled parody of the history of art. It was the late Piet Mondrian who accepted the impoverishment of his art involved by the rejection of social values. He was perhaps less opposed to ordinary life than indifferent to its drama. It was the eternal, the "universal," in his terminology, which preoccupied him: he had an affinity with oriental saints, with, say, Mallarmé. Since the aesthetic is the main quality of the eternal in art, it may be that this is why Mondrian's work, along with certain aspects of automatism, was thefirsttechnical advance in twen-

30

tieth century painting since the greatest of our discoveries, the papier collé. It was Mondrian who accepted most simply that debased social values provide no social content.

History has its own ironies. It is now Mondrian, who dealt with the "eternal," who dates the most. To underestimate the capacity of the individual to transcend the social, is to deny the possibility of art now.

The present ruling class was able to gain its freedom from the aristocracy by the accumulation of private property. Property is the historical base of contemporary freedom. The danger lies in thinking we own only our private possessions. Property creates the unfreedom of the majority of men. "When this majority in turn secures its freedom by expropriating the bourgeoisie, the condition of its freedom is the unfreedom of the bourgeoisie; but whereas the bourgeoisie like all ruling classes, requires an unfree exploited class for its existence, the proletariat does not require to maintain the bourgeoisie in order to maintain its own freedom." (Caldwell, Reality and Illusion?) There is hope therefore of ending the conflict inherent in class society.

The artists problem is with what to identify himself. The middle-class is decaying, and as a conscious entity the working-class does not exist. Hence the tendency of modern painters to paint for each other . . . The preponderance of modern artists come from the middle-class. To this class modern art is always hostile by implication, and sometimes directly so. Even before the socialists, the artists recognized the enemy in the middle-class. But being themselves of middle-class origin, and leading middle-class lives—certainly not the lives of the proletariat—the artist in a certain sense attacks himself. He undermines his own concrete foundation. He is then led to abstract eternal goods from reality. Here begins the rise of abstract art. All art is abstract in character. But it is especially in modern times that after the operation of abstraction so little remains. The artists hostility for the middle-class is reciprocated. This period, more than others, has detested its greatest creations, even when made by extremely conventional beings, like Cézanne. In the face of this hostility, there have been three possible attitudes of which the artist was not always conscious: to ignore the middleclass and seek the eternal, like Delacroix, Seurat, Cézanne, the cubists, and their heirs; to support the middle-class by restricting oneself to the decorative, like Ingres, Corot, the impressionists in general, and the fauves; or to oppose the middleclass, like Courbet, Daumier, Pissarro, Van Gogh, and the dadaists. This last class

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tends to be destroyed by the struggle. Some artists, like Picasso, have had all three relations to the middle-class. Actually, nearly all modern painters have been rejected by the middle-class until their works gained a property-value. Henri Matisse had to resist a career as a Salon painter; Manet and Degas were involved in the impressionists fight; Rouault is not mentioned in a recent comprehensive work on modern Catholic painting. The sentimental and academic painting which the middle-class really likes disappears with its patrons. The right-wing Surrealists and "neo-romantics" have been thefirstmodern painters to be accepted from the beginning by the middle-class.

The Surrealists had the laudable aim of bringing the spiritual to everyone. But in a period as demoralized as our own, this could lead only to the demoralization of art. In the greatest painting, the painter communes with himself. Painting is his thought's medium. Others are able to participate in this communion to the degree that they are spiritual. But for the painter to communicate with all, in their own terms, is for him to take on their character, not his own. 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. The medium of painting is color and space: drawing is essentially a division of space. Painting is therefore the mind realizing itself in color and space. The greatest adventures, especially in a brutal and p o l i c e d period, take place in the mind. Painting is a reality, among realities, which has been felt and formed. It is the pattern of choices made, from the realm of possible choices, which gives a painting its form. The content of painting is our response to the paintings qualitative character, as made apprehendable by its form. This content is the feeling "body-and-mind." The "body-and-mind," in turn, is an event in reality, the interplay of a sentient being and the external world. The "body-and-mind" being the interaction of the animal self and the external world, is just reality itself. It is for this reason that the "mind," in realizing itself in one of its mediums, expresses the nature of reality as felt. In benevolent periods the external world, in its social aspects, contributes greatly to this interaction. In other periods, like our own, the external world contributes less, and the choices of the mind are, from necessity, less rich. For the right-wing Surrealists to ask us to interact with the members of society when, to the spiritual mind, they represent no object of desire, is to risk what modern art has gained.

Spinoza reminds us that the thing most important to man is man. Hence the poverty of the modern painter's experience. We long to embrace one another, and instead our relations are false. It is after the French Revolution and the triumph of the bourgeoisie that the human figure disappears from painting, and the rise of landscape be32

gins. With Cezanne landscape itself comes to an end, and from him to the cubists the emphasis is changed: the subject becomes "neutral." Now certain painters wish to be called non-figurative . . .

The transitional figures, appearing before the middle-class hold in the world became strong, were Goethe, Beethoven and Goya. The first to disassociate themselves from class, they were able to identify themselves with humanity, with all men. They have a size, a fertility, a vitality subsequendy unmatched. It is in the unindustrialized Spanishspeaking countries of the Occident that this humanism, in a far more popular form, it is true, still persists. In an era where the greatest painters all skirt the inhuman, the too abstract, the Spaniards Picasso and Miró are specially loved, just as in the political sphere it is Spanish civil war and the Mexican efforts which strike our hearts. Yet this humanismo popular is no true solution to the contradictions which split industrial society. Our reaction to it is rather an instinctive response to the humanism of the unindustrialized past.

Empty of all save fugitive relations with other men, there are increased demands on the individual's own ego for the content of experience. We say that the individual withdraws into himself. Rather, he must draw from himself. If the external world does not provide experience's content, the ego must. The ego can draw from itself in two ways: the ego can be the subject of its own expression, in which case the painters' personality is the principal meaning expressed; otherwise the ego can socialize itself— i.e., become mature and objectified—through formalization. In terms of Freud's fictions, the ego is the synthesis of the "superego" and the "id." The superego represents the external world: the father, the family, society, in short, authority. The id represents the inner world: our basic animal drives. In the situation in which the ego rebels against the authority of the external world, but still retains an aspect of that world which is eternal, the aesthetic, the superego is the effect of society; in the present case those values have been reduced to that of form. Form, like the influence of society in the usual superego, comes from the outside, the world. It is in this sense that formalization represents a socialization of the ego. In rejecting the values of middle-class society, as a historical event, the aesthetic, and other eternal values, like chance, love, and logic, are what remain. It is the nature of such art to value above all the eternal, the "pure," the "objective." Thus Mondrian used to speak of the "universal." Thus the notion of "pure form" among the non-figurative painters, and Valéry s idea of the "pure self." Thus the modern sculptor's admiration for the purity of materials. Thus Arp's violent attacks on Romantic painters' egoism; and the general admiration of abstract painters for an art without a Self.. . The desire for the universal is that for one of its forms, the aesthetic; the desire for purity is the rejection of contemporary social values for the aes33

thetic; the desire for objectivity is that for the socialization of the ego through the aesthetic. Lissitsky's white square on a white ground contains the logic of the aesthetic position in its most implacable form. The power of this position must not be underestimated. It has produced some of the greatest creations of modern art. But the fundamental criticism of the purely formalist position is how it reduces the individual's ego, how much he must renounce. No wonder there is such insistence among formalists on perfection. Such limited material is capable of perfection, and with perfection it must replace so much else.

