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AND THE POETRY OF FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA,
RAFAEL ALBERTI AND OCTAVIO PAZ

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THE ART OF ROBERT MOTHERWELL
AND THE POETRY OF FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA,
RAFAEL ALBERTI AND OCT AVIO PAZ

By

Jordi Falgas

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of Art

1995

ABSTRACT

THE ART OF ROBERT MOTHERWELL
AND THE POETRY OF FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA,
RAFAEL ALBERTI AND OCT AVIO PAZ

By

Jordi Falgas

This study examines the relationship between the art of Robert Motherwell and the
poetry of three Spanish-speaking poets, Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti and Octavio
Paz.

Chapter I reviews the history and historiography of Abstract-Expressionism’s
concern with subject matter and literary meaning.

Chapter II analyzes two major basis of Motherwell’s art: his use of a surrealist
technique known as psychic automatism, and his literary interests, speciﬁcally identifying
the above mentioned writers.

The remaining chapters are devoted to the analysis of Motherwell’s creations and
the writers’ relevant works: First, a poem by Lorca (Chapter III), followed by Alberti’s
poems (Chapter IV), and finally those by Paz (Chapter V). Through this research it has
been possible to establish why Motherwell’s attention was drawn to the work of these three

particular poets and their relation to the meaning of Motherwell’s art.

“I would like to play a little tune I just composed, not along ago... entitled Pannom'ca. It
was named after this beautiful lady here. I think her father gave her that name after a
butterﬂy... that she tried to catch. I don’t think she caught the butterfly.”

Thelonious Monk, probably September 1956.

“Tu—dix ell—te mets en carrer qui no ha eixida. Lleixa anar l’aigua per lo riu, que abans
que ens partiscam, si subtilment hi volras especular, coneixeras gran part del misteri que hi
esta amagat. Pero no et faca cura de publicar aquell quan lo sabras, car risc de gran perill
te’n seguira, e de poc proﬁt a present.”

Bernat Metge, Lo Somm', 1398.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Most of all, I must express my gratitude to Dr. Phylis Floyd, my Thesis Director;
and to Dr. Linda 0. Stanford and Dr. Malcolm Compitello, my Thesis Advisers.

Others whose help was indispensable to me include Dore Ashton, Carol Corey
(Knoedler & Company), Jack Flam, Ann Gibson, and Douglas G. Schultz (Albright-Knox
Art Gallery) and Stephanie Terenzio, all of them invaluable sources of information and
assistance.

And my thanks are due as well, for both help and advice, to Carol Fisher and Bill
North, in the Kresge Art Museum; Jim Bredeck, in the Department of Art; and Pat
Thompson, in the Fine Arts Library, all at Michigan State University.

Finally, I must thank Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Octavio Paz and
Robert Motherwell, for helping me to understand.

I a tu també, tot i que ja sé que no t’he pas de donar les gracies.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES . . . . . . . . . vi
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTER
I MEANING IN THE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISTS’ LANGUAGE 3
II BEGINNINGS: SURREALISM AND LITERATURE . . 12
III FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA AND AT FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON 23

IV RAFAEL ALBERTI, A LA PINTURA AND EL NEGRO . . 33
V THREE POEMS BY OCTAVIO PAZ . . . . 49
CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . 58

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . 6 l

LIST OF FIGURES

l. Ink Sketch, Elegy N0. 1 (1948)

2. At Five in the Aftemoon (1949)

3. White [-2 (1971)

4. Red 8-11 (1971)

5. Elegy Black Black (1982-83)

6. Nocturne I (1967—88)

7. Spanish Elegy (1987-88)

8. Mexico City Personages II (1986-88)

vi

24
26
41
42
47
55
S6
57

INTRODUCTION

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting
with the gift of speech. Simonidesl

Many of the critics and art historians who have studied the artistic career of Robert
Motherwell (Aberdeen, Washington, 1915-Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1991), agree
that avant-garde poetry exerted a crucial inﬂuence on the development of his aesthetic
discourse throughout its evolution. Motherwell himself acknowledged this inﬂuence in
several writings and interviews; and it is explicit in the titles of some of his paintings and
prints.

It is my purpose to concentrate on this speciﬁc question and its many implications,
which appear to form one of the richest and most complex examples that the artistic avant-
garde of the twentieth century has given to the already classic relationship between literature
and the ﬁne arts.

For many decades, forrnalists held that the structural features of works of art, not
their authors, are what historians and critics should investigate. Such ideas supported the
development of abstraction and paved the way for the New Criticism, the reigning theory
of the forties and fifties. More recently, thanks first to structuralism and then to
deconstructivist theory, we have learned that many events in the history of art—and
Abstract Expressionism is a particularly relevant case—diverge from what they were

supposed to be according to the formalist critical model.

 

1 Attributed by Plutarco to Simonides de Ceos, and quoted by Motherwell, “A Process of Painting,”
reprinted in Robert Motherwell, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell. Stephanie Terenzio, ed.
(New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), I38. From now on, quoted as C WRM.

1

2

Early commentaries on Abstract Expressionism by artists as well as critics stressed
the spontaneous, nonacademic character of this art. As a result, links between these
thoroughly intellectual artists and their sources in literature and philosophy have received
less attention than such connections in other periods in art history. Much of the new
scholarship has explored this once neglected area. The present study is an attempt to
examine how this new approach is pertinent in the case of Robert Motherwell and what he
found in the poetry of three Spanish-speaking poets: Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti
and Octavio Paz. The question of subject or meaning in these paintings is complex, it is
true, but not so complex that it warrants enveloping the pictures in mystification or
obfuscation, or justiﬁes the accounts of solely formal and expressive signiﬁcance. My task
here is to reconcile the artist’s commitment to abstraction with his simultaneous
commitment to expanding abstraction’s possibilities for meaning. The myth of pure
abstraction—form freed from all mimesis and metaphor—was not one that particularly
interested Motherwell, and his work reveals itself to be commited to devising an abstract art

rich in complex, articulate metaphors.

CHAPTER 1
MEANING IN THE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISTS’ LANGUAGE

Initially described by its proponents in formal (Clement Greenberg) or existential
(Harold Rosenberg) terms, Abstract Expressionism, despite its many disparities,
demonstrated a surprisingly cohesive body of repeated themes, reflecting shared
convictions.2 As Ann Gibson has noted, the works of Abstract Expressionist artists
increasingly became emphatically large and astonishingly assertive, despite a wide range of
individual differences. They urgently confronted the viewer with the language of paint: its
viscosity, its capacity to retain a reference—in slashes, ridges, and scrubbings—to the
hand that had been moved to stretch the medium’s language to these extremes; and its role
as a carrier of color (with all of color’s inherent psychological and physiological power).
Despite this apparent broadness of method, however, the Abstract Expressionists rejected
other more divergent directions in art—such as Realism, certain forms of Geometric
Abstraction, and Surrealism. According to the critics and writers of the period such as
Clement Greenberg or artists like Ad Reinhardt—“form is content, that’s it”3—, by the late
ﬁfties “important” American painting was non-narrative and immediate in its impact.

While reference to what was considered to be primitive and archaic became a

conspicuous feature of some controversial modernist painting in New York during the early

 

2 Subject matter in the New York School has since received special attention. Recent investigations include
such studies as David Anfam’s Clyfford Still (London: Courtauld Institute, 1984); Anna Chave’s Mark
Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Ann Gibson, Issues in
Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990); Stephen
Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1991); and Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

3 Ad Reinhardt to Sam Hunter. Summer 1966, Ad Reinhardt Papers, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Quoted by Gibson, 51.

4
194OS—especially in the work of Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and

Clyfford Still—not all New York School artists were interested in the allegedly ‘primitive’.
As Michael Leja has recently explained, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Robert
Motherwell seem to have preferred modernist ‘sophistication’ to ‘primitivism.’4
Motherwell, for example, who spent some time in Mexico in 1941, recalled, “I didn’t have
the slightest interest in modern Mexican painting or in pre-Columbian art.”5 Although many
of these artists denied a one-to—one relationship between the forms in their work and
specific literary sources or meanings, the relations of particular individuals—such as
Robert Motherwell’s concern with poetry—to contemporary cultural preoccupations and
productions demonstrate that this policy was not due to a reluctance to express ideas or
emotions in words.

The New York School was hardly without a poetics and subject matter, or a
network of guiding principles. In his account of the New York School, Serge Guilbaut
argues that either the artists adapted their work to the same historical forces that were also
producing the ideology of the powerful liberal bourgeois elite, or that the sheer ambiguity
of the paintings opened them to appropiation by those same powerful interests.6
Furthermore, Michael Leja has shown that far from fulfilling some mythic role as an
intransigent opponent to bourgeois ideology and values, the New York School was deeply
immersed in the construction of that ideology. “In some fundamental ways, New York
School art went with, not against, the grain of wartime United States culture, and the
character of this engagement provides what coherence the group can claim.”7

The reluctance of the New York School artists to subscribe to a definable program

stemmed from what they saw as a desperately narrowed range of options for art. “If one is

 

4 Leja, 49-120.
5 Motherwell, “Interview with Brian Robertson, Addenda (1965),” reprinted in C WRM, 145.

6 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1983), 101-163.

7 Leja, 39.

5
to continue to paint or write as the political trap seems to close upon him he must perhaps

have the extremest faith in sheer possibility,” wrote Robert Motherwell and Harold
Rosenberg in their editorial statement for Possibilities in September 1947.8 The disastrous
revelations of the Stalinist regime had deﬂated their hopes that Marxism and Socialism
offered a way to resolve the conﬂict between the individual and society; and the horrors of
the Spanish Civil War and the Holocaust cast their faith in human nature into doubt.9 The
election of 1946 swept a Republican majority into both Congressional houses, ushering in
an era of conservatism that radical artists, even those most disillusioned with the failure of
the left to produce a free modern society, could not accept. To these artists, every political
position appeared to evade the complexities both of history and individual experience.

In the case of Robert Motherwell, the concerns (both visual and verbal) mirrored in
certain aspects of his art arise from a spectrum of psychological, linguistic,
anthropological, literary, and philosophical considerations. This is what Robert Motherwell
did when he connected his visual forms with the poets’ verbal statements, as we will see in
the following pages. In recent years, a group of scholars has considered inﬂuences external
to the field of art on Abstract Expressionist artists. In Motherwell’s particular case,
Bradford Collins, Evan Firestone and Robert S. Mattisson’s studies are especially
relevant.lo

By the late forties and early fifties, comparisons between the visual and verbal arts

had become a signiﬁcant strategy for determining “meaning” in abstract art. In 1949

 

8 Motherwell and Rosenberg, “Statement,” Possibilities (1947), 1.

9 One of the most vivid documents of this period is The God That Failed, ed. Richard Crossman (London:
Hamish Hamilton, 1950), a series of essays by intellectuals such as Arthur Koestler that chronicles their
disillusion with the left and their continued dissatisfaction with the right. See also John Lewis Gaddis, The
United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972),
and Guilbaut, 17-47.

