- 124
Robert Motherwell
Estimate
800,000 - 1,200,000 USD
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Description
- Robert Motherwell
- Open No. 164
- signed and signed with the artist's initials; signed and dated 9 August 1970 on the reverse
- acrylic on canvas
- 59 3/4 by 71 in. 151.8 by 180.3 cm.
- Executed in 1970-1977.
Provenance
Dedalus Foundation, New York
James and Kerianne Flynn, New York (acquired from the above in 2007)
James and Kerianne Flynn, New York (acquired from the above in 2007)
Literature
Jack Flam, Katy Rogers and Tim Clifford, eds., Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1941-1991, Vol. 2: Paintings on Canvas and Panel, New Haven, 2012, cat. no. P563, p. 299, illustrated in color
Catalogue Note
“Motherwell’s paintings and collages are marked by a number of oppositions, the most obvious of which could be characterized as the tension between spontaneity and deliberation, between pictures that appear to have been done with a minimum of planning, simply by letting the hand move, and pictures where the forms appear to have been laid down with great calculation. This tension underlies Motherwell’s compulsive need to rework his pictures, which was a way of readjusting the balances not only between forms but between different kinds of feeling” (Jack Flam, Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné 1941-1991, Vol. 1: Essays and References, New Haven, 2012, p. 6).
Although Robert Motherwell was the youngest member of the Abstract Expressionist school based in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, he became the champion of the movement’s core motif to convey emotive value through process and gesture in non-representational modes. Motherwell’s practice was rooted in the philosophical belief that abstracted forms could be felt as the manifestation of the inner self; this humanist approach to the aesthetic is best summed up by the artist’s own words, when he wrote, “The function of the artist is to express reality as felt,” (ibid., p. 6). An avid student of modernism, Motherwell consciously conceived of his work within the framework of an art historical dialogue, and would grow to become one of Abstract Expressionism’s most eloquent theoreticians. His deeply moving series of Spanish Elegies and later, Open paintings, would become some of the eras most indelible archetypal compositions.
Motherwell would go on to paint a grand cycle of canvases evocative of his faith in the potency of the pictorial symbolism and authority of twentieth century painting. There is an astonishing degree of depth and diversity throughout Motherwell’s oeuvre, which spanned over five decades. The remarkable complexity of his work is the result of his embrace of the total variety of existence as his inspiration, rather than grasping a singular ideological and aesthetic position. The artist’s explorations in the studio engaged with a wide variety of approaches to abstraction with many mechanisms; ranging from relentless pigmentation to stringent monochrome, from organic to acutely geometric compositions.
Motherwell’s series of Open paintings originated inadvertently in 1967, when the outline of a smaller work, Summertime in Italy, was temporarily leaning against an unfinished and monochromatic canvas along the studio wall. The juxtaposition of the rectangular perimeter of the diminutive piece against the vast plane of the larger work caught the artist’s eye; he outlined Summertime in Italy in charcoal and saved the result for further examination. Eventually, Motherwell rotated the canvas upside down, accepting the product as a final composition in a format deserving of prolonged aesthetic investigation.
The Open paintings marked a departure from Motherwell’s study of balancing the equation of disparate forms on the canvas as he had been doing during his earlier Elegies series and with his extensive collage practice. With each Open, Motherwell explored the concept and compositional strength created when he divided the previously unified field into separate elements. Motherwell masterfully positioned form and color in a rapport which activates the compositional dimensions of the canvas in physical space. The persistent and unyielding tension which results conveys the oscillation between order and chaos central to Motherwell’s practice. As H.H. Arnason noted in his seminal monograph, “Despite the high degree of sophistication evident in Motherwell’s work, the overriding effect of many of them is that of primitive force” (H.H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell, New York, 1982, p. 63).