The Surrealist position is far more contradictory. They have been the most radical, romantic defenders of the individual ego. Yet part of their program involves its destruction. Where the abstractionists would reduce the content of the superego to the aesthetic, not even the aesthetic has value for the Surrealists. It serves merely as a weapon of the middle-class. Authority from the external world is rejected altogether. This is the Dada strand in the fabric of Surrealism. With the content of the superego gone, the Surrealists are driven to the animal drives of the id. From hence the Surrealist's admiration for men who have shattered the social content of the superego, for Lautréamont and the Marquis de Sade, for children and the insane. This is the Sadistic strand. It is from this direction that Surrealism tends to become predominantly sexual. Yet it is plainly impossible for cultivated men to live on the plane of animal drives. It is therefore a pseudo-solution to the problem posed by the decadence of the middle-class. A second major tendency of Surrealism is to renounce the conscious ego altogether, to abandon the social and the biological, the superego and the id. One retreats into the unconscious. The paradox is that the retreat into the unconscious is in a sense the desire to maintain a "pure ego." Everything in the conscious world is held to be contaminating, as when the hero in search of the fabulous princess, in the Celtic fairy-tale, must never permit himself to be touched, whether by a leaf, an insect, or anything from the external world, as he flies through the forests on his magic horse. If he were touched by the world, his quest would immediately come to a disastrous end. Even when the hero arrives at the Princess's castle, he must jump from his flying horse through a window without touching the window-frame. He does in the end reach the Princess, and after resting with her seven days and nights, wherein she never opens her eyes, she gives birth to a young god. The Surrealist conception of the journey into the unconscious is of some such hero's task. Automatism is the dark forest through which the path runs. The fundamental criticism of automatism is that the unconscious cannot be directed, that it presents none of the possible choices which, when taken, constitute any expression's form. To give oneself over completely to the unconscious is to become a slave. But here it must be asserted at once that plastic automatism though perhaps not verbal automatism—as

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employed by modern masters, like Masson, Mirò and Picasso, is actually very little a question of the unconscious. It is much more a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms. As such it is one of the twentieth century's greatest formal inventions . . . Still, the impulse towards the unconscious contradicts to a degree that towards the id. Hence a content partly consciously sexual, partly automatic, in many of the Surrealist painters. Self-annihilation is of course undesirable. We are neither merely biological organisms nor automatons. Thus the third tendency of the Surrealists, contradictory to the other two: the destruction of the free ego's enemy, the middle-class. Here is the rapport between Surrealism and the politics of the left. But here the Surrealists have been blocked by the inertness of the working-class.

Because of its internal contradictions, and its impracticality in the external world, the Surrealist position has been subject to a certain instability. What we love best in the Surrealist artists is not their program. The strength of Duchamp and Ernst has been their Dada disrespect for traditional uses of the painter's medium, with its accompanying technical innovations. The strength of Arp, Masson, Mir6 and Picasso lies in the great humanity of their formalism. Dali long ago became reactionary: art has its traitors, too.

The argument of this lecture is that the materialism of the middle-class and the inertness of the working-class leave the modern artist without any vital connection to society, save that of the opposition; and that modern artists have had, from the broadest point, to replace other social values with the strictly aesthetic. Even where the Surrealists have succeeded, it has been on technical grounds. This formalism has led to an intolerable weakening of the artist's ego; but so long as modern society is dominated by the love of property—and it will be, so long as property is the only source of freedom—the artist has no alternative to formalism. He strengthens his formalism with his other advantages, his increased knowledge of history and modern science, his connections with the eternal, the aesthetic, his relations with the folk (e.g., Picasso and Mir6), and, finally his very opposition to middle-class society gives him a certain strength. Until there is a radical revolution in the values of modern society, we may look for a highly formal art to continue. We can be grateful for its extraordinary technical discoveries, which have raised modern art, plastically speaking, to a level unreached since the earlier Renaissance. When a revolution in values will take place, no one at present can tell. The technical problems which stand before us I must speak of some other time.

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P L A T E C A P T I O N I N ABSTRACT

AND SURREALIST

ART IN

AMERICA

1944

The Spanish Prison, like all my works, consists of a dialectic between the conscious (straight lines, designed shapes, weighed color, abstract language) and the unconscious (soft lines, obscured shapes, automatism) resolved into a synthesis which differs as a whole from either. The hidden Spanish prisoner must represent the anxieties of modern life, the intense Spanish-Indian color, splendor of any life.

In Sidney Janis, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944), p. 65. After publication of the catalogue, Motherwell changed the title of the painting from The Spanish Prison to Spanish Prison (Window).

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Robert Motherwell, Spanish Prison IWindowl, 1943-44, oil on canvas, 5274 x 42 inches, Collection of Mr. and M r s . Meredith J. Long.

R E V I E W OF C A L D E R ' S THREE YOUNG

RATS

1944

There is this to say apropos the advanced art of our time: that the critical problems of direction and of quality are not kept distinct. Because a given work has originated in the most "modern" milieu, it is supposed to be valuable ipsofacto, just [as] we sometimes assume unthinkingly that because so-and-so is a radical in his politics, he must be a humanist as a man. Otherwise art and politics were only specialized games. But in practice, we can judge nothing but a man's politics from his politics. In the same manner, the point is now so evident that Renaissance modes of expression are obsolete, so little courage and insight are needed to assert it, that novelty is no longer, as it once was, an adequate test of the livingness of a work. What pleasure therefore one finds in welcoming a book of drawings advanced in direction, fine in felt quality. Fresh, simple, humorous, awkward, direct, the drawings are sometimes uncontrolled, never faked. In America this is to be remarked. They are the illustrations of a man who has done what no other American has yet been able to do—create a great non-illustrative art—and who knows in consequence where the problems of art cease and those of illustration begin. In these drawings we see the mind of our best artist at play. They are less serious than Calder s sculpture, mobiles and stabiles; they are less advanced; they are pictures ^something, subjects provided by lively old nursery rhymes. But the drawings are no less free. Personages (invariably naked) hitting, devouring, running from one another, one maiden embracing a pig: There was a young lady loved a swine. "Honey," said she, "Pig-hog, wilt thou be mine?" " H u n c , " said he.

Freedom leads to inventions, the squared branches of "the Calico tree," a transparent coffin so one can see "the worms crawl in," curlicued eyes, noses, private parts. The problem of identity is solved at one stroke: Calder's little boy is just slugs "and snails and puppy-dogs' tails." These marvelous inventions ("nothing but the marvelous is beautiful"—Andre Breton) are disciplined, formed. They are based on line,

"Calder's 'Three Young Rats,'" The New Republic 3, no. 26 (December 25,1944): 874, 876. The book under review is Three Young Rats and Other Rhymes: Drawings by Alexander Calder, edited with an introduction by James Johnson Sweeney (New York: Curt Valentin, 1944).

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on ouAmt, like Klee. When the outline is abandoned occasionally, and there is solid rendering, say a bed, the drawing at once collapses. Thurber comes to mind. The image is more striking than the form. But Calder's energy sustains everything. When the conceptions are linear on a flat surface, the result is art. The limitation bends the felt energy into form. Process hardens into quality. Calder learned the secrets of line drawing through making figures in wire. What could be more happy than discipline in a man so free? Sweeney's sensitive, informed introduction notes that "in making a drawing, a child goes straight to those features it considers most interesting. The rest is omitted or drastically subordinated." My mother has killed me, My father is eating me, My brothers and sisters sit under the table Picking up my bones, And they bury them under the cold marble stones.

"An adult artist can only adapt the virtues of the child's approach to his own ends— a translation . . . which in turn will be acceptable to the child. . . . This is the quality of Calder's 'Three Young Rats' illustrations." Sweeney's great sympathy is always employed to illuminate, and his judgment to perform acts of justice. Certainly Calder's vitality, apart from the intelligence of his stylistic orientation, is due to the recovery of the child in him. Yet it is the metaphysical implication of his mobiles that is stunning—though he, wrapped up in immediate delights, and anti-intellectual perhaps, may not care: "symbolic" art, like philosophical dualisms, has become obsolete. The old picturings of the world have become objects in the world, no longer symbolic but existential, concrete clusters of qualities without reference to a "beyond" or an outside. Moving in this direction, Calder joined company with the cubist papier colli, the dada-surrealist "objects," the glass and metal constructions of Marcel Duchamp, the "sculpture" of Arp, Brancusi, Max Ernst, Giacometti, and Henry Moore, the "new realism" of Mondrian, the ductility and automatism of Braque, Klee, Masson, Mir6, Picasso. Following these great forebears is a still obscure younger generation. The reputed need for a "myth" disappears. The empirical world is discovered to provide sufficient "meaning," adequate objects of desire. The revolution being effected by modern international art is greater than is generally understood.

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PAINTERS' OBJECTS 1944

T h e s t u d y of the b e a u t i f u l is a d u e l in w h i c h t h e a r t i s t c r i e s out in t e r r o r b e f o r e he is v a n q u i s h e d . —Baudelaire

We know there is something odd, we might almost say unnatural, about the conception of abstract a r t . . . We have accepted its existence almost without reflection on how strange, and indeed frightening it is, that I'art moderne, in coming so far, has arrived here. This disturbing sense of oddness is not confined to laymen. Braque, Miro, and Picasso have each, with surprising anger, attacked the idea of a wholly abstract art. Yet we might have expected Braque and Picasso, after their cubist discoveries, and Mir6 and Picasso, after their use of surrealist automatism, to evince a certain sympathy with the abstract search. But no, Picasso replies that to search means nothing in painting: "To find is the thing." Is there, then, some difference between what we have always called abstract art and that extreme form of it, named non-objective art, which is a difference in kind, and not, as we have supposed, merely in degree? For painting plainly has always been a species of abstraction: the painter has selected from the world he knows, a world which is not entirely the same in each epoch, the forms and relations which interested him, and then employed them as he pleased. Past art has had the external world for the painter's model, however variously that world has been conceived. The art of Picasso has differed in the degree of abstraction, but not in the kind of abstraction, from the art of the Renaissance tradition of which he is the bitter finale. But, in the 20th century—as a result of certain conclusions, whether valid or not, drawn from the suppressed premises of cubism—we find an extraordinary phenomenon: by many artists the external world is totally rejected as the painter's model. More particularly, those painters who are usually named non-objective have replaced that model with arbitrary aesthetic elements of the simplest kind. These elements (and their relations) constitute a part of the external world: they in no wise image it. In this, non-objective art differs fundamentally, differs epistemologically, one might say, from other modes of art. . . Still, it is not easy to rid oneself of the 'objects' of the external world. "Painters' Objects," Partisan Review 11, no. 1 (Winter 1944): 93-97. Motherwell's text appeared in Partisan Review's "Art Chronicle." The excerpt from Wallace Stevens is from "The Poems of Our Climate," in Parts of a World (New York: Knopf, 1942), pp. 8-9.