10 Bradford Collins, “The Fundamental Tragedy of the Elegies to the Spanish Republic, or Robert
Motherwell’s Dilemma,” Arts 59 (September 1984), 94-97; Evan Firestone, “James Joyce and the First
Generation New York School,” Arts 56 (June 1982), 116-21; and Robert S. Mattison, “The Emperor of
China: Symbols of Power and Vulnerability in the Art of Robert Motherwell during the 19405,” Art
International 25 (November-December 1982), 8-14.

6

Blanche Brown supplied the College Art Journal with a list of comparisons between
speciﬁc paintings or sculptures and literary works, noting that by such conjunctions “one
can multiply the aesthetic understanding of the intrinsic values of the work of art itself.”11
Jacques Maritain delivered a series of lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D. C., in which he celebrated the common traits of painting and poetry and in 1954 Yale
University Art Gallery mounted a show demonstrating the correspondence between art and
poetry.12

The larger question broached here, that of deriving “meaning” from the conjunction
of the arts, however, is a topic with a long history of its own. Wendy Steiner’s The Colors
of Rethoric presents a framework for inter-artistic comparisons in the nineteenth century
and the earlier part of the twentieth century. As she explains it, the importance of the
painting-literature comparison “lies in the fact that painting has until very recently been
taken as mimetic, a mirror of the world”. When theorists and artists compared the two arts,
they were almost inevitably trying through analogical sleight-of-hand to attribute the reality
claim of painting to literature. At the same time, the obvious differences between the two
arts and between each and reality kept intruding, so that the history of the interartistic
comparison swings back and forth like a pendulum between eager acceptance and stem
denial.13 With the advent of modernism the analogy has become of supreme importance
once again. The tension between artistic medium and represented world so crucial to
Cézanne, to cubism, abstractionism, and surrealism has changed the meaning of the
analogy. “By claiming that a poem is like a modern painting one is no longer stressing their
mirroring function but their paradoxical status as signs of reality and as things in their own

right.”14

 

11 Blanche Brown, “The Correlation of Literature and the Fine Arts,” College Art Journal (Winter 1949-
50), 176-80.

12 See Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)
and George Heard Hamilton, “Object and Image,” Art News 53 (May 1954), 18-21, 58.

13 See Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rethoric (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi.
14 Steiner, xii.

7
Although there has been an increasingly open exchange among artists in the use of

linguistic theory as a model for artmaking during the last two decades, this was less
common in America at mid-century. In 1949 there was a strong resistance among the
Abstract Expressionists to the idea that language was inextricably meshed with every mode
of apprehending the world and therefore, of course, to the idea that what their works
represented could be put into words. The Abstract Expressionists’ resistance to literary
interpretation was remarked upon by their critics, both friendly and hostile. It was also
expressed by the avoidance of recognizable images in their work and in their refusal to
explain, except in the most general terms, what the work “meant.” Some, like Clifford
Still, felt that “to interpose any literary allusion is to establish a serious block to
communication.”15

The generation of the 19508 understood Abstract Expressionim as Harold
Rosenberg’s “Action Painting,” according to which the artists theatrically expressed their
personal anguish on a blank canvas with little attention to form, style, and subject matter.16
For Rosenberg, painting was an autobiographical act of self-creation in the everyday
world, and the expression of personality. A second critical interpretation of the 19503
invoked the “American” tradition and manifested the country’s longstanding search for its
own identity in art. Best expressed by John McCoubrey in his American Tradition in
Painting,17 this view argued that Abstract Expressionism represented traditional American
concerns with emotional honesty: rough, awkward, sometimes boisterous surfaces and
forms, and naive feelings. With Abstract Expressionism, the art could be unpretentious,

American, and abstract.

 

15 From a letter by the artist excerpted in Tiger’s Eye, 7 (March 1949), 60. Quoted in Gibson, “Abstract
Expressionism’s Evasion of Language,” Art Journal, 47 (Fall 1988), 208.

16 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News, 51 (September 1952), 22-23, 48-50. For
a discussion of the evolution of the art criticism of Abstract Expressionism in the 19505, see: Phyllis
Rosenzweig, The Fifties, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: The Hirshhorn Museum, 1980).

17 John McCoubrey, American Tradition in Painting (New York: G. Braziller, 1963).

8
Rosenberg’s “Action Painting” and the nationalist reading of the Abstract

Expressionist movement gave way in the late 1950s and 1960s (although elements remain
in most subsequent interpretations) to the New Criticism and formalism of Clement
Greenberg and his supporters, who hailed the Abstract Expressionists as advancing certain
principles of a virtual international modernist art and saw this as their primary
achievement.18 Locating the art exclusively within the best pedigree—such as
Impressionism, the art of Picasso and Miro—this approach focused on the Abstract
Expressionists’ stylistic evolution while proposing an exclusive concern of the artists with
formal questions: purifying the medium, squeezing out illusionistic space, and remarking
the space as optical rather than tactile. Yet such an approach minimized the intellectual
complexities behind the deceptively simple surfaces and forms. In general, Greenberg and
his supporters were actually indifferent, if not hostile, to the declared subjects or
“ideology” of Abstract Expressionism.19

Since the 19703 a different stream of thought has matured and come to dominate the
critical debate. Beginning in the 19403, but diffused among different authors and artists,
critical attention has addressed to subjects and meaning as well as the forms of Abstract
Expressionist art. This tendency blossomed in the criticism of William Seitz, Robert
Goldwater, Robert Rosenblum, Dore Ashton, Irving Sandler, Thomas Hess, Sam Hunter,
Lawrence Alloway, and others during the 19503 and 19603 and it now prevails in the work
of more than forty recent scholars. Applying traditional iconographic methodologies, these
historians examine Abstract Expressionism within its intellectual and cultural context. The

Abstract Expressionism that emerges from this scrutiny transforms previous interpretations

 

18 See, for example: Greenberg,Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, John O’Brian, ed.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Michael Fried, Three American Painters (Cambridge,
Mass: Fogg Art Museum, 1965); and William Rubin, “Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition,”
Artforum, Part 1, 5:6 (February 1967), 14-22; Part 11, 5:7 (March 1967), 28-37; Part 111, 5:8 (April 1967),
18-31; Part IV, 5:9 (May 1967), 28-33.

'9 For a detailed discussion of Greenberg’s dismissal of Abstract-Expressionist subject matter or
“ideology”, see: Barbara Cavaliere and Robert C. Hobbs. “Against a Newer Laocoon,” Arts Magazine. 51
(April 1977), 110-17.

9
as new information has revamped our understanding of the artists’ basic interests and

thematic concerns and how these are embodied within the forms of their works.20

Among their many contributions, these scholars have been more determined than
ever to ﬂush out the Abstract Expressionists’ reasons for the evasion of language and
literary meaning. Four major explanations have been advanced. The first, discussed by
Donald Kuspit, is centered on the formalist position so categorically stated by the critic
Clement Greenberg by 1940, whose basis—according to Kuspit—is found in Kant, Roger
Fry, Clive Bell, and T. S. Eliot.21 Irving Sandler, T. J. Clark, Serge Guilbaut, Fred
Orton, Griselda Pollock, and others have emphasized a second reason: the association of
realism with the totalitarism of Hitler and Stalin. Even American Social Realism’s narrative
accessibility began to suggest a connection between the propagandistic explication of a
painted or sculpted text and totalitarian control.22 A third reason, also pointed out by
Sandler, developed by Paul Rogers and others, and often noted by the artists themselves,
was the Abstract Expressionists’ suspicion of the literary basis of the descriptive

pictorialism and lack of painterly vigor they saw in French Surrealism. They rejected the

 

20 Some of Gorky’s paintings have been demonstrated to ﬂow rather directly from objects he associated
with his childhood and his personal life (see Harry Rand, Arshile Gorky, The Implications of Symbols
[Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld & Schram, 1980]); Pollock’s Jungian vision has come to be seen as a factor in
his choice of the ‘primitive’ objects whose forms he chose to adapt for his work (see the articles and
comments by David Freke, Donald Gordon, Rosalind Krauss, Elisabeth Langhome, Irving Sandler and
Judith Wolfe); and David Smith’s observations about the similarity of social and sexual aggression appear
to have played a signiﬁcant role in the development of some of the forms in his sculpture (see Rosalind
Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, the Sculpture of David Smith [Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1971] and
Robert Lubar, “Metaphor and Meaning in David Smith’s Jurassic Bird," Arts Magazine [September, 1984],
78-86).

21 Donald Kuspit, Clement Greenberg: Art Critic (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979).

22 Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting (New York: Harper & Row, c. 1970), 5-12; T. J.
Clark, “Clement Greenberg Theory of Art, “ Critical Inquiry, 9 (September 1982). 139-156; Guilbaut, “The
New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America: Greenberg, Pollock, or from Trotskyism to the New
Liberalism of the ‘Vital Center,” October, 15 (Winter 1980), 61-78, and How New York Stole the Idea of
Modern Art, 25-29, 38-39; Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, “Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed,” Art
History, 4 (September 1981), 305-27.

10
illusionistic forms of Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dali adopting the silent, gestural aspect of

Surrealism—automatism—ostensibly for its plastic possibilities alone.23

Ann Gibson has added another group of explanations to the Abstract
Expressionists’ evasion of language.24 First, a judgement expressed by Carl Jung in
Modern Man in Search of a Soul (available in English in 1933), where he wrote that there
was a qualitative difference between the power of the “psychological” artist who was aware
of the relationship between his intention and his product, and that of the “visionary” artist
who was directed by dark primordial drives within his psyche to produce work whose
meaning he could not divine.25 Second, the belief of New Criticism (the dominant literary
theory in the United States during the forties and fifties) that interpretation of art was
wrongheaded, exemplified in Clement Greenberg’s dismissal of artists’ intention, which
indicates his lack of attention to the difference between a painter’s intention and its
realization.26 Third, certain aspects of Russian Formalism also expressed aversion to
interpretation;27 and finally, an attitude central to Existentialist philosophy, which implied
that the meaning of a work is not synonymous with the artist’s intention.28 For all these
reasons, most artists and critics held that language could not produce a verbal correlative of

the meaning and intent of the Abstract-Expressionist work.

 

23 Sandler, 34-41; Paul Rodgers, “Towards a Theory/Practice of Painting: Abstract Expressionism and the
Surrealist Discourse,” Artforum, 18 (March 1980), 53-61.

24 See Ann Gibson, “Abstract Expressionism’s Evasion of Language,” 209-214.
25 Carl G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933), 164, 171.

26 This was suggested by Yves-Alain Bois, “Ryman’s Tact,” October, 19 (Winter 1981), 101. In their
landmark essay, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review, LIV (1946), 468-488, M. C. Beardsley and W.
K. Wimsatt had pointed out that whatever an artist might say about what he meant his or her work to mean
was beside the point. Whatever could not be extracted from the work by a close reading was not relevant.

27 Scholars such as Victor Erlich, Frederic Jameson, Barbara Korpan, and Serge Doubrovsky have noted
points of contact between Russian Formalist thought and Anglo-American New Criticism.