Schematically, Motherwell’s art is underlain by the basic premise that through the compression of the picture plane the artist can achieve the intensification of formal relationships that amplifies feeling in the viewer. He saw his Opens as a reflection of the metaphysical void, an important concept in Zen Buddhism. He explains: “This is perhaps strongest in the Opens…built on a conception analogous to the Oriental conception of the absolute void: that you start with empty space, and that the subject is that which animates the great space, the void. The amazing discovery is that it takes relatively little to animate the absolute void” (ibid., p. 140).
Open No. 164 in particular shows the stylistic breadth of the Open series, a testament to Motherwell’s bold experiments with minimal aesthetics that was in part prompted by the impact of Minimalist art of the 1960s. Open No. 164 clearly shows the influence of Motherwell’s contemporaries Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, in particular the rhythmical yet loose geometry of the composition where distinctly articulated edges are counterbalanced against the more expressive red form. The rectangular fields compartmentalize the canvas into carefully weighed elements. Here, the artist combined his deft command of expressive brushwork within a rigorous structure. The command of the architectonic red streak stands in abrupt contrast to the cool black and blue fields. This explosive central gesture, starkly confrontational in both its scarlet tone and surging presence recalls a reoccurring triangular form which first appeared in Motherwell’s two series of Beside the Sea and Summertime in Italy paintings from the early 1960s.
Beside the Sea was partly inspired by the 1960 show at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Claude Monet: Seasons and Moments. That exhibition highlighted Monet’s ruminations on a single motif under changing light, such as his multiple views of the seaside landscape, The Manneport near Etretat. Motherwell clearly reworked Open No. 164 over an extended period of time; documentation confirms that the expressive red line was not added until as late as 1977. In the same year, Motherwell was reintroducing the arching form in his Cathedral series of collages. Photographs from inside his Provincetown studio in 1970 display an exhibition poster for Le Corbusier’s 1967 show at the Pavillon de Vendôme in Aix-en-Provence, France, which highlights the distinctive roofline of the Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp. This is strong evidence that this architectural configuration served as the catalyst for Motherwell’s use of the pitched form in both his Cathedral collages and for the bold finishing mark on Open No. 164.
Motherwell's work is always underpinned with a delicate yet moving elegance, no matter how raw and powerful the gesture. With Open No. 164, Motherwell discovered an incredibly elastic pictorial language that would communicate force on multiple levels but also eludes easy resolution. As noted in the Catalogue Raisonné, for Motherwell, “The spontaneous, liberated, unthinking gesture had to be made, but it also had to be reshaped, modified, molded into an articulate whole. The contrast between signs of intellect and of instinct, between the extremes of severe geometry and irregular, biomorphic forms, is a leitmotif that runs throughout his work” (ibid., p. 6).
Although Robert Motherwell was the youngest member of the Abstract Expressionist school based in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, he became the champion of the movement’s core motif to convey emotive value through process and gesture in non-representational modes. Motherwell’s practice was rooted in the philosophical belief that abstracted forms could be felt as the manifestation of the inner self; this humanist approach to the aesthetic is best summed up by the artist’s own words, when he wrote, “The function of the artist is to express reality as felt,” (ibid., p. 6). An avid student of modernism, Motherwell consciously conceived of his work within the framework of an art historical dialogue, and would grow to become one of Abstract Expressionism’s most eloquent theoreticians. His deeply moving series of Spanish Elegies and later, Open paintings, would become some of the eras most indelible archetypal compositions.
Motherwell would go on to paint a grand cycle of canvases evocative of his faith in the potency of the pictorial symbolism and authority of twentieth century painting. There is an astonishing degree of depth and diversity throughout Motherwell’s oeuvre, which spanned over five decades. The remarkable complexity of his work is the result of his embrace of the total variety of existence as his inspiration, rather than grasping a singular ideological and aesthetic position. The artist’s explorations in the studio engaged with a wide variety of approaches to abstraction with many mechanisms; ranging from relentless pigmentation to stringent monochrome, from organic to acutely geometric compositions.