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Much of the power of Mondrian's austere and naked Compositions derives from the "objects" of the external world, just to the extent that we are aware that they are not present. One of the arguments, but not the only argument by any means, which may be deduced from the non-objective painters' works, might be phrased thus: Look! It is not difficult to abandon that dull and tedious system of describing the 'objects' of the world of expressive purposes. We are too intelligent and advanced for so primitive a system. Besides, now we know all about the appearance of the world's "objects," the human body, the perspective of space, the manner in which lightfalls upon trees. To discover those things was the historical task of the Renaissance. We are much more interested in the structure of reality, or—if you object to the philosophical implication, you English-speaking people with your conventional notion that art is principally a question of beauty—what interests us is the structure of painting, not the appearance of the "objects" of the external world. An empty canvas is more to the point, in being itself, an "object, "and not merely an awkward image of "real objects"; and is, moreover, as Kandinsky says, "for lovelier than certain pictures." The problem is more nearly how not to lessen the original virginal loveliness of the canvas... From this direction the oddness of non-objective art is evident. It is an art of negation, a protest against naturalistic descriptiveness as the most adequate vehicle of expression for the modern mind. This protest has not gone unheeded. No major painter of the present is primarily descriptive in his means; and, among the interesting younger painters, none is descriptive at all, so far as we know. The occasional exceptions to this tendency occur against the painter's will, as in those passages where he has not yet found adequate non-descriptive means, or where, with other ends in view, he may still involuntarily, and by chance, seem to refer to the external world. Indeed at present, at this very moment, when non-objective painters have made their point, we are able to feel much less strongly than earlier in the century the historical necessity of the rigid self-imposed limitations of abstract art. We are impelled instead to remark with Wallace Stevens: Say even that this complete simplicity Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed The evilly compounded, vital I And made it fresh in a world of white. A world of clear water, brilliant-edged, Still one would want more, one would need more, More than a world of white and snowy scents.

It may be that the great Mondrian himself now feels such wants and needs. Certainly, his recent painting, Broadway Boogie- Woogie (Museum of Modern Art, New Acquisitions) represents a marked shift on his part from an intent of simple purification to one of expressiveness...

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Now in his old age, and in a foreign country, Mondrian has assembled all his remarkable resources for purely expressive ends. In Broadway Boogie-Woogie the simple elements of his hitherto analytical art have been transformed.1 The former severe black bands are fractured into segments of color so intense in contrast that they jump, so sharp in segment that they become a staccato rhythm against the larger rhythm of the main structure; there are heavier, and by virtue of size (since all the colors are pure), even more intense rests; and all the while the large white background, the eternal World, reinforces the concrete and fugitive drama. For the first time a subject is present, not by virtue of its absence, but actually present, though its appearance is torn away, and only the structure bared. The Modern City! Precise, rectangular, squared, whether seen from above, below, or on the side; bright lights and sterilized life; Broadway, whites and blacks; and boogie-woogie,, the underground music of the at once resigned and rebellious, the betrayed . . . Mondrian has left his white paradise and entered the world. «*»

As a result of the poverty of modern life, we are confronted with the circumstance that art is more interesting than life. "Experience is bound to utility, "as André Breton by common-sense. "The pleasurable "things" of other times for the says, "andguarded most part no longer exist, and those which do no longer suffice. With what our epoch meant to replace the wonderful things of the past—the late afternoon encounters, the leisurely repasts, the discriminations of taste, the graces of manners, and the gratuitous cultivation of minds—what we might have invented, perhaps we shall never know. We have been made too busy with tasks. At what other time could the juxtaposition of a bright square on a white ground have seemed so portentous? The Surrealists alone among modern artists refused to shift the problem to the plane of art. Ideally speaking, ¿«/wrealism became a system for enhancing everyday life. True, the Surrealists were always saying that "poetry should be made by all"; but they did not mean precisely what we have always meant by poetry. If they had been successful, we might not have needed "poetry" at all. Still, their various devices for finding pleasure—spiritual games, private explorations, public provocations, sensory objects, and all the rest—were artificialenough abroad before the war. In the hard and conventional English-speaking world the devices simply could not work. Here it was the Surrealists who were transformed. And it may be that their pioneer, and therefore often naive effort to enhance the life of the modern mind will be forgotten. But in any case, it is not unimportant, this thing Alexander Calder has done, in making objects of pleasure worthy of adults (Museum of Modern Art, Calder Retrospective). Granted, most of us must see them in museums or galleries, and that destroys half the fun. Still, there they are! The playthings of a prince for us all. . . It was Mondrians influence which first led Calder from his earlier pleasantries, and toys for children, to these marvelous objects for the adult mind: "I was very much 42

moved by Mondrian's studio, large, beautiful, and irregular as it was, with the walls painted white, and divided by black lines and rectangles of bright color, like his paintings . . . and I thought at the time how fine it would be if everything there MOVED; though Mondrian himself did not approve of this idea at all." Later it came to be Mir6's shapes among those of abstract artists which Calder liked best. But the essential conditions of his art remained the same: a fruitful union—his native American ingenuity (a preference for tools, rather than the brush), leading in turn to a fresh discovery (an art of motion), coupled with the advances of European art (abstract forms) and European thought (the Surrealist understanding of the desirability of the object of pleasure). The consequence of this union is that Calder s native American gifts become interesting to general culture. There is something splendid about the form of motion, or, more exactly, motion formed; and it is with this that Calder has enchanted us.

Certain individuals represent a young generations artistic chances. There are never many such individuals in a single field, such as painting—perhaps a hundred to begin with. The hazards inherent in man's many relations with reality are so great—there is disease and premature death; hunger and alcoholism and frustration; the historical moment may turn wrong for painters: it most often does; the young artist may betray himself, consciously or not, or may be betrayed—the hazards are so great that not more than five out of a whole young generation are able to develop to the end. And for the most part it is the painting of mature men which is best. The importance of the one-man show of young Jackson Pollock (Art of This Century) lies just in this, that he represents one of the younger generation's chances. There are not three other young Americans of whom this could be said. In his exhibit Pollock reveals extraordinary gifts: his color sense is remarkably fine, never exploited beyond its proper role; and his sense of surface is equally good. His principal problem is to discover what his true subject is. And since painting is his thought's medium, the resolution must grow out of the process of his painting itself.

NOTE i. The intrinsic value of this new picture cannot concern us here. Though it has been sometimes judged a near failure, we regard it as the most important work by Mondrian with which we are acquainted. The value, however, of a non-objective painting, like that of a piece of "pure" music, cannot be proven. "Proof" rests only on persuasion; and in our time we are persuaded by demonstration. But the qualitative greatness of specific sensuous relations, which constitute the content of non-objective art, cannot be demonstrated—as one can demonstrate, and apart from strictly formal qualities, the symbolic richness of the early Chirico, for instance. For the layman there is no "circumstantial evidence" in non-objective art. This does not mean that value-judgments on non-objective art are arbitrary. We merely remark that they cannot be proven; and add that it is difficult to see how anyone, save certain painters, can even discriminate the content of such works, not to speak of valuing them. 43