28 The idea that a work of art might be made with no speciﬁc intended meaning for an audience was stated
by Jean-Paul Sartre and further elaborated in 1952 by Harold Rosenberg, basically in his now-famous article
“The American Action Painters,” quoted above.

11

Gibson is one of several scholars who recently compared the relationship between
artists’ statements and those of writers in other fields, with images in the work itself;29

because, as she puts it,

forty years later we have begun to feel that if consciousness is not altogether
formed by language, perhaps it cannot profit by attempting to escape it either. I
would suggest that the solution to the problem of the relation of intention to
meaning in Abstract Expressionism, absent as it is from the artists’ statements as
they are framed, should not be sought solely in the works or in their reception
alone, either. Rather, it may be located at the intersection of these areas, in the
play of language with what eludes it, and will involve the imaginative
reconstruction of the choices not made; that is, the concepts foregone, emotions
unexpressed, and issues untreated, as well as those present in the work.30

Working “at the intersection of these areas” we will see how, in the particular case of
Robert Motherwell, language was basic not only to his expression of aesthetic thought but

to its formation.

 

29 In addition to those cited in notes 2 and 10, see the works of Anne Edgerton, Robert Hobbs, Rosalind
Krauss, Joan Marter, Stephen Polcari, Harry Rand, Elizabeth Langhome Reeves, Roberta Tarbell, Judith
Wolfe, and Sally Yard.

30 Gibson, “Abstract Expressionism’s Evasion of Language,” 212.

CHAPTER 2
BEGINNINGS: SURREALISM AND LITERATURE

Robert Motherwell has often been described as two people: an artist who interacted
spontaneously and sensuously with his material and a man of letters. Trained as a
philosopher, he was a professor for many years. Through his lectures, writing and editing
the Documents of Modern Art, Motherwell became one of the most eloquent spokespersons
for abstract art and modernism. His study of Eugene Delacroix, then of Henri Matisse,
Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Joan Miro, made him intensely aware of himself as an actor
in the unfolding chronicle of modern art. Very early on he concluded that representational
art—even the Surrealist variety—was a dead end. Only abstract art is modern, he said,
because “it is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life—rebellious,
individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, initable.”31

When he was three, Motherwell’s family moved from Aberdeen, Washington, to
San Francisco. After graduating from preparatory school, he studied brieﬂy at the Otis Art
Institute, then entered Stanford University, where he majored in philosophy and began to
delve into modern art, music, drama, as well as psychoanalysis and French literature. He
attended a graduate program in philosophy at Harvard University and, in 1938-39, spent a
year abroad writing a master’s thesis on Eugéne Delacroix’ Journals. He also studied
French art from Symbolism to Surrealism.32

In 1940 he moved to New York City, which explains why his name appears

relatively late in the chronicle of American Surrealism, for a person who later would be

 

31 Motherwell, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” reprinted in C WRM, 85.

32 For a complete biographical account see C WRM, xvii-xxvii.

l2

13
among the ‘founding fathers’ of the New York School. In 1937, in the wake of the

Museum of Modern Art’s Surrealism shows, when Gorky and Baziotes were already
reading Minotaure and experimenting with Surrealist imagery, Motherwell was a twenty-
two-year-old graduate student at Harvard, working toward a Ph. D. in philosophy. In
1939, when Baziotes and Jackson Pollock were already disputing automatism, Motherwell
was teaching philosophy at the University of Oregon. By 1940, he had come to New York
but, by his own admission, he did not know any American painters and did not care to
meet any.33 Preferring “the French milieu,” he studied engraving with the Surrealist Kurt
Seligmann and took to hanging around the edges of the growing community of European
refugee intellectuals gathering in New York. It was not until the summer of 1941, on a trip
to Mexico with Roberto Sebastian Matta—to whom he had been introduced that spring—
that Motherwell was finally introduced to Surrealism. “In the three months of that
summer,” he said later, “Matta gave me a ten-year education in Surrealism.” In Mexico
City, he visited Wolfgang Paalen, whose show Baziotes and Pollock had seen at the Julien
Levi Gallery the year before. On the same trip, Motherwell also met Maria Ferrera, a
Mexican actress who would soon become his ﬁrst wife.

On his return from Mexico, Motherwell began to paint seriously for the first time
and, with Matta as a sponsor, he redoubled his efforts to ingratiate himself into the
community of European artists. At ﬁrst, they were intrigued by his brashness. While most
Americans remained standoffish, if not hostile, Motherwell—who described himself as
“imbued with French culture”——strode fearlessly into the Surrealists’ gatherings and
engaged them in intellectual conversation. “I would talk to Marx Ernst,” he recalled. “[He]

probably was the first painter before me to have a degree in philosophy and was

 

33 For this and the account that follows see Motherwell, “Interview with Sidney Simon: ‘Conceming the
Beginnings of the New York School: 1939-1943,” quoted in C WRM, 155-168. See also Steven Naifeh and
Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), 422-
430.

14
perfectly willing to talk about intellectual things.”34 In public, Ernst and the others tolerated

the nervy young American, often teasing him with arch, ambiguous comments—“You have
a tremendous capacity to grow”—that he invariably took as compliments. André Breton
even picked Motherwell to be the ﬁrst editor of VW (part of his halﬂiearted effort to build
bridges to the American artistic community), although Motherwell was ﬁred before the
inaugural issue appeared.35

In private, however, the Europeans ridiculed him. In their book on Pollock, Naifeh
and Smith quote Lucia Wilcox (a friend of Pollock) as saying, “he used to come and
insinuate himself into this crowd but they simply didn’t pay any attention to him.” Ernst
dismissed him as “a joke.”36 Breton, who considered all Americans naive, deplored his
intellectual pretensions and referred to him demeaningly as “le petit philosophe.”37 Even
Matta, in an unguarded moment, agreed that he was “a windbag and a pompous ass.”38

In 1942, however, Matta had a use for his new protégé. To prepare for the decisive
“manifestation” that would establish a new Surrealist movement, Matta recruited
Motherwell to help launch his intensive campaign. They visited artists’ studios with their
message. Motherwell would arrange the meetings and make introductions, then Matta
would explain the movement: the need for a “revolution of the young ‘inside’ Surrealism;”
the need for Americans “to develop some sort of unified direction in their art;” the need to
“show up the Surrealists as a group of dogmatic painters no longer attuned to the

contemporary world;” and the need for “reliance on truer versions of the technique of

 

34 Motherwell, interview by Paul Cummings, Nov. 24, 1971; Feb. 21, 1972; Mar. 30, 1972; May 1,
1974; Archives of American Art.

35 John Bernard Myers, Tracking the Marvelous: A Life in the New York Art World. (New York: Random
House, 1983), 35.

36 Naifeh and Smith, interview with Roger Wilcox, 424.
37 Myers, 35.

38 Naifeh and Smith, interview with Roger Wilcox, 424.

15

psychic automatism.”39 Motherwell would follow with an eager, lengthy explanation of
Surrealist theory. During the spring and fall of 1942, Matta and Motherwell took their act to
the studios of Gorky, Pollock, de Kooning, Kamrowski, and Busa, meeting with mixed
reviews. Gorky was bemused, de Kooning indifferent, Kamrowski and Busa were
interested, however, and Pollock was “exhilarated.” Including Baziotes, Matta now had six
artists—himself, Motherwell, Baziotes, Busa, Kamrowski, and Pollock—enough to make
a movement.

The Surrealist principle of “pure psychic automatism”—a way of disrupting
everyday connections, of mining the unconscious for new, abstract forms to convey
emotions and experiences—proved especially fruitful for Motherwell. Motherwell’s belief
in the expressive power of raw gesture and chance relationships was given impetus by the
theories of the Surrealists exiled in New York during those years. The key premise of their
creations was “automatism,” or encouraging subconscious revelation by beginning a work
of art without previous conscious thought. The Surrealists, however, sought hidden
ﬁgures in these markings, which they then consciously elaborated. Motherwell and several
of the other young New York School artists saw in the immediate paint strokes themselves
an inherently valuable means for expressing feelings abstractly, one of the most signiﬁcant
discoveries of Abstract Expressionism. From the 19403 on, Motherwell typically began his
paintings with various types of automatism.4O

Due to the prominence of this process in Robert Motherwell’s creative method, I
believe it is worthwhile to consider the question further. Indeed, the creative principle
underlying Motherwell’s work involves spontaneous invention. Like the Surrealists, he
regarded his own unconscious mind as the chief source of artistic subject matter. But the

Surrealists aspired to reach an uncensored, dreamlike state in their art; they used

 

39 On Matta and Motherwell’s tour of artists’ studios, see: Cavaliere and Hobbs, 111.

40 For a larger discussion of Motherwell’s use of automatism see Jonathan Fineberg, “Death and Maternal
Love: Psychological Speculations on Robert Motherwell’s Art,” Artforum (September 1978), 52-57.

16
“automatic” writing or painting to enter the hidden levels of the human psyche and to avoid

conscious form control.

In the hands of some Surrealists, automatic writing or painting meant producing
blindly or so quickly that there would be no interference from the intellect. Motherwell saw
this psychic automatism as a creative principle capable of generating original new art
without imposing a predetermined style.41 In retrospect, he regarded this as having been
the essential problem for the young American vanguard in the 19403: to bring American art
out of its aesthetic provincialism and into the mainstream of European modernism, while at
the same time ﬁnding a theoretical basis for generating new art.42 Surrealist automatism
seemed to offer that potential, but on a less purely intellectual level, Motherwell was
already profoundly inﬂuenced by the introspective focus of Surrealism. Nevertheless, he
used this idea of automatism in a slightly different way from the Surrealists.

Jonathan Fineberg has explained how in contrast to the dreamlike, uncensored state
to which the Surrealists aspired, Motherwell set out to capture a strong emotional
experience of which he was highly conscious from the start and in which he had an active
involvement. This does not mean he understood all of its psychological implications or
motives, but that he began with a strong emotion which he sought to objectify in his art.
Thus each of Motherwell’s paintings intentionally embodies both a psychological
experience and the artist’s active struggle to translate it into a visual metaphor. In addition,
every work also brings associations from beyond its own ontogeny—allusions to other
events in the artist’s emotional life history, previous pictures, and external inﬂuences.

In sum, each brushstroke and form is charged with meaning, and a whole new
aspect of the expressive richness of Motherwell’s work begins to emerge as we closely

examine these details—in our case, the meaning he found echoed in a particular poetry—

 

“ See Fineberg, 53.

42 Apparently, many of the Surrealist poets and painters were never entirely satisﬁed with this method
because, like Aragon, they confessed years later that they did not always abide by the rules, but deliberately
altered their compositions. See Helena Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism (New York: Paragon House,
1988), 18-19.

l7
relating speciﬁc formal devices with particular emotions and piecing together the dynamic

interaction between them. Motherwell’s interaction with the Surrealist milieu and the
adoption of his automatist method, together with his literary interests—which we shall see
below—are at the very basis of his use of poetry in relation to his visual creations.

