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The artist Robert Motherwell was a bridge between continents: directly a spokesman for the New York College and a conduit for the theories of European modernists. And but, there has not been a retrospective of his work in Europe since 1998. In Austria, the final main Motherwell exhibit passed off within the Nineteen Seventies.
That can change this month because the Kunstforum in Vienna hosts “Robert Motherwell — Pure Portray.” The retrospective, which runs Oct. 12 to Jan. 14, was first unveiled on the Fashionable Artwork Museum of Fort Value, Texas, earlier this yr (it closed on Sept. 17).
The present — because the title signifies — focuses completely on his work, that includes loans from personal collections and museums from throughout the US and Europe. “Pure Portray” spans half a century, starting with figurative abstractions of the Nineteen Forties and lengthening into consultant works of his final years. The retrospective unfolds chronologically, permitting for an examination of how his artistry developed.
Whereas a straightforward promote in Fort Value, Motherwell isn’t as apparent a alternative for the Austrian capital. Evelyn Benesch, the Kunstforum’s deputy director and the exhibit’s co-curator, stated that the museum was eager to current not simply “outstanding and well-liked” artists, but in addition these which the museum’s administration “merely finds actually good.” She pointed to the facility of experiencing Motherwell’s work “of their monumentality, command of house, structured surfaces and shade scheme.”
The main curator of the exhibition, Susan Davidson, who presided over an exhibition of early collages by Motherwell on the Guggenheim Museum in New York a decade in the past, expressed the same sentiment: “I hope the exhibition brings out the complexity of his surfaces. This was so rewarding to see in Fort Value. The brushwork and use of various tones is admittedly hanging.”
The artist would typically modify his work in what Ms. Davidson calls an act of “natural revisionism.” The work “The Voyage: Ten Years After” (1960-1) was topic to a minimum of six months of additional work after it had been exhibited. Ms. Davidson writes within the exhibition catalog that his “retrospective self-analysis was central to his ongoing apply. Motherwell harbored an abiding must take inventory, to reimagine, and particularly to refine his portray — a course of that was nearly a precondition of his artmaking.”
He was the main spokesman of what he termed the New York College — the postwar motion that asserted the autonomy and finally preeminence of American artwork, with New York as its cultural middle. Having frolicked in Paris in 1938-39, Motherwell was in a position to simply domesticate relationships with European-born avant-garde artists corresponding to Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian. In 1942-44, he labored with émigrés from Max Ernst to André Breton whereas serving as American editor of the Surrealist journal “VVV.”
Because the New York College shaped — together with artists corresponding to Jackson Pollock and William Baziotes — Motherwell tried to counter their destructive sentiments towards European tradition. He drew a line from the abstraction in fashionable artwork to the custom of French Symbolist poetry, talking of “an artwork that refuses to spell every thing out.”
The present exhibit permits for an summary of Motherwell’s portray that he was not in a position to expertise in his lifetime. He died months earlier than a significant retrospective, in 1991.
He had, nonetheless, attended the opening of a present on the Museum of the Twentieth Century in Vienna in 1976-7 that marked an vital second within the reception of his work in Europe.
The Vienna version of “Pure Portray” will current his most vital sequence — the “Elegies to the Spanish Republic” (1948-90) and “Opens” (1967-c. 1976) — in respective rooms quite than throughout time, as in Fort Value. The present additional contains the 1988 portray “The Female II,” which had gone lacking till the curators tracked it down with a non-public collector in Singapore.
Ms. Davidson famous the significance of additionally considering his earlier, figurative work, mentioning as examples “A Sculpture’s Image, with Blue” (1958) and “Two Figures with Cerulean Blue Stripe” (1960).
“All of the artists of his era inside that New York College started as figurative painters and moved towards abstraction,” she stated. “In order that’s a vital side.”
The retrospective can even function the 1975 portray “The Spanish Demise” — a part of the Spanish Elegies sequence — which was in storage at Vienna’s Mumok Museum of Fashionable Artwork. Ms. Benesch stated she was delighted to current “this essential portray” right here “for the primary time in a global context.”
The Elegies’ juxtaposition of black ovals and rectangles towards a white floor grow to be a signature motif of Motherwell’s work. The monumental work are additionally political statements, lamenting the dying of the Spanish Republic after the Spanish Civil Conflict of 1936-39.
Ms. Benesch attracts a line again to historical past work of the nineteenth century, mentioning as examples “a Delacroix or ‘Le Radeau de La Méduse’ by Théodore Géricault — which hold within the Grande Galerie of the Louvre — or big tapestries from the Renaissance. Throughout Impressionism every thing is small, after which painters are creating on a big scale once more.”
Motherwell’s “The New England Elegy,” a mural painted for an inside wall of the John F. Kennedy Federal Constructing in Boston in 1966, was interpreted as an illustration of the president’s assassination and led to protests. The late president’s brother, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, made a public assertion that the portray “isn’t meant to characterize any particular occasion.”
Ms. Davidson stated that Motherwell’s experiences in Mexico within the ’40s with the Chilean painter Roberto Matta, and his eventual marriage to the actress Maria Emilia Ferreira y Moyers — whose household immediately suffered from the Mexican Revolution — left him “with firsthand accounts that weighed on him. And he used his portray as an expression of human rights and human struggling.”
She additionally says that he was deeply affected by World Conflict II. “It wasn’t fought on our land, however it was very current. There was rationing. It was a really restrictive time. If we fast-forward to what’s going on as we speak and the reckonings which can be occurring all over the world — whether or not it’s in wars or how persons are held accountable for his or her actions or previous actions — I feel that Motherwell may be very related in that regard.”