P R E F A C E TO M O N D R I A N ' S PLASTIC

ART AND PURE PLASTIC

ART

1945 Historical: Among the twentieth century's strongest plastic expressions, e.g., those of Henri Matisse and Picasso, must be put that of the late Piet Mondrian. He called his plastic expression "neo-plasticism." Neo-plasticism has encountered stronger and sometimes more bitter resistance over a longer period of time than any of the others, and it is some measure of its force and vitality that, despite this, it has come to exert an international influence; it must be insisted however that not all of the things influenced by neo-plasticism exhibit its full meaning. As Mondrian himself notes, the influence of neo-plasticism has been, on the whole, greater in the fields of architecture, posters, advertising, layout, and industrial design than in those of painting and sculpture. This may be because these latter fields are bound more to traditional modes of expression. In any case, despite opposition Mondrian always showed an extraordinary willingness to collaborate with allied tendencies, and with younger artists. He believed in an objective and universal expression, so far as possible, and not in a merely personal one. As it has been put, he believed in the individual, but not in individualism. His interest in collaboration is in evidence from the very beginning of his mature activity: in 1917, with van Doesburg, Vantongerloo, J.J. Oud, and other artists and architects, he founded the famous de Stijl group. "Two elements formed the fundamental basis of the work of de Stijl, whether in painting, architecture or sculpture, furniture or typography: in form the rectangle; in color the 'primary' hues, red, blue and yellow" (Barr). The influence of de Stijl spread, in the early '20s, to the famous Bauhaus in Germany (through personal contact with van Doesburg), and then throughout the world. Later in Paris Mondrian participated in the Abstraction-Création group; still later in London with the Circle group; and finally in America in the American Abstract Artists. Biographical: Piet Mondrian (Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan) was born in Amersfoort, Holland, March 7th, 1872. His father and an uncle first taught him drawing; and then a patron supported him for three years at the Amsterdam Academy of Arts. Liv-

"Preface," Piet Mondrian, Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art, 1937, and Other Essays, 1941-194), The Documents of Modern Art, no. 2 (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1945), pp. 5-6. (Updated second edition, 1947, and third edition, 1951.) In the 1947 edition Motherwell updated the bibliographical section of his preface with two notes: the publication of Mondrian's "A New Realism" in the anthology American Abstract Artists (New York: Ram Press, 1946), for which it was written; and the announcement of Essays on Art, by Piet Mondrian, edited by Harry Holtzman, then in preparation. Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James, The New Art—The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian (Boston: G. K. Hall), was not published until 1986.

ing precariously for years afterward, without contact with the most advanced movements in art, he was a naturalistic painter. His own development finally led him to abandon natural color. At the age of thirty-eight, in 1910, he went to Paris, where he was immediately drawn to Cubism—"especially to Picasso and Léger"—and as a result he began to find his own path. In 1914 he returned to Holland for a visit, and the outbreak of the first great war forced him to remain there five years. It was during these years that he collaborated in the founding of the de Stijl group. He returned to Paris after the war, published Le Neo-Plasticisme (1920), and devoted himself to painting, living month after month on unbelievably small sums. With the imminence of the second great war he left Paris for London (1938). There he underwent the worst of the blitz: the windows of his studio were destroyed; a time-bomb finally drove him out. He arrived in New York City on October 3rd, 1940, where he was happiest of any place. He had always admired what he called the "ripe mentality" of Americans; he considered America to be the most advanced of all countries; and he loved urban life, New York City, people, dancing, and hot jazz. Here he made his last great masterpieces, the New York and especially the Boogie-Woogie series; and here at the age of seventy he held his first one-man show. His outward demeanor was unpretentious, kindly, reserved; behind this behavior was one of thefinestminds and most passionate natures modern painting has yet known. He died of pneumonia February 1st, 1944. He is buried in a simple grave in Cypress Hills Cemetery, New York City. Bibliographical (in English): Toward the True Vision of Reality was originally printed as a pamphlet (at the time of Mondrian's first exhibition) by the Valentine Gallery, N.Y., 1942; Pure Plastic Art in the catalogue Masters of Abstract Art, Helena Rubinstein Salon, N.Y., 1942; Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art in Circle (edited by Gabo, Martin, and Nicholson), London, 1937; and Abstract Art as a preface to Art of This Century (edited by Peggy Guggenheim), N.Y., 1942. The latter two articles are here reprinted with slight changes by Mondrian. Liberation from Oppression in Art and Life and A New Realism are published here for the first time. The present book comprises the complete essays written by Mondrian in English. Writings about Mondrian in English are few and slight in comparison with his importance. Reference may be made to James Johnson Sweeney's Plastic Redirections in 20th Century Painting, Chicago, 1934; to Alfred H. Barr's admirable Cubism and Abstract Art, N.Y., 1936; to the catalogue of the Museum of Living Art, edited by A. E. Gallatin, N.Y., 1940; and to The New Vision by L. Moholy-Nagy, N.Y., 1945 (3rd ed.). Undoubtedly the standard book in English will be James Johnson Sweeney's forthcoming PietMondrian, N.Y., 1945.

«5

PERSONAL STATEMENT 1945

To begin with, this picture is not abstract. It is representational pictures that abstract from reality, abstracting the color and contour of houses, as well as other things, from the concrete nature of the external world. My picture represents nothing; but it is something—an event in the world, like anything else. You come to know it as you learn to know another person, or a tree—the picture has its particular characteristics, in the Hegelian sense, as they have theirs. But if my picture is not abstract, it is imaginative. Its feeling-content happens to be just how I feel to myself (hence its name, 'Autoportrait'), expressed as directly and cleanly and relevantly as I can communicate the concrete felt pattern of my senses. How I feel is not how I look; naturally then I have not represented my visage. This is the justification for the non-representational means employed in this work. Nonrepresentation for its own sake is no more, though no less interesting than representation for itself. There simply happen to be certain problems of expression which representational means cannot solve. No one is responsible for this situation, unless you would hold reality itself at fault. And, as Apollinaire says, that is all. The main thing is not to be frightened. Or rather, since this is impossible, to act as if one is not. "Personal Statement," A Painting Prophecy—1950, exhibition catalogue (Washington, D.C.: David Porter Gallery, 1945), n.p. Other artists participating in the exhibition were William Baziotes, Stuart Davis, Jimmy Ernst, Adolph Gotdieb, Karl Knaths, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Mark Rothko.

ii

Robert Motherwell, Personage lAutoportraitl, 1943, collage of Japanese and Western papers, with gouache, oil and ink on paperboard, 40Ve x 25V4 inches. S o l o m o n R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy G u g g e m h e i m Collection, 1976.

R E V I E W OF HENRY MOORE'S

SCULPTURE

AND

DRAWINGS

1945

This volume in plan and execution is in every way worthy of its subject. It has large, especially clear reproductions of all the artist's sculpture, plus many drawings, some in color; the introduction is by Herbert Read, apparently the most active enthusiast of modernist art in England; Henry Moore's own writings are included; finally, there is a biographical chronology, a bibliography, and a photograph of the artist. The book is big enough, and physically attractive. One is bound to hope that not all of those who would derive deep pleasure from it will be prevented by the price from having it. Henry Moore's accomplishment, in becoming the first major figure in art to appear in Britain in generations, is of magnitude under any circumstances; it is more remarkable in that his work was realized at home, not in pre-Nazi Germany or in Paris, that is to say, realized in a segment of the hostile and plastically ignorant Englishspeaking world. For this reason every British or American artist watches him with excitement, good will, and admiration. The actual nature of this work is not easy to explain to a literary public. Perhaps the plainest preliminary is to say that he loves the forms, at once concrete and abstract, but not very representational, of our great international modernist style, that he constantly employs these forms with great virtuosity, that he has borrowed them, since he is not especially inventive, from nearly everyone, among others Axp, Brancusi, Chirico, Giacometti, Klee, Laurens, Lipchitz, Mir6, Zadkine and, above all, Picasso; but that, despite this, his work is not essentially abstract, but traditional and naturalistic. It is as though he did not fully comprehend the ends of abstraction, but loved its forms sensuously, as one might love an Eskimo object without knowing what it was for. Standing on the frontier of an absolute conception, he remains an empiricist and undecided; then sometimes he plunges, without premeditation. His quality is not universal at all, but personal and romantic: As far as my own experience is concerned, I sometimes begin a drawing with no preconceived problem to solve, with only the desire to use pencil on paper, and I make lines, tones, shapes with no conscious aim; but as my mind takes in what is so produced, a point arrives where some idea becomes conscious and crystallizes, and then a control and ordering take place.

"Henry Moore's Sculpture and Drawings," The New Republic 113, no. 17 (October 22,1945): 538. The book under review is Henry Moore's Sculpture and Drawings, introduction by Herbert Read (New York: Curt Valentin, 1945).