Art historian Jack Flam explains that Motherwell’s intellectual and academic
background distinguished him from the other Abstract Expressionists, who emerged from a
more traditional art school training. "In particular, Motherwell’s interest in philosophy, in
Symbolist literature, and psychoanalysis would serve as the intellectual matrix from which
a good deal of his later thinking would develop and be sustained,"43 a view Motherwell
himself acknowledged:

The thing I should make clear, because I belong to a generation that mainly killed
itself, in one way or another—and I’m just as self-destructive—is what really
distinguishes me from them [the rest of the New York School]. Now, I’m not
talking about esthetic values but about human beings. With Smith, Reinhardt and

myself, there was a real belief that the main enterprise was modern culture, of
which painting and sculpture are but one aspect.44

Dore Ashton went further and explicitly identiﬁed Motherwell's literary inﬂuences:

In fact, Motherwell’s spiritual concourse with many poets is singularly
slanted toward those for whom color—named color—is a kind of magical
catalyst. No doubt he has had moments of heightened recognition while reading
these poets, and has infused them in his work. The list is long, including
Coleridge, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé of the nineteenth century.
Perhaps even more signiﬁcant is Motherwell’s contact with poets of the twentieth

century, most of whom are writing in the Spanish language.45

Stephanie Terenzio shows how this inﬂuence was not limited to Motherwell’s

aesthetic beliefs but to all his intellectual thinking and philosophy. Terenzio explains

 

43 Jack D. Flam, Motherwell (Oxford: Phaidon, r991), 13.
44 Vivien Raymor, “A Talk with Robert Motherwell,” Artnews (April 1974), 51.

45 Dore Ashton, “On Motherwell,” in Robert T. Buck, ed. Robert Motherwell (New York: Abbeville
Press/Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1983), 35-36.

18
Motherwell's adoption and development of some of the postulates of modernism, through

his introduction to French painting and literature:

Motherwell had been captured by the spirit of modernism, an expression of
reality with which he passionately identiﬁed. For him, modemism was the culture
of modern industrial civilization—one without precedent in character. He was
determined to investigate it, learn it, and, if possible, add to it. Because Cézanne,
Matisse, Baudelaire, Gide, Proust, Valéry, and the French symbolist poets had
been among his first (and lasting) attachments, he assumed for a time that
modernism was inherently and exclusively French. His notions about leaving
New York for Paris faded as he came to realize that modernism was an
international phenomenon—including within its ranks such voices as Joyce,
Eliot, Lorca and Rilke—and that the French contribution was only one glorious
manifestation of a more general reﬂection of contemporary reality.46

Finally, the words of the painter confirm his long standing interest in innovative

poets and novelists, which provided him with an “active principle for painting”:

I understood, too, that “meaning” was the product of the relations among
elements, so that I never had the then common anxiety as to whether an abstract
painting had a given meaning. People who from a purist standpoint have felt that I
have allowed too much “literature” at times into my painting, underestimate, in
my opinion, the philosophical freedom with which it was done. But in the
end I certainly learned more from Baudelaire and Mallarmé and Joyce than from
philosophy For the first time I had an active principle for painting, speciﬁcally
designed to explore unknown possibilities. A voyage to the New, in Baudelaire’s
metaphor.47

Mallarmé said somewhere, “You don’t represent the object, you represent
the effect of the object.”48

Some Abstract Expressionist artists’ preference for symbolic over allegorical
reference lay in their appreciation of French Symbolism. The crux of symbolist poetry for
both William Baziotes and Robert Motherwell, according to the latter, revolved around

Mallarmés famous dictum that the poet should represent not the thing itself but the effect

 

46 CWRM, 6-7.
47 Motherwell, “Interview with Bryan Robertson, Addenda (1965),” Ibid., 143.

48 Motherwell, “Interview with Richard Wagener (14 June 1974),” Ibid., 217.

19
that it produces—that poetry should refer indirectly.49 Thus Motherwell used Symbolist

theory to confirm his own painterly direction in which he had already embarked.
Motherwell’s series of paintings Throw of Dice and Beside the Sea, from the early 19603,
and the unpublished print series A Throw of the Dice (1962-63), whose title is taken from
Mallarmé’s poem about chance, is based upon this automatist freedom, a combination of
intuition and chance. As we shall see, this is only one of many examples of Motherwell’s
multiple combination of his ‘surrealist’ method, a literary inﬂuence, and the abstract style.
From the early days of his career, Motherwell did not conceal his literary sources.
He did so through the titles he gave to several specific works that were considered
landmarks in the deﬁnition and evolution of his artistic language. The ﬁrst was Mallarmé ’s
Swan (1944), which in turn is an ambiguous name for an ambiguous painting, a fitting
tribute to a master of ambiguity, the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé.50 A few years later he
painted The Homely Protestant (1948), a title Motherwell chose as he opened James
Joyce’s Ulysses at random and put his finger on the page with his eyes closed (a surrealist
techinque). From 1949 are The Voyage, based on a poem by Charles Baudelaire, in which
modern art is described as a journey towards the new; and At Five in the Afternoon, for
which Motherwell borrowed the first verse of the first part of the Llanto por Ignacio
Sdnchez Mejias by Federico Garcia Lorca. Later on, in 1967, he produced the incomplete
series of paintings which were meant to illustrate a new and unpublished translation of
Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. And ﬁnally, one of Motherwell’s last projects was the series
of forty prints he created to illustrate Joyce’s Ulysses (1988). These are the highlights, but

other examples will be discussed in the pages that follow.

 

49 The object was impotant only in terms of an experience of it. Mallarmé felt that the aim of poetry was
“peindre non la chose, mais l’effet qu’elle produit.” From an October 1864 letter, written in London to
Mallarmé’s editor, Henri Cazalis, in Paris. Quoted by Jean C. Harris, “A Little-known Essay on Manet by
Stéphane Mallarmé,” Art Bulletin 46 (1964), 562.

50 See L. Bailey Van Hook, “Robert Motherwell’s Mallanné ’3 Swan,” Arts Magazine (January, 1983),
104-5.

20
We have already seen how Dore Ashton pointed out the inﬂuence of some

twentieth-century Spanish-speaking poets on the work of Motherwell and, she believed,
particularly on his use of color. Ashton elaborates on three of these poets: “There was
Lorca, as early as the 19403, whom Motherwell recognized as a fellow painter (but in
words); Lorca whose famous ballad begins by naming a color: ‘Green, how I love you,
green.”’5l Much more intense is Motherwell’s involvement with a contemporary of Lorca,
one of the generation of Ultrar’stas who renovated modern Spanish poetry. Rafael Alberti—
himself a painter—speaks often of his youthful romance with painting, and in his poems
spells out colors not only by metaphorical allusion, but literally. Alberti’s entire poetic
oeuvre is spattered with swatches of color, named and named again. Finally, there is
Octavio Paz, a Mexican. A superb feeling for color, as Ashton points out, infuses Paz’s
work throughout. Dore Ashton is right in identiﬁying these sources, but I hope to show, in
the following chapters, that the shared importance of color was neither the only nor the
essential connection between Motherwell and the different poets.

Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), Rafael Alberti (1902) and Octavio Paz (1914)
are, then, three important sources Motherwell successively drank from all his life and
showed the interest he always felt for some aspects of Spanish and Latin American
literature and culture. Talking about his work after Alberti’s poems, the artist defined this
interest:

I am not attracted to everything Spanish. It so happens I am particularly
attracted to the poetry of Garcia Lorca’s generation, of which Alberti is part, the
generation of men who could have been my father. Let’s say, if I had taken a text
of Hemingway to illustrate, it would not be simply because it was American, but
because it was a particular part of America that interests me, and the same is true
in relation to Alberti. It’s not being a Spaniard, but being a Spaniard of that
particular generation with those particular political and aesthetic interests; and,

more, of being an ancient in the modern world (which is Spain’s problem, like
Japan’s).52

 

51 Ashton, p. 37. “Green, how I love you, green / Verde que te quiero verde” is from the fourth part of
Lorca’s Romancero Gitano (1924-27), called Romance Sonambulo.

52 Heidi Colsman-Freyberger, “Robert Motherwell: Words and Images,” Art Journal 34 (Fall, 1974), 19.

21

For intellectuals of the 19303 and 1940s, the writings of the modern poets Lorca
and Alberti and their contemporaries, as well as Lorca’s unjust execution, came to stand for
a deeply felt sense of tragedy about the Spanish republican defeat. To many, this event
symbolized the plight of the individual against oppression and death. But to Motherwell,
Lorca and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) also represented an exceedingly personal
confrontation not only with the finality of death but with a whole range of the painter’s
deepest anxieties.

Although nobody has pointed it out before, we must remember that during the
summer, fall and winter of 1938 Motherwell traveled through Europe, he took a studio in
Paris where he began to paint, and exhibited at the Parisian Raymod Duncan Gallery,
before returning to the United States in 1939. In the summer of 1938 the Spanish Republic
had nothing left but Catalonia, Madrid, and some southeastern provinces, and its territory
was split in two. The Fascist specter cast its aura of blood and death across the peninsula.
It is not difﬁcult to believe that, while Motherwell was in Paris, the news of Lorca’s
execution shocked him as much as many other atrocities of the war, brought daily to Paris
by the firsthand accounts of hundreds of Spanish refugees”. In Paris too, Picasso’s
Guernica had been exhibited the year before in the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris
Exhibition. In this summer of 1938, while Guernica was on display in Scandinavia, Hitler
had 1,300,000 men under arms and was announcing his intention to annex the
Sudeterland. Again, it is not difﬁcult to imagine the impact of all of these events on a young
American student, who was already obsessed with death.

Robert Mattison has suggested that Motherwell’s obsession with death may be the

unconscious result of his asthmatic condition and health anxieties as a child, and he quotes

 

53 For years the Spanish government suppressed the truth about Lorca’s death. Following his assassination
on August 19, 1936, many notes and commentaries on Lorca’s rumoured death appeared in the press, but
not until much later was the rumour clariﬁed as a fact, and for years many unanswered questions remained.
Therefore we might suggest that, although Motherwell probably knew about it since 1938, the continuous
appearance of pieces of research throughout the 19403 and early 19503 constantly revived his memories of
the tragedy. See Ian Gibson, The Assasination of Garcia Lorca (New York: Penguin Books, 1983).

22

the painter remebering that “there was a great celebration when I reached my sixteenth
birthday because nobody expected me to live.”54 In any case, these feelings were
reinforced by his experiences in Mexico, subsequent loneliness in New York, and personal
response to World War II. The theme of death appears in such intensely personal, early
works such as Surprise and Inspiration, Personage and Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, and

later more publicly in the ‘Spanish Elegies.’

 

54 Mattison, Robert Motherwell: The Formative Years. (Ann Arbor, Mi.: UMI Research Press, 1987), 42.

CHAPTER 3
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA AND AT FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON

The most famous and representative series of paintings Robert Motherwell
produced are the so-called ‘Elegies to the Spanish Republic’, a subject to which the painter
returned again and again, to create more than 140 versions between 1948 and 1991. The
‘Elegies’ began as a simple illustration for a poem.