Motherwell’s series of Open paintings originated inadvertently in 1967, when the outline of a smaller work, Summertime in Italy, was temporarily leaning against an unfinished and monochromatic canvas along the studio wall. The juxtaposition of the rectangular perimeter of the diminutive piece against the vast plane of the larger work caught the artist’s eye; he outlined Summertime in Italy in charcoal and saved the result for further examination. Eventually, Motherwell rotated the canvas upside down, accepting the product as a final composition in a format deserving of prolonged aesthetic investigation.
The Open paintings marked a departure from Motherwell’s study of balancing the equation of disparate forms on the canvas as he had been doing during his earlier Elegies series and with his extensive collage practice. With each Open, Motherwell explored the concept and compositional strength created when he divided the previously unified field into separate elements. Motherwell masterfully positioned form and color in a rapport which activates the compositional dimensions of the canvas in physical space. The persistent and unyielding tension which results conveys the oscillation between order and chaos central to Motherwell’s practice. As H.H. Arnason noted in his seminal monograph, “Despite the high degree of sophistication evident in Motherwell’s work, the overriding effect of many of them is that of primitive force” (H.H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell, New York, 1982, p. 63).
Schematically, Motherwell’s art is underlain by the basic premise that through the compression of the picture plane the artist can achieve the intensification of formal relationships that amplifies feeling in the viewer. He saw his Opens as a reflection of the metaphysical void, an important concept in Zen Buddhism. He explains: “This is perhaps strongest in the Opens…built on a conception analogous to the Oriental conception of the absolute void: that you start with empty space, and that the subject is that which animates the great space, the void. The amazing discovery is that it takes relatively little to animate the absolute void” (ibid., p. 140).
Open No. 164 in particular shows the stylistic breadth of the Open series, a testament to Motherwell’s bold experiments with minimal aesthetics that was in part prompted by the impact of Minimalist art of the 1960s. Open No. 164 clearly shows the influence of Motherwell’s contemporaries Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, in particular the rhythmical yet loose geometry of the composition where distinctly articulated edges are counterbalanced against the more expressive red form. The rectangular fields compartmentalize the canvas into carefully weighed elements. Here, the artist combined his deft command of expressive brushwork within a rigorous structure. The command of the architectonic red streak stands in abrupt contrast to the cool black and blue fields. This explosive central gesture, starkly confrontational in both its scarlet tone and surging presence recalls a reoccurring triangular form which first appeared in Motherwell’s two series of Beside the Sea and Summertime in Italy paintings from the early 1960s.
Beside the Sea was partly inspired by the 1960 show at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Claude Monet: Seasons and Moments. That exhibition highlighted Monet’s ruminations on a single motif under changing light, such as his multiple views of the seaside landscape, The Manneport near Etretat. Motherwell clearly reworked Open No. 164 over an extended period of time; documentation confirms that the expressive red line was not added until as late as 1977. In the same year, Motherwell was reintroducing the arching form in his Cathedral series of collages. Photographs from inside his Provincetown studio in 1970 display an exhibition poster for Le Corbusier’s 1967 show at the Pavillon de Vendôme in Aix-en-Provence, France, which highlights the distinctive roofline of the Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp. This is strong evidence that this architectural configuration served as the catalyst for Motherwell’s use of the pitched form in both his Cathedral collages and for the bold finishing mark on Open No. 164.
Motherwell's work is always underpinned with a delicate yet moving elegance, no matter how raw and powerful the gesture. With Open No. 164, Motherwell discovered an incredibly elastic pictorial language that would communicate force on multiple levels but also eludes easy resolution. As noted in the Catalogue Raisonné, for Motherwell, “The spontaneous, liberated, unthinking gesture had to be made, but it also had to be reshaped, modified, molded into an articulate whole. The contrast between signs of intellect and of instinct, between the extremes of severe geometry and irregular, biomorphic forms, is a leitmotif that runs throughout his work” (ibid., p. 6).