48

This is kin to the technique of automatism systemized by the surrealists. It has been a constant resource, with differing functions for Ernst, Klee, Masson, Mir6 and Picasso—a weapon for inventing forms. Some of these forms, though concrete in being tactile and visual, are abstract. Everyone understands abstraction from nature, whether in art or science: it is a mode of selection. There is another kind, abstraction from the possible, which, though it may ultimately refer to the background of experience, can be taken (for certain purposes) as an internal and, if necessary, arbitrary system of relations, such as can be found in logic or mathematics. The late Piet Mondrian was the most thorough and consistent constructor among artists of such an abstract structure; and these abstract means were related to a clear and intelligible end: the union, and in being a union, a dissolution of painting, sculpture and architecture into a harmonious ensemble. As early as 1912, when Henry Moore was still a youth, the friend and appreciator of the Cubist painters, Guillaume Apollinaire, saw the point: "When sculpture departs from nature it becomes architecture." It is for this reason that representation of any kind disappeared from Mondrian's work. What has to be insisted on is a relation between means and ends. It is hard to believe that Henry Moore is profoundly interested in architecture. He is an isoU and romantic living in a traditional and literary country. Rather than relate, he dominates, by virtue of his powerful personality. Still, he is much taken by modern sculptural forms, and by other media—painting, drawing, collage, and perhaps mathematical objects. These last, extremely beautiful and complex models made by mathematicians to represent equations, may have suggested the general character of Moore's most advanced and eloquent creations, his so-called "stringed figures." Imagine large stones, or columns of lead or hard wood profoundly indented, so that planes stick out, all elegantly curved; and the planes perforated, with colored strings or metal wires drawn through and across an imaginary and many-stringed guitar. These objects are beautiful to behold, and nearly purely aesthetic. They constitute a complete contradiction to his most recent work, a "Madonna and Child" commissioned by St. Matthew's Church, Southampton. The solution of this contradiction must be his present problem. On that solution depends the value his creations will exhibit to the future.

if

P R E F A C E TO P A A L E N ' S FORM AND ca.

SENSE

1945

The problems which confront each generation of painters are reflected in the character of its actual works of art, and in its writing about them. Each expression of these problems varies with the concrete influences to which a painter has been subject, and with the insight he has gained into the inherent problems of a period, that is, into the contradictions which it asks to be resolved. In this regard the genuine problems of a period emerge most clearly in the relation of the past to the present; this relation is always manifest in the work of younger artists. Such writers as Herbert Read and André Breton, among other writers and painters, have written strictly in support of the painting of Paalen, one of the most active of the younger painters; he obviously represents the definitive formulation of a point of view among the multiplicity of our time. His painting has undergone a continuous evolution, from the abstraction of the period when he participated in the Abstraction-Création group in Paris (1933-35), and the automatism of this collaboration with the Surrealist group (1936-40), to the new work reproduced in the present volume (which is to be exhibited for the first time in the United States at Art of This Century, New York City, April 1945). Paalen was born in Vienna, in 1907, of Austrian and French parentage. He lived in Paris for many years, and since the war has continued his work in Villa Obregon (San Angel), near Mexico City. In 1940 he organized the large "International Exhibition of Surrealism" in Mexico City; but in the following year he broke with the Surrealists on theoretical grounds. With slight modifications the text of Form and Sensefirstappeared in the art review Dyn, founded in 1941 by Paalen in Mexico, and printed in English and French. He has written the first serious study of the antiquity of the Indian art of the Pacific northwest coast of America under the title "Totem Art." In Dyn he has published

Complete typescript in two pages; handwritten early draft on one sheet of drawing paper. Motherwell met the Austrian-born artist Wolfgang Paalen in 1941 during his stay in Coyoacan, Mexico. He translated Paalen's essay "The New Image" from the French for the inaugural issue of Paalen's review Dyn (Mexico City), i, no. 1 (April-May 1942): 7-15. One of two essays by Paalen included in the first issue, "Farewell to Surrealism," would appear in French. Motherwell's text was probably prepared as a preface to the publication of Paalen's Form and Sense in "Problems of Contemporary Art," no. 1 (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1945), pp. 31-41. The series "Problems of Contemporary Art" had no general editor and was described by the publishers on the back cover of the review as "a catch-all for texts relating to the tensions of the arts." The early handwritten draft of Motherwell's preface was first published in Joan Banach, Robert Motherwell: A Painter's Album (Barcelona: Fundaci6 Antoni Tapies, 1996), pp. 12-13.

50

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^ 3 I0 > 34°; intellec-

Modigliani, Amedeo: The Caryatid, 293

tual influences/enthusiasms, 1-12; marriages,

Moholy-Nagy, Liszló, 77,106,124-26, 293,

284, 286, 308-9, 349; Mexico trip, 7,5on,

305; on Hausmann, 147,148; on Schwitters,

286, 301, 308; Paris stay (1938-39), 238,

121,122,148; WORKS: The New Vision, 45;

305-6, 344; politics, 5, 7, 346; in Province-

Vision in Motion, 107,121,147-48

town, 308-11; in Spain, 349-50; teaching,

Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl, 107,147; on Schwitters and Men, 120,124-26

380

54n, 7 9 , 1 8 1 - 8 4 , 1 7 3 . 1 8 5 ; WORKS (AS

ARTIST): Barcelona, 87; La BelleMexicaine,

241; Beside the Sea series, 12,310; The Black Sun, 2; Chi Ama Crede, 12; collages, 241, 243; La Danse, 241; Elegy to the Spanish Republic #i)2, 340,341; Elegy to the Spanish Republic

Nazis, at dinner with Marinetti, Schwitters, and Moholy-Nagy, 124-26 Neff, John Hallmark: Henri Matisse Paper Cutouts, 3i2n, 3 1 3 - 1 4

series, 5,194-95, 310, 340,341, 348; Fishes

Neo-Plasticism, 44. See also Mondrian, Piet

with Red Stripe, 222, 223; The French Line,

Neo-Romantics, 32

241; The Homely Protestant, 65; In Plato's

Nerval, Gérard de, 168

Cave, 11 \Je t'aime series, 241, 332; Jour la

Neutra, Richard, 305

maison, nuit ta rue, 241; Kafka's Room, 336-

the new, 198-99, 207, 224, 272, 280-81, 287

37; The Little Spanish Prison, 344,34s; Lyric

Newman, Barnett, 79, 285, 297, 298, 301, 303,

Suite series, 12, 232-35, 233, 234; Mallarmé's

332; as co-contributor, 63n, 225n; New York

Swan, 241; Open series, 243-44; Personage

Times letter, 302-4

(Autoportrait), 46, 47; Portrait of James Joyce,

New School for Social Research, 301

321; La Résistance, 241; Rimbaud series, 12;

New York: Dada in, 131-34; Parisian artists

Samurai series, 12; Spanish Picture with

in (1939-1945). 291-307

Window, 243, 24311; Spanish Prison (Win-

New York Dada (periodical), 131,152

dow),

New Yorker, 209

3 6 , 3 8 , 2 4 3 ; W O R K S (AS E D I T O R ) :

The Dada Painters and Poets, 104-53 ( s e e

New York Institute of Fine Arts, 333

also under The Daeia Painters and Poets)-,

New York School, 10, 82, 93-98,154-57, 239>

Modern Artists in America, 101-2, ioin.

297, 306, 307; Dada and, 108; exhibits with

See also The Documents of Modern Art

European artists, 297-99; Metropolitan

motion, expressions of, 24, 43

Museum exhibit protest, 95; Surrealists and,

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 53, 7 0 , 1 7 2 , 1 9 1 ,

94,108,157,186, 299-304; Symbolists and,

196, 253, 263, 270, 307, 329 Munnings, Alfred, i62n, 163

New York Times, Gottlieb-Rothko-Newman

Museum of Modern Art (Beaubourg; Paris), 236, 242, 306; Paris-New

289. See also Abstract Expressionism; specific artists

Munch, Edvard, 99

York exhibition,

29m, 318 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 202, 203, 291, 292, 318, 349; "Lyric Suite" donation, 232n; Mir6 retrospectives at, 193; Pollock

letter to, 302-4 Nicholson, Ben, 317; Notes on Abstract Art, 20, 298 Nierendorf Gallery (New York), 291 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9, 301; Birth of Tragedy, 303

exhibit at, 228; Rothko retrospective at, 272;