As with other twentieth-century avant-garde movements, during the years of
gestation Abstract Expressionism was not only discussed in magazines such as The
Partisan Review or The Nation, but in publications closer to it, or “little magazines,” as
they were often called. Basically, these were Iconograph (Spring 1946-Fall 1947), The
Tiger’s Eye (October l947-October 1949), Possibilities (Winter 1947-48), Instead (ca.
January 1948-ca. January 1949), and Modern Artists in America. (1952). In the winter of
1947-48, Wittenbom & Schultz edited Possibilities (An Occasional Review), with John
Cage, Pierre Chareau, Harold Rosenberg and Robert Motherwell as editors.55 Only one
issue appeared, although a second one was planned. For the latter edition, Motherwell
agreed to illustrate a poem by Harold Rosenberg, The Bird of Every Bird; and following a
common practice at that time, the painter himself copied the poem in his handwriting above
the image he conceived, known as Ink Sketch, Elegy No. I (Figure 1). Due to economic
restrictions on the edition, Motherwell used only black and white in his illustration. The
second issue of Possibilities was never published and the artist kept the little exercise, until

one year later, when the following took place:

 

55 See Gibson, Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist Run Periodicals, 33-40.

23

24

 

Lou/n .

Mam

 

Figure 1

Ink Sketch, Elegy No. I (1948)

25

At one moment I was looking around for a generating idea, and thought
well, I’ll try another version, only larger and eliminating the written script. It was
one of those times when I just wanted to paint for the act of painting When I
painted the larger version—At Five in the Aftemoon [Figure 2]—it was as if I
discovered it [the image] was a temple, where Harold’s [the Possibilities
illustration] was a gazebo, so to speak. And when I recognized this [that the
image was now a temple], I looked around for whom represented what the temple
should be consecrated to, and that that was represented in the work of Lorca
To be more concise [I would say] the ‘temple’ was consecrated to a Spanish
sense of death, which I got most of from Lorca, but from other sources as well—
my Mexican wife, bullfights, travel in Mexico, documentary photographs of the
Mexican revolution, Goya, Santos, dark Hispanic interiors.56

Motherwell took the title of the painting, At Five in the Afternoon, from the ﬁrst
part (La cogida y la muerte / His Goring and His Death) of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem
Llanto por Ignacio Sdnchez Mejias (A Flood of Tears for Ignacio Sdnchez Mejias).57 The
death of the famous Spanish bullﬁghter and dramatist Ignacio Stinchez Mejias occurred on
Saturday 11th of August 1934, as a result of a fateful goring he received in the bullring of
the town of Manzanares (Ciudad Real). The bullfighter, who was profoundly immersed in
the literary circles of the period, was a good friend of Lorca and of all the other members of
the ‘Generacion del 27.’ The poet, who refused to see his agonizing friend (“gQuién me
grita que me asome?/ ;No me digais que la vea!” “Who shouts for me to take a peek?/
Never tell me to look at it!” [a sangre derramada 11. 40-41), did not wait too long to write
the elegy, because on November 4th he read it at a meeting with friends. A Flood of Tears
for Ignacio Sdnchez Mejias was published as a book in May 1935, less than a year after

the death of the torero, by the prestigious house Cruz y Raya, under the direction of

 

56 EA. Carmean, Jr., “Robert Moterwell: The Elegies to the Spanish Republic,” in American Art at Mid-
Century: The Subjects of the Artist (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 1978), 97, 98.

57 Federico Garcia Lorca, Obras Completas. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1986), 549-558. The only English
translation of the poem available to Motherwell in 1949 was the one in: Lorca, Lament for the Death of a
Bullﬁghter and Other Poems. Trans. by A. L. Lloyd. (London: William Heinemann, 1937), 33-43. On its
preface (pp. xv-xvi), Lloyd writes that “the Lament for Ignacio Sa’nchez Mejias, which is surely Lorca’s
greatest poem, seems to synthesize all the poet’s personal grief at the loss of a friend, all his struggle
with the idea of death, all the unease and omens that were already in the air of Spain a year before the
outbreak of the Civil War. Both Spanish and foreign critics have found this poem, so full of beauty, terror
and love, the quintessence of the tragedy of Spain.”

26

 

Figure 2

At Five in the Aﬁemoon (1949)

27
Lorca’s close friend José Bergamin. It has been said that this poem reﬂects the best side of

the poet because tradition and innovation alternate in it, together with creative freedom and
discipline, lyrical impetus and restraint.58 It combines traditional elements found in early
works, like Poem of the Deep Song and Gypsy Romances, with the surrealism of his New
York cycle of poems. Even in the key word of the title, Llanto (a copious amount of tears,
accompanied by sobs and wailing), Lorca unites the ancient and the modern. We know
from his brother Francisco that he wanted to avoid using the word elegz’a (elegy). In his
choice of the modern term llanto Lorca conjures from the past the echo of the plantos,
elegies, or laments, of the middle ages.59

Ignacio Sénchez Mejias was dead at forty-three, leaving behind a glorious career in
the bullring, marked by tremendous bravery and heart. The literary man left a series of
articles on bullﬁghting, two ﬁne plays, an unﬁnished novel—and a deep sorrow in the
hearts of two of Spain’s greatest poets, which, in turn, led to two of the ﬁnest elegies ever
written. Rafael Alberti wrote Verte y no verte ( To See You and Not To See You), and
Lorca wrote what one critic, Rafael Martinez Nadal, called the most desolate elegy in all of
Spanish literature.60 Amason quotes Motherwell as saying that “I have no more prized
souvenir,” when talking about a Spanish postcard of Sénchez Mejias that hung on his
studio wall for many years.61 From this, we may conclude that Motherwell must have been
aware not only of the tragic events recalled in Lorca’s poem, but that he also must have felt

some admiration for Mejias’ life and career.

 

58 “Lorca’s Llanto is a similar coalescence of past and present. Emerging from the rich context of centuries
of elegiac verse, it speaks also in a contemporary mode which we apprehend as our own. In such a synthesis
of the traditional and the actual we ﬁnd the source of much of the Llanto’s depth and grandeur.” Calvin
Cannon, “Lorca’s ‘Llanto por Ignacio Sénchez Mejias’ and the Elegiac Tradition,” Hispanic Review 31
(1963), 229.

59 See Federico Garcia Lorca, Antologt’a Comentada (Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 1988), 279-285.
Though usually translated as 'lament', 'llanto' has been recently translated as 'a ﬂood of tears'. See Federico
Garcia Lorca, Ode to Walt Whitman & Other Poems. Translated by Carlos Bauer (San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 1988), v-viii.

60 See Lorca, Ode to Walt Whitman & Other Poems, viii.

6' H. H. Amason, Robert Motherwell (New York: Abrams, 1977), ﬁg. 79.

28
H. H. Amason has observed that Lorca’s poetry carried, all together, the passion

Motherwell had felt since the late 19303 for the lost battle of the Spanish Republic; and,
most of all, his obsession with subjects of life and death, which he already expressed in
works such as Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (1943).

Oh, white wall of Spain!

Oh, black bull of sorrow!

Oh, hardened blood of Ignacio!

It is not difﬁcult to see in these verses from La sangre derramada (His Spilt Blood),
the second part of A Flood of Tears, how Lorca's poetry could inspire a painter like
Motherwell. Through his knowledge of the Spanish culture and folklore Motherwell was
able to 'feel' the black, white and red in the same way the poet did; and with his painter‘s
sensitivity he could translate them into color spots on a canvas, using his own formal visual
language.

In his study of the ‘Elegies’, Robert C. Hobbs pointed out that in Lorca's poem the
verse ‘At ﬁve in the afternoon’ is repeated thirty times. The refrain's repetition produces a
powerful cadence and poetic effectiveness which, according to Hobbs, is echoed by
Motherwell’s At Five in the Afternoon. Hobbs says:

By piling refrain upon refrain and interspersing between them lines that become
expletives, Lorca creates a sustained climax that has a lot in common with
Motherwell's painting—the refrain "at five in the afternoon" is an inevitable
thrust, a continuing, overwhelming force that surrounds and compresses together
the intervening lines in a manner very similar to the way that the ponderous

verticals of the painting remain implacable, forcing the ovoids to remain
suspended in an uneasy tension.62

Hobbs has tried to interpret the possible analogies between the poem and the
‘Elegies’ saying that a comparison between lines in the Llanto with Motherwell's paintings

demonstrates how closely the latter are tied to the former. The colors and forms of the

 

62 Robert C. Hobbs, "Robert Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic," in Robert Motherwell
(Dusseldorf: Stadtische Kunsthalle, 1976), 30.

29

paintings follow some images projected in this poem. When death is presented in the first
section, it is in the form of the "desolate horn" (l. 15) of the bull that lays "...eggs in the
wound" (l. 29) of the bullfighter. And eggs provide a direct analogy to ovoids in the
paintings. The way Lorca presents the audience‘s awareness of Ignacio's death is in the
line "and the crowd was breaking the windows" (1. 47). Broken panes of glass present
violently the theme of the window, an opening into the realm of death and correlate with
both the use of it as a symbol representing an anticipation of death and its appearance in the
‘Elegies’. The colors in the first section of the poem are mainly red—“iodine covering the
bull ring” (1. 27)——and white—“white sheet” (1. 3), “cottonwool (l. 9)”, and “frail of lime”
(l. 5). In addition, an interesting play of white and green is developed in the line "Horn of
the lily through green groins" (l. 43) in which the lily becomes something terrifying, the
horn of the bull, and the color green of the coins is caused by the gangrene that has entered
the wound. In these paintings derived from the poem, Motherwell often uses the colors red
and green to accent large areas of black and white.63

Several of Motherwell's paintings produced during the 19503 can be considered
part of a series with 'Lorquian subjects;’ in the same way that all the ‘Elegies’ are in a
broad sense. The painter himself, in 1951, named a painting Spanish Elegy: Garcia Lorca
Series; and Spanish Drum Roll and Little Spanish Drum Roll, both from 1950, suggest a
clear analogy between the cadence of a drum roll, the repetitive poem and the painting's
repeated shapes. After At Five in the Afternoon, Motherwell did a much larger picture with
the same basic organization entitled Granada (1949). Not coincidently, Granada is the town
where the poet was born, and where he was also executed in the early days of the Spanish
Civil War by the fascist rebels. Still in 1949, Motherwell next painted a series of related
works to which he gave titles of other Spanish cities. He renamed all these early pieces
Elegy to the Spanish Republic, dedicated the entire series to Spain—and especially to

Lorca’s generation of Spanish intellectuals, as we have seen in his words—and numbered

 

63 Robert C. Hobbs, Robert Motherwell’s ‘Elegies to the Spanish Republic,’ Including an Explanation of
the Artist's Theory (Chapel Hill. N. C.: University of North Carolina, 1975), 156.

30
the pictures in sequence, and continued to do so with subsequent works in this idiom for

the rest of his life. Later on, the artist dedicated one of his larger lithographs to the poet,
Lament for Lorca (1981-82).

