拍品专文
Robert Motherwell’s monumental An Ungainly Figure, painted during the artist’s most energetic and fertile period in 1959, immediately allures with the dynamism of its forms and the boldness of its colors. An organic, oblong figure sheathed in a rich black looms over the remainder of the composition, angling downward into a field of rich ochres and lemon yellows. Visible strokes demonstrate the master’s direct, immediate, and intuitive manner of laying paint on canvas at speed, working without preconceptions. These strokes allude beyond the work’s effortless veneer toward Motherwell’s intuitive control, allowing him to precisely balance formal structure with an expressive image, ensuring neither is subordinate to the other. Paint splashes appear infrequently across the tableau, spattering out from the top black form, increasing the sensation of figuration, wherein the form becomes a growing organism—a technique which Motherwell developed two years previously in 1957. An Ungainly Figure’s composition is at ease within the work’s impressive scale, expressing no edges, its forms breaking away from the closed world of the easel picture.
Robert Motherwell, born in Washington state and raised in San Francisco, studied philosophy and literature at Stanford. As a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard, a fortuitous encounter with the American composer Arthur Berger convinced him to move to New York to study art history with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia. Schapiro introduced Motherwell to the Surrealist circle in the city, where he embraced their theory of psycho-automatism, which he interpreted as a form of free association, and took to painting. His early collage collaboration with Jackson Pollock for a Peggy Guggenheim exhibition brought Motherwell in contact with the group whom he would soon term “the New York School,” of which he was the youngest member.
Motherwell’s eye favored European modernists such as Fernand Léger and Piet Mondrian over the Surrealist style, while also attending to Matisse and Picasso. However, his greatest influence was the quattrocento Italian master Piero della Francesca, whose geometric forms situated on the rolling ochre fields of his native Tuscany recalled to Motherwell his own adolescence in California. Motherwell was also impacted by whom he described as the “black artists,” including Goya and Manet, who wielded black pigment with a nuance and talent few artists can obtain. Newly wed to fellow artist Helen Frankenthaler, Motherwell’s three-month honeymoon from 1958-59 further impacted An Ungainly Figure, as he infused Spanish motifs like the tawny orange along with Frankenthaler’s expressive energy.
Motherwell’s intellectual prowess and eloquent style made him the group’s spokesman and advocate. Motherwell’s painterly meditations reflect an analogical principle, each work an oblique metaphor. The artist hewed closely to Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s declaration that things must be suggested or evoked, not described. A bibliophile, Motherwell was widely influenced by the writings of other writers, namely Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and James Joyce. His lifelong ambition was to infuse his work with what Dore Ashton describes as “meaning knitted into the fabric; meaning that is dispersed throughout the organic composition” (D. Ashton, “Robert Motherwell: The Painter and his Poets,” Robert Motherwell, Second Edition, New and Revised, 1982, p. 9).
Attuned to Søren Kierkegaard’s assertion that “a tame goose never becomes a wild goose, but a wild goose can very well become a tame goose,” and influenced by Carl Jung’s emphasis on how hidden forces generate symbols, Motherwell directed his artistic efforts towards capturing an essential sensuality on his canvases. The artist declared that “painting must be sensual—this is its nature—but it must not be pleasing or decorative. The Artist’s essential function is to retain integrity at any cost in an essentially corrupt world which seduces and destroys all of us” (R. Motherwell, quoted in op. cit., p. 12). An Ungainly Figure emerges from the period in which Motherwell produced his most direct and most passionate works in pursuit of this moral imperative toward the sensual.
Always aware of color, Motherwell favored his “peasant colors” in earth tones along with cadmium reds and yellows, forbidding synthetic paints from his canvas. This favored palette is evident in An Ungainly Figure, where the careful contrast of color balancing the black form integrates the composition into a sensitive, elegant construction. Motherwell describes his painting process as “like that of a hunter in a duck-blind waiting to sight a bird on the wing” (R. Motherwell, quoted in op. cit., p. 7). An Ungainly Figure manifestly demonstrates the result when Motherwell successfully sights a mallard.
Robert Motherwell, born in Washington state and raised in San Francisco, studied philosophy and literature at Stanford. As a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard, a fortuitous encounter with the American composer Arthur Berger convinced him to move to New York to study art history with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia. Schapiro introduced Motherwell to the Surrealist circle in the city, where he embraced their theory of psycho-automatism, which he interpreted as a form of free association, and took to painting. His early collage collaboration with Jackson Pollock for a Peggy Guggenheim exhibition brought Motherwell in contact with the group whom he would soon term “the New York School,” of which he was the youngest member.
Motherwell’s eye favored European modernists such as Fernand Léger and Piet Mondrian over the Surrealist style, while also attending to Matisse and Picasso. However, his greatest influence was the quattrocento Italian master Piero della Francesca, whose geometric forms situated on the rolling ochre fields of his native Tuscany recalled to Motherwell his own adolescence in California. Motherwell was also impacted by whom he described as the “black artists,” including Goya and Manet, who wielded black pigment with a nuance and talent few artists can obtain. Newly wed to fellow artist Helen Frankenthaler, Motherwell’s three-month honeymoon from 1958-59 further impacted An Ungainly Figure, as he infused Spanish motifs like the tawny orange along with Frankenthaler’s expressive energy.
Motherwell’s intellectual prowess and eloquent style made him the group’s spokesman and advocate. Motherwell’s painterly meditations reflect an analogical principle, each work an oblique metaphor. The artist hewed closely to Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s declaration that things must be suggested or evoked, not described. A bibliophile, Motherwell was widely influenced by the writings of other writers, namely Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and James Joyce. His lifelong ambition was to infuse his work with what Dore Ashton describes as “meaning knitted into the fabric; meaning that is dispersed throughout the organic composition” (D. Ashton, “Robert Motherwell: The Painter and his Poets,” Robert Motherwell, Second Edition, New and Revised, 1982, p. 9).
Attuned to Søren Kierkegaard’s assertion that “a tame goose never becomes a wild goose, but a wild goose can very well become a tame goose,” and influenced by Carl Jung’s emphasis on how hidden forces generate symbols, Motherwell directed his artistic efforts towards capturing an essential sensuality on his canvases. The artist declared that “painting must be sensual—this is its nature—but it must not be pleasing or decorative. The Artist’s essential function is to retain integrity at any cost in an essentially corrupt world which seduces and destroys all of us” (R. Motherwell, quoted in op. cit., p. 12). An Ungainly Figure emerges from the period in which Motherwell produced his most direct and most passionate works in pursuit of this moral imperative toward the sensual.
Always aware of color, Motherwell favored his “peasant colors” in earth tones along with cadmium reds and yellows, forbidding synthetic paints from his canvas. This favored palette is evident in An Ungainly Figure, where the careful contrast of color balancing the black form integrates the composition into a sensitive, elegant construction. Motherwell describes his painting process as “like that of a hunter in a duck-blind waiting to sight a bird on the wing” (R. Motherwell, quoted in op. cit., p. 7). An Ungainly Figure manifestly demonstrates the result when Motherwell successfully sights a mallard.