Noguchi, Isamu, 53n, 186, 309

and Schwitters's Merzbau, 153m; Tony Smith

Noland, Kenneth, 220, 224, 235, 283, 284

on, 323; "What Modern Art Means to Me"

non-figurative painting, 33. See also abstraction,

symposium, i58n museums, 77, 78-79, 306, 330; European artists in American collections, 291-92; lack of internationalism in, 317-18; Motherwell's ideas about, 202-4. See also specific museums music, 27, 251, 253, 255, 283, 329, 343; Ball's sound poems and, 1 1 6 - 1 7 ; notation for, 325;

abstract painting non-objective art, 4 0 - 4 1 , 43m, 94, 107,156. See also abstraction, abstract painting Novalis, 81 Novros, David, 225n Nuremberg, Germany, rebuilding of, 207 Nutter, James B „ 54n

of Satie, 1 1 0 - 1 2 , 1 4 4 ; Surrealism and, 112 Muskie, Edmund, 263

objectivity, 16, 34, 69, 70, 99 objects, 39, 41, 54, 81-82, 230; presence/

National Gallery (London), 349 National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), 204, 306

absence of, 8 1 - 8 2 , 1 9 4 - 9 6 , 1 9 7 Oedipus theme, 301 O'Hara, Frank, 232

nationalism, 166, 270, 302. See also chauvinism

Oldenburg, Claes, 225n

naturalism, 195, 255. See also representation

O'Neill, Eugene, 299

Naville, Pierre, 127,130

Onslow Ford, Gordon, 5, 301, 302

381

Oppenheimer, Max, 116

330; artistic imitation of past styles, 198,

Orbes (periodical), 145

237, 294-95; artistic use of, 168, 288;

order, 54, 55, 97, 211, 339

conservation/value of, 330; the new and,

Oriental art and calligraphy, 9 6 - 9 7 , 1 9 1 , 248,

207; modern art vs. past art, 28, 9 5 , 1 6 0 -

328-29, 338

61, 327-28

originality, 330. See ubo creativity; the new

Patti, Adelina, 74

Orozco, José Clemente, 227

Paulhan, Jean, i76n

Ortega y Gasset, José, 1,1S1

Pavia, Phillip, 225n

O u d , J. J., 44

Paz, Octavio, 319, 325

Oz, Amos, 10

Peirce, Charles Sanders, 77

Ozenfant, Amédée, 140, 238, 241, 293; The Foundations of Modern Art, 26

Penn, Irving, 2i8n Pereira, I. Rice, 53n Péret, Benjamin, 305

Paalen, Wolfgang, 7,50,50n, 301,302; Form and Sense, 50-52,5on Pach, Walter, 131; The Journal of Eugine Delacroix (trans.)> 286-87 Pacific Northwest Indian art: Paalen's descriptions of, 50, 52 Padgett, Ron, 275n painting(s), 32, 97,154,155, 206-8, 214-17,

performance, 251 perspective, 2 1 0 - n Perspectives USA (periodical), 174, i76n Pétain, Philippe, 228 Petersen, E., 305 Pevsner, Antoine, 20, 2on, 184, 298 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 199, 292; "Conversations with Artists," i98n

290; ambiguity and abstractness, 1 7 0 - 7 1 ,

Phillips, Duncan, i86n, 272

207-8, 334; as artisanal, 253, 254; as artist's

philosophy, I, 3 - 4 , 9,10,11, 77; subject-object

statement, 7, 8 - 9 , 32, 55, 302; of children, 267-68; drawing vs., 247, 248-49; empty

relationship, 81. See abo specific philosophers Picabia, Francis, 7 7 , 1 0 9 , 1 1 9 , 1 2 8 , 1 3 9 - 4 1 ,

canvas in, 41, 86, 205, 215, 216, 217; finish-

144-45,152; and Dada split, 127,139;

ing, 205-6, 273,340, 342; on floor, 216, 227;

and Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q.,

interaction between artist and medium, 55-

York, 1 1 3 , 1 3 1 , 1 4 1 ; pre-Dada, 112; WORKS:

56, 86,196-97, 214-15, 216, 252-53, 255,

Entr'acte, no; La Novia, 293; Pine Cone

340; moral choices in, 10, 7 6 , 1 7 9 , 1 9 6 ,

texts, 139-41,152; Poems and Drawings of

132; in New

206-7, 2iin2, 216; Motherwell on his own

the Daughter Born Without a Mother, 141;

work, 6 - 7 , 8,10,57, 7 6 - 7 7 , 86, 205-6, 208,

La Pomme de Pins, 107; Still Life: Portrait

216-17, 243-44, 252-53, 310, 340; nature in,

of Cézanne, 107; Tzara illustrations, 128;

210-11; preconceptions vs. open-endedness in, 206, 214, 216-17, 290, 333, 340, 342. See also artistic process; medium

Udnie, 107 Picasso, Pablo, 163,167,189, 236, 238, 253, 255, 268, 283, 288, 312, 313, 327, 334, 338;

papier collé. See collage

on abstract art, 40; on academic approach,

Paris: Dada in, 128,129,134-38; Motherwell's

174-75,179> 22-8; on artistic goals, 40, 54,

1938-39 stay in, 238, 305-6, 344; student

307; on art philosophers, 331; Apollinaire

unrest (1968) in, 304-5. See also Museum

and, 25; automatism, 35, 40,49; in "Black

of Modern Art (Beaubourg; Paris)

or White" exhibit, 86n; Calder and, 39;

Paris, School of. See School of Paris

Cézanne and, 174-75, '79> 22%> 3°7'> color

Paris-New York exhibition, 29 m , 318. Seeabo

in, 348; Cubism and, 25, 69, 70, 72, 81, 307,

European artists in U.S. Parke-Bernet Gallery (New York), 204 Parrot, Louis, 144 Partisan Review, 7, 28on Pascin, Jules, 238 passion, 54, 85, 97,154,179, 204, 216, 242 the past: American attitudes about, 59, 207, 209; artistic rejections of, 63, 66,120, 2iin2,

382

312, 328; Dada and, 128; on defining art, 247, 278; Duchamp vs., 278, 305; on emotion of painting, 204; humanism of, 29-30, 33, 35,107; Joyce and, 319, 322; Michelangelo and, 171; Mondrian and, 45; Moore and, 48; Motherwell and, 4 , 1 6 5 , 1 6 6 , 288, 343; in "The First Papers of Surrealism" exhibit, 299; on painting as rhyming, 190; Parade

ballet, no, i n ; papier collé and, n , 25, 2930; Pollock and, 227, 228; sexuality in, 190; David Smith and, 218; social relations, 20-21, 32, 61; stature of, 44, 288, 312, 317; Twombly and, 103; on understanding art, 178; writings, 312; WORKS: Girl with a Cock, 30; Guernica, 25, 29-30,173-74, 1 77. ^ i , 188, 292, 338, 349; Guernica drawings, 228, 248, 269-70, 288; The Human Comedy, 184; Woman with Knife and Cock, 228 Picasso Museum (Antibes, France), 203 Pickens, Alton, 53n picture plane, 216, 301, 302, 303, 334 Piero della Francesca, 161, 314 pigments, 89, 90,312. See also color Pine Cone (review), 139-41 Pissarro, Camille, 31,185 Plato, 12, 28, 53, i n play, 12; Surrealists' objects of pleasure, 42, 43 Poe, Edgar Allan, 168-69, 289, 334 poetry, 27, 255; in Chirico, 18,19; Dada, 108, 116-17,120,135-38; of Europeans in exile, 292; painting and, 72, 74, 214; sound, 1 1 6 17,123; Surrealist, 108. See also The Dada Painters and Poets; French literature/poetry; specific poets Poincaré, Henri, 9,170 politics, 5, 7,58, 261, 263,346,347; artistic radicalism and, 281; Dada and, 106,127,130, 138; Pollock, 224; Schwitters and, 123-24; of Spanish Civil War, 346-50; Surrealism and, 35,127,130 Pollock, Jackson, 43, 93,166,167, 225-29, 248, *73> 301, 308, 309, 329, 337, 344; automatist experiments, 192, 225, 300; as co-exhibitor/ co-contributor, 46n, 58n, 154m and Peggy Guggenheim, 298, 299; Male and Female, 301; rhythm of, 339; and Seitz's Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, 332; Tony Smith and, 323; Tomlin and, 186, 225 Pollock, Lee Krasner. See Krasner, Lee Pontigny en Amérique conference (1944), 6, 8, 27m Motherwell's lecture, 6, 7, 27-35 Pop art, 224, 236, 237, 239, 304,305 Porter, Katherine Anne, 347 possibilities I: An Occasional Review, 58n; preface, 58 Poulaille, Henry, 144 Pound, Ezra, 319 Pousette-Dart, Richard, 46n, i54n Poussin, Nicolas, 99