As for the subject of the ‘Elegies,’ their chief expressive metaphor (i.e. the format
of alternating bars and ovals in black on white) has a particularly well deﬁned character. In
1950 Motherwell wrote that the ‘Elegies’ are “all in black and white: they are funeral
pictures, laments, dirges.”64 Two decades later he still discussed their intent along similar
lines, claiming that “the ‘Elegies’ treat life and death as fundamentals,”65 and in 1963 he
described their content as the “insistence that a terrible death happened that should not be
forgot.”66 When talking about his Reconciliation Elegy in 1980, a mural commissioned by
the National Gallery of Art in the late 19703, he said

My ‘Elegies to the Spanish Republic’ had been meant, on one level, as an elegy
for the tragically missed opportunity of Spain to enter the liberal modern world in
the 1930’s. And for its tragic suffering then and for decades after. The
[Reconciliation] title must also unconsciously correspond to a certain subjective
stage in my own life. Life and death are now to me subjectively less

antagonistic—less sharply opposed: to put it the other way around, both are
absorbed by the natural process of living.67

Nowhere in Motherwell’s oeuvre is the cry of pain stronger, more personal—and
yet more universalized—than in the ‘Spanish Elegies’. The ‘Elegies’, perhaps even more
than Motherwell’s other work, involve a complex system of allusions. They refer, as we
have seen, in a very evocative way to numerous forms in the real world, and they also
make powerful, though indirect, literary allusions. The notion of ‘illustrating’ a poem

without directly illustrating any of the images that appear in it had its basis in the Symbolist

 

64 Motherwell, Motherwell (New York: Sam Kootz Gallery, 1950), up.
65 Motherwell, in Robert Motherwell: Recent Work (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Art Museum, 1973), 14.

66 Motherwell, “Robert Motherwell: A Conversation at Lunch,” An Exhibition of the Works of Robert
Motherwell (Northhampton, Mass: Smith College, 1963), up.

67 Carmean, E. A., Jr., ed. Robert Motherwell: The Reconciliation Elegy (Geneva and New York:
Skira/Rizzoli, 1980), 77.

31

principle of correspondance, in which Motherwell was already deeply interested. By
refen'ing to the poem in the title of the painting, Motherwell has evoked a whole network of
allusions that do enrich our viewing of the painting. Furthermore, the painting becomes a
ﬁeld in which the artist and the viewers identify their core of selfhood and see enacted its
complex states and psychological operations.

If we linger over his statement: “The image is akin in feeling—a visual
equivalent—to the feeling in Garcia Lorca’s Lament for Ignacio Sdnchez Mejias and was
meant to be,” we must conclude that the ‘Elegies’ present themselves as the visual
equivalent of a poetic language that the artist identiﬁes with his painterly language.68 So we
must consider the normal layout of the ‘Elegies to the Spanish Republic’ as sharing the
elliptical and many-meaning character of the poetic tongue. The rethorical ﬁgure of ellipsis
consists in not expressing one or several words that one’s mind has to supply.69 The
dictionary speciﬁes that ellipsis is a stylistic procedure, tending to abbreviate discourse, an
art of suggestion, in which the writer appeals to the reader’s mind and imagination. It is the
same for the ‘Elegies’; and all the interpretations suggested concerning it are caught up in
the polymorphic and plurisemantic treatment of the poetics specific to Motherwell’s own
pictorial language.

So the ‘Elegies’ can properly evoke those male genital organs and those gargantuan
fruits, those ovoid forms without any of these references ever answering the whole work,
because whatever in it feeds each of them—vital force and temporality—life and death—
time and etemity—justiﬁes all of them by transcending them entirely. For the work to attain
the admirable height of inspiration of the Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 70 (1961), it
had not to become ﬁxed into some archetype but to be—as it is—involved in and commited

to the multifonn nature of its own formal and semantic creation.

 

68 Motherwell (1977), quoted in Marcelin Pleynet, Robert Motherwell 1969-1990 (Paris: Artcurial, 1990),
92.

69 For the Abstract Expressionist’s use of rethorical devices see Gibson, “The Rethoric of Abstract
Expressionism,” in Michael Auping, ed. Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments (New York
and Buffalo: Harry N. Abrams/Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1987), 64-93.

32

Lorca’s poetry came to reinforce Motherwell’s approach: a combination and
extension of the personal, the liberal political, and European modernism. Following the
statement quoted above, Motherwell said:

The force of Lorca’s poem and its resonance are far beyond the death of a
matador, but perhaps not beyond the death of Spain. I ‘meant’ the word elegy in
the title. I was twenty-one in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War began. And I
love the ‘Spanish black’ that Rafael Alberti writes of, and which some years later
I illustrated in a livre de peintre, A la pintura, to his poem. The Spanish Civil War
was even more to my generation than Vietnam was to be thirty years later to its
generation, and should never be forgot, even though la guerre est ﬁnie. For years
after the series began, I was often mistaken for a Stalinist, though I think the
logical political extension (not that one need be logical: I hate dogma and rigidity)

of extreme modernist individualism, as of native American radicalism, is a kind of
anarchism, a kind of conscience.70

Paintings and poems of death relate to the historical and contemporary events in a
continuum of human possibility. With the ‘Elegies’ Motherwell joins what Stephen Polcari
has called a more Jungian sense of creativity—the visionary—with his more usual opposite
psychological concerns.71 Here the elemental and dramatic dominate. He came to believe,
as other Abstract Expressionists did earlier, that life and death are intertwined and part of
the same process. His permanently unresolved, conﬂictive, and unreconcilable ‘Elegy’
emblems brought forth the Abstract Expressionist antagonisms. Motherwell contributed
black and white “protagonists in the struggle between life and death” to his period’s
psychologized imagination. Before the war, the pattern of struggle was between
individuals, as in Thomas Hart Benton; or between man and exterior nature as in John
Steuart Curry; or between classes in Social Realist work; or between ignorance and new
technology in WPA murals. With Motherwell the struggle is internalized, framed in terms
of life principles that he found in his view of Lorca and Spain, elevated, and cultivated for

himself as for others through the modern tradition.

 

70 Motherwell (1977), quoted in Pleynet, 92.

71 Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 45-47.

CHAPTER 4
RAFAEL ALBERTI, A LA PINTURA AND EL NEGRO

If Lorca and At Five in the Afternoon are at the origin of the most important series
of paintings Motherwell ever produced, the poetry of Rafael Alberti is tied to the most
ambitious work he ever undertook in the field of printmaking: a livre d'artiste including
selections from the original Spanish poem cycle A la pintura (Poema del color y la linea)
(1945-1967) by Alberti, accompanied by 21 aquatints by Motherwell.72 This is how the

artist described his ﬁrst encounter with Alberti’s book:

One of my habits is browsing in bookshops. One day, perhaps in that same year
1967 that I have been speaking of, in E. S. Wilentz's Eighth Street Bookshop, I
found Ben Belitt's translation, published by the University of California Press, of
Rafael Alberti’s Selected Poems, including small portions of his huge cycle of
poems in homage to the great art of painting, A la pintura. I had found the text for
a livre d 'artiste, a text whose every line set into motion my innermost painterly
feelings. And again and again between 1968 and 1972, working on the livre,
sometimes discouraged, sometimes bafﬂed, a line of Alberti's would start me
again. This poetry is made for painters, and this livre was made for the poetry. I
meant the two to be wedded, as in a medieval psalter, but with my own sense of
the "modern."73

The prints that Robert Motherwell did at Universal Limited Art Editions represent

less than a tenth of his graphic work, nevertheless they comprise a synoptic view of the

 

72 From now on, we shall distinguish between three different references to A la pintura: [Alberti’s collected
works] Rafael Alberti, Obras Completas, Toma II, Poesia [939-1963 (Madrid: Aguilar, 1988), 266-373;
[Ben Belitt’s edition] Alberti, Rafael Alberti. Selected Poems, Ben Belitt, ed. and trans, (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 160- 193; and [Motherwell’s A la pintura] Robert
Motherwell and Rafael Alberti, A la pintura/To Painting (West lslip, N.Y.: Universal Limited Art Editions,
1972).

73 Motherwell, "The Book's Beginnings," in Robert Motherwell’s "A la pintura": The Genesis of a Book
(exhibition catalogue). Introduction by John J. McKendry. Texts by Diane Kelder and Motherwell (New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972), 12.

33

34
principal themes, sources, and methods of his art. Color is not only the most important

element in his work, it is also symbolic, as we have already seen in the ‘Elegies’ and shall
see in the following pages: Motherwell associated red with blood, wine, and hunters’ caps;
ocher recalls the color of California hills; blue was a favourite because of his lifelong habit
of summering by the sea; white was Mallarmé’s white paper, awaiting a word. Black—
signifying death, anxiety, Goya—had always been the alpha and omega of his palette.74

Motherwell’s love for the materials of his profession was a powerful ally in Tatyana
Grosman’s campaign to get him to work at her print shop at West Islip, New York. She
had been trying since 1957, when she met Motherwell at the home of Pierre Chareau, an
architect who designed the artist’s studio in East Hampton. A year later, she reintroduced
herself, mentioning the Chareaus. She tried a new lure: for some time, she said, “we have
been doing limited-edition portfolios on which the artist and the poet work together.”75

After several frustrated attempts to work with Grosman, in 1965, suffering from
the slump that many artists feel after a major retrospective, Motherwell went to Irwin
Hollander’s New York workshop to make lithographs. He worked with the printer
Emiliano Sorini in a collaboration that buoyed his spirits and provided the mental stimulus
he needed. It was Mrs. Grosman’s good fortune to have already issued the next challenge:
When Motherwell returned to ULAE in 1968, it was to create the livre d’artiste she had
proposed to him in 1957.

Motherwell was the only artist Grosman had invited to create images for a text of

his own choice. Motherwell demurred, waiting until 1967, when he found Alberti’s A la

 

74 “The ‘pure’ red of which certain abstractionists speak does not exist, no matter how one shifts its
physical contexts. Any red is rooted in blood, glass, wine, hunters’ caps, and a thousand other concrete
phenomena. Otherwise we should have no feeling toward red or its relations, and it would be useless as an
artistic element. But the most common error among the wholehearted abstractionists nowadays is to
mistake the medium for an end in itself, instead of a means.” Motherwell, “Beyond the Aesthetic,” Design
47, no. 8 (April 1946), 15; reprinted in C WRM, 38.

75 For this account and the one in the following paragraph, and more about Motherwell’s printmaking at
ULAE, see Esther Sparks, Universal Limited Art Editions. A History and Catalogue: The First Twenty-
Five Years (New York: The Art Institute of Chicago and Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 165-194; and Terenzio
and Dorothy Belknap, The Prints of Robert Motherwell: A Catalogue Raisonné 1943-1984 (New York:
American Federation of Arts, 1991), 9- 152.

