Robert Motherwell

Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art, New York

In good condition. Very slight surface dust. Crease in paint where canvas wrapped around stretcher lower right corner at edge. Scattered areas of minute raised bubbles in black paint (paint is stable): lower right, upper center, upper right and lower left. Under UV: no apparent sign of in-paint.
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Painted in 1979 in the latter half of Robert Motherwell's career, this work revisits the elements of color and form as a means of recording the artist's self-expression without becoming literal. For Motherwell, the physical relationship between formal elements greatly influenced the subject matter of his works. "Shapes," he said, "must be kept more or less purely abstract, while colors can be allowed a certain range of external associations without imposing narrative."[1] For an artist who painted predominantly in monochromatic imagery until the 1950s, color became an increasingly significant part of his oeuvre; it had the ability to transcend and translate experience unlike other formal elements. This work exemplifies Motherwell's preference for bright, flat colors where the pink and ochre pigments contrast starkly against the black void which consumes the canvas. Starting in the early 1960s with the Africa series, Motherwell had been repeatedly experimenting with these powerfuld dark motifs against a variety of different backgrounds.[2] Like the polarity of black and white present in his earlier works, Untitled (Black, Ochre, Pink) demonstrates Motherwell's belief that color "functions primarily as an autonomous formal element, but is also unavoidably rooted to our experience in the real world."[3]

[1] Dore Ashton and Jack D. Flam, Robert Motherwell, 1983, 10.
[2] Ibid, 43.
[3] Ibid, 10.