(Robert Motherwell obituary, continued)
SEXUAL OVERTONES AND DRAFTSMANSHIP
While not dismissing the sexual overtones some critics saw in the work -- for instance, that the ovoids and bars represented the testicles and penis of the bull so prevalent in Spanish life and folklore -- he also associated much else with the theme. As a draftsman he liked the opportunity it provided of "working straight lines against curves." For another, the blacks massed against white symbolized the black of Latin civilization, "the black cypress trees in the cemeteries, the black funeral carriages, the many women dressed in black, how in Spanish light the shadows are black with sharp edges." And, proud of his half-Scottish, half-Irish ancestry, he also saw it as relating to his forebears, who produced "those Celtic stone megaliths, like Stonehenge, all over northern Europe and into Spain.
His most recent work in the "Elegy" series was "Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 172 (With Blood)," done in 1989-1990, which appeared in the Knoedler show.
Mr. Motherwell's other major painting series was known as the "Opens," whose characteristic imagery is that of a drawn rectangle or rectangles, suggesting windows and doorways cut into a field of subtly nuanced color. He happened on the theme in the late 1960s, when he leaned a small painting, its back facing forward, against a larger canvas whose surface had already been painted. He was so struck by the "proportion" set up by one rectangle superimposed on another that he immediately outlined the shape of the smaller canvas on the larger one with charcoal.
A DERIVATION OF ADOBE HOUSES
Describing the "Opens" as "a painted plane beautifully divided by minimal means, the essence of line drawing," Mr. Motherwell said they derived in part from the unadorned, white-washed adobe facades of Mexican houses with "beautifully proportioned" doors and windows. But the "Opens" also tended to be more involved with "strictly artistic problems" than the "Elegies," problems, as he told Mr. Flam at the time of the Albright-Knox show, "in the viscosity of paint, of color fields, of the skin of the world highly abstracted."
He was also highly prolific as a printmaker, which he enjoyed as a collaborative process, producing, over the last decade, more than 430 etchings, lithographs and portfolios. His most recent print venture was a series of etchings for an American edition of James Joyce's "Ulysses," published by Orion Press in San Francisco.
And he was a master of the collage medium, which he considered a more intimate side of his art than painting. In his collages, he took a personal, lyrical approach, combining fragments of colored paper, musical scores, labels, letters and stamps in richly evocative compositions that he regarded as a "kind of private diary, not made as autobiography, but one in which all kinds of personal memories are incorporated." He used the collage form to create the current poster for the 25th anniversary of "Mostly Mozart," the annual Lincoln Center festival.
CONTINUED