Robert Motherwell

“I take an elegy to be a funeral lamentation or funeral song for something one cared about….  They are as eloquent as I could make them.  But the pictures are also general metaphors of the contract between life and death and their interrelation.” (Robert Motherwell, Smith College, January 1963)

The New England Elegy series began with a commission from the United States government in 1966.  Motherwell was asked to create a mural for the giant, glassed-in corridor of the Kennedy buildings in Washington, D.C., a memorial to the assassinated President.  The mural and the ensuing series were born from an overall sense of tragedy – both the death of the young Kennedy but also the recent death of one of Motherwell’s closest friends, the artist David Smith. Motherwell intended to create a powerfully evocative canvas, capable of moving the viewer deeply as they traversed through the coldly impersonal corridor, a juxtaposition that only enhanced the ability of the painting to communicate.   

Upon completion of the giant mural, Motherwell continued the momentum of the New England Elegy series in a number of small works on paper and several canvases.  As he worked on the new series, Motherwell’s complex modern aesthetic continued to evolve.  As in his Spanish Elegies, the new works expressed a dual commitment to the importance of abstraction and to the importance of emotive feeling.  Motherwell believed that “the aesthetic is the sine qua non for art: if a work is not aesthetic, it is not art by definition.  But in this stage of the creative process, the strictly aesthetic…ceases to be the chief end in view…it is the creation of an object for sensing that is the artist’s task” (Robert Motherwell from “Beyond Aesthetic”, Design, April 1946 as found in Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Motherwell, New York, 1965, p. 37).  Through pure abstraction, Motherwell would suggest or evoke feeling – he did not believe that things needed to be described in order to successfully communicate with an audience.

New England Elegy #3 is constructed in a highly architectonic fashion.  The influence of the postcard of Rhodesian ruins that he had hung in his studio in 1966 is keenly evident.  The surging vertical and thrusting horizontal evoke the structure of classical architecture.  This evocation of a ruined temple further emphasizes the elegiac nature of the work.  As if the form of a mausoleum, the black calligraphic lines explode across the page, dividing the canvas, moving across the white void, the column rising from the temple floor.  The use of paint splatters and rough edges, born from his work and inspiration found in collage, adds energy and expression to the work.  The black and white tonality creates a somber mood, relieved by the bright splash of green, seemingly caught within the massive architecture of the bold lines, held down by the jutting diagonal lines.  The green organic form contrasts sharply with the architectural structure, creating a tension between order and chaos.  “The Elegies have always been concerned with the expression of this element of the savage in the human soul.  However, in most of these the suggestion of the barbaric has been held in control by the architectural structure of the forms, as in mankind it is held in control by the social suppression of civilization.” (H. H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell, New York, 1982, p. 63)

Working on a smaller scale and free from the pressures of working on a monumental sized commission, Motherwell was able to explore the capacity of abstract art to so eloquently express tragedy, violence and a somber, elegiac feeling.  Motherwell’s deceptively simplified work, New England Elegy #3, perfectly illustrates the power of abstraction as it teeters between rawness and elegance, brutality and refinement