35
pintura. When Motherwell wrote to say that he wanted to use the Alberti poems, she made

rapid and unusual arrangements. Contrary to all precedent, Motherwell and his wife, the
painter Helen Frankenthaler, were invited to work in the studio on the same day at the same
time. Frankenthaler preferred the lithography studio; Motherwell descended to the new
etching press downstairs to work with Donn Steward. In three days, they ﬁnished Black 1-
3, a page that became the touchstone for the work and was continually referred to by the
artist over the next four years.76

With two pauses (September 1968 to February 1969 and December 1969 to
January 1971), Motherwell worked steadily for the next four-and-one-half years. In forty
or more sessions, they produced hundreds of sketches, collages, and printing samples. The
archival material was kept because Motherwell prefered to work in his own environment.
Steward created that environment for every visit by pinning up the work Motherwell had
ﬁnished on his previous visit and starting each session with a careful review of the last.

In 1972, Motherwell did the final revision to the livre d’artiste and signed the
edition. Titled “Robert Motherwell’s A la pintura: The Genesis of a Book,” the work was
exhibited for the first time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in 1972,
followed by several other exhibitions in different cities around the United States. It is a
book of twenty-four unbound pages consisting of twenty-one intaglio prints, a
frontispiece, a title page, a preface page by Rafael Alberti, a table of contents page, and a
colophon page. From A la pintura ULAE produced only one edition of 40 plus eight
artist's proofs and two printer’s proofs.

For A la pintura Motherwell varied one of his series of paintings that he called
‘Opens’—in which a U-shaped “window” is drawn on a field of rich color—to emphasize
the diverse perceptions of each hue. In the ‘Opens’, the characterstic imagery is that of a

drawn rectangle or rectangles, suggesting windows and doorways cut into a ﬁeld of subtly

 

76 See Diane Kelder, “Motherwell’s A la pintura,” in Robert Motherwell's "A la pintura": The Genesis of a
Book, 5; and Colsman-Freyberger, 20, where the artist is quoted saying “that one of my favorite plates still
remains the ﬁrst one, which acted as a gauge for the book.”

36

nuanced color. He happened on the motif by accident in 1967, when he leaned a small
painting, its back facing forward, against a larger canvas whose surface had already been
painted. He was so struck with the “proportion” set up by one rectangle superimposed on
another that he immediately outlined the shape of the smaller canvas on the larger one with
charcoal.77

He might not have taken it so seriously, he agreed in an interview, had Minimalism
not been in full cry at the time, and yet he was careful to point out that in their freehand
drawing and nuanced, sensuous surfaces, the ‘Opens’ are the very opposite of
Minimalism. “At the time, my life and painting were disoriented; I was breaking up with
Helen [Frankenthaler], and I wanted to take a fundamental problem—say, a color ﬁeld with
a relatively simple element, so that if my work began to slide, I could see in what ways,”
he said.73 Therefore, it was a formal problem though closely related to a personal problem.
And he found his way out of his ‘disorientation’ in the scrutiny of iconography,
representation and creativity which he undertook for the making of A la pintura and of the
‘Open’ series.

The image that resulted, which Motherwell described as “a painted plane beautifully
divided by minimal means, the essence of line drawing,” became the ﬁrst of the series,
which the artist characterized, in part, as a response to the plain, whitewashed adobe
facades of Mexican houses with “beautifully proportioned” doors and windows cut into
them. But the ‘Opens’ also obviously relate to the use of windows in the work of Manet,
Matisse and Picasso, carrying to the logical extreme their thrust to balance the palette for
both indoor and outdoor light.79 The U-shape suggested scores of ideas: architectural,

philosophic, poetic, and “an opening from an interior world to an external world.”80 They

 

77 See Motherwell’s own account of this event in Motherwell, “The Book’s Beginnings,” 12.

78 Grace Glueck, “The Creative Mind: The Mastery of Robert Motherwell,” The New York Times
Magazine (December 2, 1984), 69-78, 82, 86.

79 Flam, 25-26.

37
also, perhaps, relate to his own childhood, spent—his mother was an ardent collector of
French Provincial fumiture—“in a houseful of French doors.”

Before the ‘Opens’, a characteristic aspect of Motherwell’s work had been an
aggressive compositional revision of the canvas through a long series of overpaintings. The
‘Opens’ rely on bright color and minimal gesture. They express a restrained classicism
inherent in Motherwell’s personality, which can be seen as early as his Spanish Wall with
Window of 1941 and Wall Painting of 1943.

The ‘Opens’ led to some of the most important discoveries Motherwell made in his
prints. His lithographs had employed unrevised gestures set against the white field of the
paper, which related to the simplified structure of the ‘Opens’. As Robert S. Mattison
pointed out, in A la pintura, Motherwell desired highly saturated hues with an even
stronger brushstroke.8|

I wanted a more painterly quality than I had found for myself in lithography, and
more intense color—literally—than I had ever seen in engraving—after all, the
poems were called Blue, Red, The Palette, The Paintbrush, Black and so on—
and I was painting the ‘Open’ series in intense color. It was when the master
printer in the engraving workshop at Mrs. Grosman’s, Donn Steward, introduced
me to aquatint as a way of having both a subtle and an intense field, and to
“sugar-lift” on aquatint as a felt equivalent to my charcoal lines that we were able
to move toward the ultimate realization of what I had in mind. Over four years,
Steward’s sensitivity of technical response to my intentions, as well as
suggestions and even anticipations (so closely did we work together) was

sustained in a way that I would not have thought possible. In the midst of this
technological era, one of my cherished experiences has been to work with a great

and meticulous craftsman.82

Each ﬂat sheet of A la pintura is a single composition, containing one or two
aquatints juxtaposed with stanzas of an Alberti poem printed in English and Spanish in

separate colors, excerpted from the edition and translation by Ben Belitt. The artist

 

80 From the ﬁlm Motherwell/Alberti: To Painting/A la pintura, Blackwood Productions, 1973; quoted in
Sparks, 171.

81 Robert S. Mattison, “Two Decades of Graphic Art by Robert Motherwell,” The Print Collector’s
Newsletter (January-February 1981), 199.

32 Motherwell, Robert Motherwell’s “A la pintura 12.

38
conceived of these large sheets resting in a box, unbound without wrapper, the top of

which is transparent and allows them to be seen and displayed, one at a time.

Following what he found in Ben Belitt’s selection, the poems chosen by
Motherwell were, in this order: A la paleta/To the Palette (collected works, num. VI),
Negro/Black (c.w., unnum., verses 2, 3, 4, 12, 19, 20, 22, 26, 28, 32 and 34), Azul/Blue
(c.w., unnum., verses 1, 2, 3, 4, 11, 12, 14, 15, 23, 24, 28, 30, and 31), Rojo/Red
(c.w., unnum., 2, 4, 9, 13, 14, 15, 20, 24, 31 and 33), Blanco/White (c.w., unnum.,
verses 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 22, 28, 32 and 33) and Al pincel/To the Brush
(c.w., num. XIV).

In her article “Pintura y poesia en Rafael Alberti” Ana Maria Winkelman
describes the poem A la pintura as the culmination of Alberti’s profound interest in
painting.83 Alberti, a painter himself, gives the impression that he personally acknowledges
what art has meant for him and is concerned primarily with painting. There are, however,
references throughout the work to related art forms such as sculpture and drawing. The
poems of A la pintura are devoted to a variety of topics. There is a series of thirty or so
brief poetic impressions on each of six colors: blue, red, yellow, green, black and white. A
number of rigidly constructed sonnets treat certain artistic techniques and elements related
to art: the hand, crayon, pallet, retina, line, perspective, Chiaroscuro, movement, nudity,
color, light, shadow, watercolor, artistic taste and divine proportion. Lastly, there are a
number of poems dedicated to certain artists: Leonardo, El Greco, Bosch, Rubens,
Raphael, Van Gogh, Renoir, Gauguin, Goya, Picasso, and others.

Because of what he found in the Belitt edition, Motherwell was only able to use two
of the many poems Alberti dedicated to painter's tools, techniques and senses, all related to
the creative act—one is used to open the selection and the other to close it; and four of the
six poems are dedicated to different colors, altering the order in which they appear in the

collected works. Motherwell did not include the poems Velazquez and Michelangelo, which

 

83 Ana Maria Winkelman, “Pintura y poesia en Rafael Alberti,” Papeles de Son Armadans 30 (1963), 162.

39
had been translated by Belitt; and he also introduced, as a preface, a fragment from

Alberti’s memoirs La arboleda perdida (A Vanished Grove), which is also used in the Belitt
edition, where the poet recalls his early vocation as a painter, his visits to the Prado
Museum and his discovery of Velazquez, Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens, Zurbaran, Goya, etc.:
“I recognized, without puzzling it through, how much sun and Mediterranean air had been
packed into the marrow of my Italian-Andalusian bones.”84
As Robert C. Manteiga points out in his book on Alberti, the greatest contribution

of painting on Alberti’s work is the poet’s understanding and appreciation of color not only
as an artistic device, but as a poetic device as well.85 Since Alberti dealt with painting itself
and some major painters, the poems from A la pintura provided Motherwell with language
and imagery from which the artist could draw a good part of his visual elements, although
his goal was not form itself. Instead, he would use form and color as a poetic device as
well. Despite the images that the text easily conveys, Motherwell always avoided being too
literal. In McKendry’s book, it is noted that the illustration of

One line or one letter

above me: indelible marvel!

One line or one letter,

one chalk stroke
compact in the blackboard's mute noctume.

(from White 7-9) is the most literal image in the book. “The letter A appeared in sketches,
but for a long time Motherwell resisted putting it into the final image because it was ‘too
literal.’ It was finally added after the edition was completed to give needed weight to the

pages of the White poem.”36 In the ﬁrst two stanzas of White 3-6, Alberti says:

 

84 Motherwell and Alberti, Preface Page.

85 Robert C. Manteiga, The Poetry of Rafael Alberti: A Visual Approach (London: Tamesis Books
Limited, 1978), 107-124.

86 Robert Motherwell’s "A la pintura": The Genesis of a Book, 46.

40

I—Rafael Alberti—have seen it:
light lives in the popular whites.

My childhood: a withewashed
rectangle, wet quicklime

“Yo”, the Spanish word for “I”, is here printed in reverse, as if it were the “whitewashed
shadow” from Alberti’s verse. The reversal also suggests an open book, which Motherwell
was still sketching in the experimental stages of White 3-6, as the format for A la pintura.
It is worth pointing out how the artist answered to other lines of the poem. For
instance, the stanzas 4 and 5 from Blue
The blue of the Greeks:
columnar, asleep upon plinths like a god.

Wings seize our brushes
when we dip them in indigo.

Motherwell's strong response required an entire page for each of them. In other instances,

lines such as

The Venice of Titian: a blueness gone gold.
Canvas cannot contain it: but
Walls are my history.

almost blue in its backward reﬂections.

clearly determined the image Motherwell finally created. And when a form is clearly
described, as in “by the circle, the square and the triangle,” Motherwell discarded it in favor
of a more subtle visualization. In White 1-2 (Figure 3), following Alberti’s phrase “almost
blue in its backward reﬂections,” Motherwell proceeded “backward” in several respects.
He started with a Mediterranean blue and white, reversed to black, then opposed blue with

its complementary color, orange.