Prado Museum, 349 Prall, D. W„ 343 preconceptions vs. open-endedness, 195, 206, 214, 216-17, 2 9°> 333. 340. 34 2 Preston, Stuart, 8in Price, C. S., 53n primitive art, 188,197, 301, 303, 304, 328-29 private property, 31, 35 "Problems of Contemporary Art," 5on Proust, Marcel, 319, 326, 331 Provincetown: James Joyce Symposium (1980), 319, 3i9n, ¡20, 322; memoir, 308-11 Provincetown Art Association, 309 provincialism, 166, 242 psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, 8,12, 115,136,195, 299-301, 325n; Motherwell's draft for conference on, 325-26 public responses to art. See art appreciation/understanding purity/purification, 197,199, 209-10, 2iin3 Putnam, Samuel, 129; European Caravan (ed.), 107-8,126-27,128,129 Putzel, Howard, 297, 299 Queneau, Raymond, 305 Quinn, John, 322 radicalism, 280-81 Ragon, Michel, 236n; interview with, 236-39; letter to, 239-42 Rand, Paul: cover design for The Dada Painters and Poets, 10$ Rank, Otto, 299 Raphael, 77 Rauschenberg, Robert, 264 Ravel, Maurice, i n , 144 Ray, John, 104 Raymond, Marcel, 109; From Baudelaire to Surrealism, 2-3, 72-74, 72n, 77, 94,107, 134-38, 241 Read, Herbert, 48, 48n, 50, 52, 297, 298, 299 realism, 63,160,161,195,337; "new," of Mondrian, 44n, 54, 85,107,172-73, 217, 306. See also naturalism; representation; Social Realism Realistic Manifesto (Gabo and Pevsner), 20 reality, 53,171-72, 281, 290; "true" or "new," of Mondrian, 44n, 54, 85,107,172-73, 217, 306. See also feelings/felt reality reason, 21, 22 Redon, Odilon, 154, 271

383

Rees, Otto van, 116 Reeves, Ruth, 7511 Reich, Wilhelm, 300 Reid, Ogden, 25611 Reinhardt, Ad, 9,10, 80, 93,167,181, 299; as co-contributor, i54n, i98n; Modern Artists in America (ed.), 101-2,10 in Reis, Becky, 298 Reis, Bernard, 108, 298 relations, relational structures, 11, 54-55, 56, 67, 171,180; emphasis and, 164-65; in Mondrian, 15.49 religion, 181; collapse of, and spiritual values in art, 11, 30 Rembrandt, 8, 248, 280,313 Remington, Frederic, 203 Renaissance painting, 172,188,190-91, 216 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 78, 89,163,164,185, 270,313 representation, 55, 253; freedom from/rejection of, 16, 67, 69, 70,156, 159. See also realism Reverdy, Pierre, 128,145 rhythm, in Pollock, 227, 339 Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges, 59n, 127,12829,140,145; History of Dada, 104,109,139; Ugolin, 128 Richter, Hans, 106,117-18,119,142-43, 147; and Dada Manifesto 194p, 138,139; Dada X YZ. .., 107,109 Rickey, George, 93n Rigaut, Jacques, 109,129-30,145; Lord Patchoque, 129 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 56, 94, 289 Rimbaud, Arthur, 2, 5, 54, 56,116,122, 136, 144, 218; A Season in Hell, 83 risk, 79,194-95, 255. 303 Ritchie, Andrew, I58n Rivers, Larry, 225n Rivière, Jacques, 136 Robertson, Bryan, 232 Robinson, Edward G „ 202n Roché, Henri-Pierre, 131, 279^, 322 Rockwell, Norman, 163, 251 Rodin, Auguste, 328 Rodin Museum (Paris), 291 Rohm, Ernst, 124 Romains, Jules, 144 Romantics, Romanticism, 29, 34, 48, 49, 271, 272; Motherwell's Harvard studies of, 286, 344

Rose, Barbara, 224

384

Rosenberg, Harold, 5-6, 7, 58n, 72n, 76,192, i98n, 309,317, 333 Rosenberg, Paul, 291 Rostand, Maurice, 140 Roszak, Theodore, 53n, 93 Rothko, Mark, 191, 204, 230-31, 236, 242n, 245-46, 271-74,307,313,323; as co-exhibitor/ co-contributor, 46n, 58n, I54n; color use of, 190, 245, 273-74, 334; death of, 271, 27m, 273; drawing and, 247; European responses to, 268-69; Lowell and, 280; Motherwell and, 6, 9, 79, 230-31, 245-46, 271-72, 284, 309; New York School and, 10, 93, 298, 299, 301-2, 337; New York Times letter, 302-4; and Subjects of the Artist school, 79, 273 Rouault, Georges, 32,163 Rousseau, Henri, 145,181 Roussel, Albert, i n Roussel, Raymond, 110,144 Rowley, George, 332 Rubens, Peter Paul, 8, 249 Rubinstein, Helena, 291 Rukeyser, Muriel, 347 Russell, Bertrand, 211,343-44 Russian culture, France and, 292 Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 226, 227 Sabartès, Jaime, 247 Sachs, Hanns, 300 Sade, Marquis de, 34 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 273 Saint-Just, Louis de, 304 Salmon, André, 116,128 Sàndler, Irving, 301 Sanouillet, Michel, 279n2 santos, 203 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 9, 10 Satie, Erik, 68,107,109,110-12,128,140,144, 145; in Albert-Birot poem, 148,149; WORKS: Musique d'ameublement, 1 1 1 - 1 2 , 1 4 4 ; Parade, 110,112,148; Le Piège de Meduse, 110-11; Socrate, 111 Saura, Antonio, 350 scale, 254 Schapiro, Meyer, 4,5, 7,16, 76, 78,181, 298, 344

Scheuer, James H., 256n, 262-63 Schiff, Gert, 346n Schlegel brothers, 344 Schoenberg, Arnold, 305 School of New York. See New York School

School of Paris, 66, 82; postwar, 236, 237-38, 240, 242; prewar, 291, 306, 307, 337 Schultz, Heinz, 6, 77,108. See also Wittenborn and Schultz (publishers) Schwartz, Delmore, 12 Schwitters, Ernst, 107,123-24 Schwitters, Kurt, 25, 77,119-26,147,148; in The Dada Painters and Poets, 107,108,109, IJ3N2; WORKS: Anna Blossom Has Wheels, 121,

126; merz, 120,123-26; Merzbau, 120,153m; priimiitittiii, 123; Ursonata, 122,123,147 science, 29, 330; Mondrian and, 15,16 scribbling. See doodling sculpture, 254, 280; Arp, 61-62; Duchamp ready-mades as, 112-13; Moore, 48-49; New York School, 93; David Smith, 88, 218-21; Tony Smith, 323-24. See also specific sculptors Second World War. See World War II Segal, Artur, 116 Segal, George, 225n, 237 Seitz, William C „ 332, 333, 334-35; Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, 331-35, 331ft self-consciousness, 154, 232 Seligmann, Kurt, 4,5, 63n, 294, 297, 301,305 Serner, Walter, 128 Sert, José Luis, 27n, 188, 2i4n, 216 Sesame Street, 264 Sessions, Roger, 174, i76n Seuphor, Michel, 141 Seurat, Georges, 17, 31,55, 89,161,177, 291; in American collections, 291, 292; WORKS: Grande-Jatte, 292; oil sketch for GrandeJatte, 293 "Seventeen Modern American Painters" (1951), i54n, i56n Severini, Gino, 150 sexuality, 267; in Mirò, 190; in Picasso, 190; in Surrealism, 34, 35 shadows, 2iin2 Shahn, Ben, 75n, 93n, 96, i6on, 238 Shakespeare, William, 307, 329 Sharrer, Honoré, 53n Sheeler, Charles, 93n Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 104 Sic (review), 148 Signac, Paul: D'Eugène Delacroix au néoimpressionisme, 286 Simonides, 214 Sisley, Alfred, 89-90 Sittler, Joseph, 256, 256n, 259, 264 Les Six, m

Skeat, Walter W„ 198, ig8n Slodki, Marcel, 116 Smith, Anthony (Tony), 323-24 Smith, David, 88, 93,166, 203-4, 218-21, 232, 267, 273, 282-85, 313. 319. 335. 337! as co - exhibitor/co-contributor, 58n, 93n; death of, 224, 228, 235, 283 Smith, Jane, 324 Soby, James Thrall, 193, 298, 299; The Early Chirico, 17 socialism, 7, 30 Social Realism, 119,157, 237, 238, 273 social values, 28, 29, 35, 59,181; of New York School, 94, 96-97; rejection/retention of, 19. 30, 35. 79. 96 Société Anonyme, ioin, 297 Society of Independent Artists exhibition (1917), 130 Solano, Francisca, 347 solipsism, 95 Solzhenitzyn, Alexander, 274 Sophocles, 181 Soulages, Pierre, 236, 236n, 237, 239, 240, 241, 317.318 Soulé, Henri, 221 sound poems, 116-17, IZ 3 Soupault, Philippe, 128,137,140,145,150 Soutine, Chaim, 167, 313 Souverbie, Jean, 238 Spanish Civil War, 5, 33, 346-50 Spanish Institute (New York), 346n Spinoza, Benedictus de, 3, 32,55,173,179, 343 spiritual values, 11,13, 29, 304 Spoleto Festival, David Smith at, 219-20 spontaneity, 154,156. See also automatism; free association Stael, Nicholas de, 167 Stalinism, 7,127 Stamos, Theodoras, i54n, 167 Stedelijk Museum, 222 Stein, Gertrude, 122,130,145; Four Saints in Three Acts, 145 Steinberg, Saul, 53n, 230 Stella, Frank, 224 Stella, Joseph, 302 Stendhal, 278 Stephan, John, 63n Stephan, Ruth Walgreen, 63n Sterne, Hedda, I54n, 167, 299 Sternheim, Carl, 337 Stevens, Wallace, 1 0 , 1 1 , 4on, 41,102

