“I'm a Viking who
has read French literature."
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell
Although showing a skill and interest in art by gaining a fellowship to Los
Angeles’ Otis Art Institute as a
12 year old, the abstract expressionist artist Robert Motherwell
went on to study philosophy at Stanford and Harvard universities. It was a pact
he had made with his banker father who wanted some economic insurance for his
eldest son whose heart was set upon becoming a painter.
As he revealed in a Smithsonian
Institution oral history "And finally after months of really a cold
war he made a very generous agreement with me that if I would get a Ph.D. so
that I would be equipped to teach in a college as an economic insurance, he
would give me fifty dollars a week for the rest of my life to do whatever I
wanted to do on the assumption that with fifty dollars I could not starve but
it would be no inducement to last. So with that agreed on Harvard then—it was
actually the last year—Harvard still had the best philosophy school in the
world. And since I had taken my degree at Stanford in philosophy, and since he
didn't care what the Ph.D. was in, I went on to Harvard."
Armed with a rigious education and after spending a
year painting in Paris coupled with a European Grand tour in his late teens Motherwell
was able to approach the beginnings of his career as an abstract artist as an
expression of his literary and philosophical concerns along with his love and
knowledge of European culture.
As he said in an artist’s talk at the Art
Gallery of Ontario “I knew a priori relational structures are meaningful,
and could begin with absolute confidence. Whereas I say Matisse is one of my
heroes. I think the moment Matisse left the face out in his figure paintings,
it must have been a staggering decision for him to make. And most of my
contemporaries were faced with similar hesitation at a certain moment.”
Appropriating
the idea of automatic drawing from the surrealists it became a mainstay of his artistic
production.
About which
he said "You let the brush take over and in
a way follow its own head, and in the brush doing what it's doing, it will
stumble on what one couldn't by oneself. It's essential to fracture influences
in the same way that free association in psychoanalysis helps to fracture one's
social self-deceptions."
About Motherwell the eminent critic Clement Greenberg said after
the artist’s death in 1991 “Although he is underrated today, in my opinion he
was the very best of the Abstract Expressionist painters."
The New
York Times obituary reported Motherwell as stating "All my life I've
been working on the work -- every canvas a sentence or paragraph of it. Each
picture is only an approximation of what you want. That's the beauty of being
an artist; you can never make the absolute statement, but the desire to do so
as an approximation keeps you going."
Fifteen of his works are currently on show at Hong Kong’s Pearl
Lam Galleries in the exhibition Form,
Gesture, Feeling: Robert Motherwell 1915 – 1919, A Centennial Exhibition
which is on show until the 6th of November.
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