385

Stieglitz, Alfred, 132 de Stijí 44, 45, 209 Still, Clyfford, 79,15411, 299, 332

symbols, symbolism, 39, 55,170-75, 300, 302; of Chirico, 17,18,19n4, 43m; of Cornell, 169; of New York School artists, 301-2, 303

Stimer, Max, n o Stone, Edward Durell, 20211 St. Paul's School (Concord, N.H.), 25on; Motherwell's lecture at, 250-55 Stratton, Charles Sherwood (General Tom Thumb), 74,169 Stravinsky, Igor, 283,305, 329,338 structure(s): as emphasis, 164-65. See also relations, relational structures subject matter, 57, 69, 95,161, 253, 303, 304 subject-object relationship, 70, 82 Subjects of the Artist school, 79, 273 the Sublime, 11, 63, 66 subtlety, 7 1 , 1 7 1 Sullivan, Louis H „ 77, 203 superego, 33, 34 Surrealism, Surrealists, 27, 34-35, 85,156, 195, 210, 269, 281, 283, 304, 334; Abstract Expressionism and, 94,108,157, 186, 192, 210, 299-304; vs. the aesthetic, 56; American painters and, 59-60; Apollinaire's coining of term, 25; automatism, 6 - 7 , 35, 49,192, 210, 216, 295; Breton and origins of, 127, 130-31; Breton on, in "Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism," 20n, 22; Chirico and, 19; Cornell and, 168,169; Cubist influences on, 25; Dadaists and, 106,119,127, 129,130, 277; dream images and, 192, 295, 301, 306; humor in, 337; literary influence of, 108; Miró and, 188; music and, 112; in New York, 4,5, 277, 293-94, 299-301; objects of pleasure, 42, 43; quarrels/conflicts, 130, 277; responses to, 32, 210; Romanticism and, 30; social relations, 34-35; in U.S., during World War II and after, 299-305. See also specific individuals Sweeney, James Johnson, 93, 93n, 107,192, 293, 298, 299; Piet Mondrian, 45; Plastic Redirections in 20th Century Painting, 45; Three Young Rats and Other Rhymes: Drawings by Alexander Calder (ed.), 38n, 39 Swift, Jonathan, 109 Sylvester, A. D. B., 63n Sylvester, David, 205n; Motherwell interview, 10, 205-11 symbolic thought, 170-71 Symbolist poets, 69, 94, 208, 218, 241, 289. See aho specific poets

386

Taeuber, Sophie, 147 Tamayo, Rufino, 293, 350 Tanguy, Yves, 5,191,192, 210, 238, 301; in New York, 294, 295, 297, 301, 304, 305 Tipies, Antoni, 239,317, 350 Tchou, Claude, 304 techne, 53 technology, 253, 254, 262 television, 264 Thackeray, W. M., 104 Theobald, Paul, 107 This Quarter (periodical), 131,132 Thomas, D. M.: The White Hotel, 325n, 326 Thomas, Jimmy, 310 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 172 Thomson, Virgil, i n , 130 thought, painting as medium for, 7, 8-9, 32,55 Thumb, General Tom, 74 Thurber, James, 39 The Tiger's Eye, 63n, 64; "A Tour of the Sublime," 63, 66 Tillich, Paul, 181 Titian, 313 Titus, Edward W., 131 Tobey, Mark, 53n, 86n, i54n, 332, 335 Tolstoy, Leo, 274 Tomlin, Bradley Walker, 86n, 93, I54n, 167, 186-87, 225> 3 ° 2 touch, 252, 325, 326 tradition, modern art and, 237-38. See abo the past transition (periodical), 116,123,143,146, 298 Trapp, Frank Anderson: The Attainment of Delacroix, 286 tribalism, 207, 208, 209, 242, 251, 326, 329-30 truth, truthfulness, 10, 97,154,171-72,197, 230-31, 338. See also authenticity; honesty Turgenev, Ivan, 270 Turner, J. M. W„ 253, 268, 313 Twain, Mark, 74,126 Twombly, Cy, 103, i03n Tworkov, Jack, i66n, i98n Tzara, Tristan, 59n, 77,109,114,127-28,131, 136,140,142,145, 305; break with Breton, 127,130-31; Cabaret Voltaire and Dadas founding, 116,118,119,139,144; and Dada Manifesto 1949,106,138-39; and Huelsen-

beck, 106,118,138,139, 277; WORKS: Cinema calendrier, 128; Introduction to Daeia for The Dada Painters and Poets, 106,107,138; Memoirs of Dadaism, 127; Seven Dada Manifestoes, 127-28,144; 2$poèmes, 128; Zurich Chronicle (ipi;-ip), 109,127 Uccello, Paolo, 100,161 Udall, Morris, 260

white, 348; and black, 86, 212 Whitehead, Alfred North, 3-4, n , 67, 77, 327, 344; on abstraction, 4, 91,159, 227, 250,344; on clarity/ambiguity, 170-71; on creativity, 4, 82 Whitelaw-Reid Mansion, 299 Whitman, Walt, 84 Whitney Museum of American Art, 202, 203, 318

Ulysses, 66 unconscious: in artistic process, 12,34-35, 36, 57, 96,192-93, 300-301. See also automatism; psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory unity, 67, 83; mind/body, 3,5, 28, 32; Whitehead on, 3 - 4 universal values. See eternal values universities, 77, 78-79 Utrillo, Maurice, 306

Wight, Frederick, 8 in, i86n Wildenstein, Georges, 202n Wilenski, Reginald: Modem French Painters, 26

Vaché, Jacques, 109,113,126-27,129.131» 145 Valéry, Paul, 2, 33, 94,157, 279ml, 289, 331;

Grain, 169; letter to, 6 - 7 Wilson, Edmund: Axel's Castle, 127 Windelband, Wilhelm, 336 windows, 243

Dada and, 109,128,134-35,136,157, 279ml Vallerey, Gérard, 29m values, 21. See also the aesthetic; eternal values; ethics, ethical values; social values Van Gogh. See Gogh, Vincent van Vantongerloo, Georges, 44 Varèse, Edgard, 131 Vauxcelles, Louis, 140 Veblen, Thorstein, 181 Vekony, Rose, 236n Veldsquez, Diego, 348 Vietnam War, 224 View (periodical), 152, 301 Viking Press, 286 Villa, Pancho, n o Vlaminck, Maurice de, 167 void. See emptiness Vuillard, Edouard, 236 VW (periodical), 6, 7, I5n, 298

Wilhelm, prince (August Wilhelm of Hohenzollern), 124 Wilke, Ulfert, 93n Willard, Jess, n o Willard, Marion, 283, 335 Williams, William Carlos, 347; In the American

Wittenborn, George, 6, 77. See also Wittenborn and Schultz (publishers) Wittenborn, Joyce, 107 Wittenborn and Schultz (publishers), 72n, 77, 106,108 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 329 Wolff, Kurt, 337 Wols (Wolfgang Schulze), 167 Works Progress Administration. See WPA World War I, 269, 337; Lenin quoted on, 114-15; and origins of Dada, 113,114 World War II, 269, 295, 337, 344, 346; European artists in the U.S. during, 291307 WPA, 2, 225, 226 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 323 Wyeth, Andrew, 195, 251

Wagner, Richard, 253 Warhol, Andy, 239, 253 Weaver, Charlie, 203 Webern, Anton, HI Webster, John, 72 Weyhe gallery, 293

Yeats, William Butler, 3, 94, 226, 289, 322

"What Modern Art Means to Me" symposium, 158-59

295-96 Zukofsky, Louis, 58n

"What Should a Museum Be?" symposium, 202-4, 202n

Zurich, Dada's origins in, 113-14,127-28,136,

Zadkine, Ossip, 27n, 48, 297,302 Zayas, Marius de, 132 Zervos, Christian, 52,108 Zuckmayer, Carl, 292, 295; A Part of Myself,

139

387

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