41

wu- In.»

I

uuqhm

--.~—-

uh—d-~
.“M-h pod it.
Mm
—~_¢-uu rat-la.

 

 

Figure 3
White I-2 (1971)

..... ............-..........
w...a....—..,._.

(nuMMn-_v.-‘l

Mun-Ian...

42

 

Figure 4

Red8—Il (1971)

43
The combination of word and image in A la pintura represented an ideal of visual

and verbal union: as word interacts with image, each image interacts with other images in
the series. The last Blue (Blue 12-13), for example, restates the first (Blue 1-3). It also
predicts the weight and ﬂaglike crispness of the next page, Red 1-3. As each page is
turned, new links emerge. Each subsequent viewing-and-reading enriches and illuminates
the whole.

The image in Red 8-11 (Figure 4) changed completely between its original
conception and the printing. For three years, Motherwell had maintained the austere mood
of his ‘Open’ series, although his painting had become much looser and more gestural. But
here, inspired by the “explosions” and “inferno” in Alberti’s text, he made Red 8-11 one of
the most dramatic images in the book. A large gestural brushstroke in lift ground is placed
upon a painterly and intensely hued field of red achieved through open-bite aquatint. This
combination of gesture and field is the direct source for many of the prints Motherwell
made in his studio since 1974.

On the fourth page for the White poem, the only one on which there are two images
and the last to be completed, the painter used an original creative process: according to
McKendry’s catalogue, in the fall of 1968 Motherwell visited an exhibition, The Age of
Fresco. The exhibition included many examples of sinopia, a preparatory drawing for a
fresco. One of these studies was by Ucello, an artist Alberti mentioned in this poem; so
Motherwell could establish a masterful connection between the Italian master’s drawing,
Alberti’s lines, his own work on the ‘Open’ series and the two images in this page. The
artist’s own words, once again, express how he confronted the task:

The problem was iconography. A medieval book of hours on Biblical themes
depicts them. A way for a modern artist to deal with references to the pantheon of
great painters—Tintoretto, Veronese, Goya, Titian, Rembrandt, et al.—would be
through montage (which, unbeknownst to me, Alberti later did himself for the
Italian translation of A la pintura). But modern artists cannot otherwise use the
Renaissance tradition, any more than medieval artists worked in the classical
Greek tradition. I decided to cut the Gordian knot by sticking to my own

iconography throughout, one that is meant to convey essences. My iconography
can cope with, say, the bluenesses of blues, light and air and color, walls,

44

perspective, and a general sense of the Mediterranean; with solitude, weight,
intensities, placing, decisiveness, and ambiguities; it cannot deal with Venus—
except as one aspect of the skin of the world, of which painting itself is also a
skin, and in this sense my illuminations are both a higher degree of complexity—
but not of subtlety—than the poems. Alberti's text has its own magical light,
based on the latitude of the Mediterranean countries. New York, Barcelona, Long
Island, and Rome (where Alberti now lives in exile from Franco Spain) are
approximately on the same latitude. Part of the artistic task is to find identity in
differences, metaphors. Metaphors of painting and of poetry and of workshops
and of women and of men that are in turn metaphors for reality itself.
Indescribable as it is (whatever it is), directly.87

In this paragraph, Motherwell explains how the creation of his prints for A la
pintura was only possible after he decided to use his “own iconography”, although during
the long process of production of the different works, this language would undergo a
permanent scrutiny to reach a “higher degree of complexity” and maintain its “differences”.
With the combination of an inspiring text and magniﬁcent working conditions, as H. H.
Amason has explained, Motherwell was able to produce one of the remarkable graphic
books of this century. In A la pintura, all the wide variety of Motherwell's interests, the
fantastic range of his talents were brought together. The book of etchings and hand-set
letter press, all laid out by the artist, might even be considered as a comprehensive
introduction to the way in which the artist worked and thought and his passion for
materials, for color, for placement, and calligraphy. These are on the technical and formal
side. The book is more signiﬁcant as a summary or an ABC of one artist’s total experience,
his wide-ranging interests in poetry, philosophy, and art history as well as in art.88 So
upon the base of Alberti’s poetry, Motherwell was able to reassure himself in his own view
of creativity and of himself as an artist, a “modern artist”.

The prints for A la pintura did not deﬁne a series of limits but opened up a number

of possibilities. In his words, “After the disciplined restraint of the aquatints for A la

 

87 Motherwell, Ibid., 12 and 13. The Italian edition to which Motherwell refers is Alberti, Alla pittura
(Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1971).

88 Amason, 69-70.

45

pintura, the Open image wanted to erupt, which resulted in six pictures in shades of liquid
black, called the In Plato ’s Cave series.”39 Secondly, the rich hue of aquatint encouraged
Motherwell to brighten his acrylic colors in a series of works from 1971 to 1975, most
notably the intensely red A la pintura paintings and Phoenician Studio. So we see how
Motherwell’s experience with A la pintura had two direct effects on his invention in other
media, both as reaction and stimulus to move further out of his previous ‘disorientation’.

A la pintura—a title that Motherwell also used in naming some paintings following
this experience—was not the only work that related the worlds of Rafael Alberti and Robert
Motherwell. In fact, the poem El Negro Motherwell was written by Alberti in homage to
Motherwell at the time of the latter’s retrospective exhibition in Barcelona in the spring of
1980, a poem that has not been included in his collected works for unknown reasons. The
core of El Negro Motherwell is, obviously, the symbolic use of the color black by
Motherwell, frequently related to his idea of “Spanish,” (see quote on p. 20) which is the
same one expressed by Alberti. The two artists met in 1980 at the Madrid opening
ceremonies of the retrospective exhibition, which had traveled from Barcelona. Alberti
unexpectedly rose from his seat, moved toward the podium and, in an electrifying voice,
read El Negro Motherwell?O In that meeting, both agreed that the poem could be the basis
of a second livre d'artiste, which Motherwell produced between 1981 and 1983, in
collaboration with the printer Kenneth Tyler. El Negro is a book of nineteen original
lithographs, with a preface by Jack D. Flam, illuminating the poem by Rafael Alberti,
printed in Spanish with an English translation by Vicente Lleo Canal. Tyler Graphics Ltd.
published an edition of 51 plus 10 artist's proofs, and was exhibited for the ﬁrst time at the
M. Knoedler and Co. Gallery in New York City in 1983.

As in A la pintura, Motherwell took an non—traditional approach to design. The

pages of El Negro come in three sizes, the larger sheets opening out horizontally either

 

89 Motherwell in Amason, plate 236.

90 See Donna Stein, Contemporary Illustrated Books: Word and Image, [967-1988 (New York: Independent
Curators Inc., c1988), 39.

46
once or twice. Occasional patches of color—ochre for the earth, blue for the sky and sea——

interrupt the passionate, mysterious blacks that deﬁne bold, eloquent images which further
explore the challenging themes of Motherwell’s Spanish Elegy series. Motherwell extracts
the titles for his lithographs from the sensuous words and vigorous lines of the poem:
Black Wall of Spain, Through Black Emerge Purified, Elegy Black Black (Figure 5),
Black with No Way Out, Black Undone by Tears, etc. In El Negro, Motherwell and Alberti
collaborated in the fullest sense—each artist creating for in his medium for the other.

El Negro is, therefore, a precious result of a relationship between two artists. With
a poem by Alberti that speaks about painting and painters—A la pintura—Motherwell
created a series of works about creativity. Alberti answers this livre d ’artiste with another
poem, El Negro Motherwell, about the language of the painter, who in turn, reacts with
another series of images deliberately inspired by the poem, thereby closing the circle of the
painter-poet-painter collaboration.

In working with Alberti’s poetry, we must conclude that Motherwell found the
perfect equivalent for developing his working method, which at this moment of his life
consisted in using memories or impressions of the visual world rather than “memories” of a
prehistoric or ancient past.9' Nevertheless, he rarely worked from a motif toward form. He
usually moved in the opposite direction, discovering the motif and associations as he read
the poetry. In A la pintura Motherwell evokes the poem’s associations through form and
color, he embodies the poem’s meaning through form, color and technique; which, in turn,
are the poem’s subject-matter. The work is a joyous celebration of creativity itself. A la
pintura provided him with the solution to his “fundamental problem” in life and painting, at
this particular moment in time, quoted above. From what we said in the previous chapter,
we could describe Motherwell’s involvement with Lorca’s poetry as a look outwards, from
the individual to the world. Now we may call his relationship with Alberti’s work a look

inwards.

 

91 In describing this method, Stephen Polcari notes that it was more like Ellsworth Kelly‘s than that of the
Abstract Expressionists. See Polcari, 320-21.

47

 

Figure 5

Elegy Black Black (1982-83)

48
Word and pictorial utterance were brought together, each reinforcing and enlarging

the other’s ﬁeld of meaning. Motherwell said:

I also should mention that several people have cut up some of the pages and
framed just the aquatint image. A sacrilege. Not only is it a violation of the book
as a book, but the images are related to the typeface, visually as well as in
meaning, so that the whole page is the work of art, not just the plate on it
Certainly as much time was spent on placing the plate on the page in relation to
the type and the margins, on determining the dimensions of the page, as in
actually making the plates. There is a considerable interplay. I mean that the
plates, abstract as they are, are much more directly related to the text than most
people realize. The reason people seem not to realize this is because the imagery is
not much related, though it is in several cases. But most of the time I used my
U-shaped Open image. That is, the Open plates are homages in part to the
Mediterranean spirit in art, as is Alberti’s text, and there is the union in our
disparatness.92

As a result, from the ‘Open’ and the A la pintura series onwards—a3 will be further
exemplified in the following chapter—Motherwell was able to combine a number of
divergent formal possibilities into a number of strong pictorial syntaxes, which not only
draw upon different parts of the artistic traditions that he inherited, but also upon different

parts of his own being and identity as an artist.

 

92 Motherwell, in Colsman-Feyberger, 20, 21.

 

CHAPTER 5
THREE POEMS BY OCTA VIO PAZ

The third contact established between the painting of Robert Motherwell and the
work of a Spanish-speaking poet took place in a different way than the two previous ones.
Here it was not the painter who was motivated by one of his readings but the initiative came
from the Mexican Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz, who on the 16th of May 1971
composed the poem Piel/Sonido del mundo (Skin/Sound of the World), whose title he took
from a sentence of Robert Motherwell, quoted by Dore Ashton: “1 am interested in the skin
of the world, the sound of the world. Art can be profound when the skin is used to express
a judgment of values.”93 Octavio Paz explains, in a note to the poem, that the text refers to
many of the artist's paintings and collages: the ‘Elegies to the Spanish Republic’, the
homage to Mallarmé (Mallarme’ ’s Swan, 1944); the ‘Je t'aime’ series, from the 19503; and
Chi ama, crede (l962).94

Although no one has been able to establish when Motherwell first encountered
Paz's poetry, in 1978—and probably due to the success of A la pintura—Tatyana Grosman
wrote to Motherwell: “The poem by Octavio Paz dedicated to you is marvelous. We have to
discuss ideas how to publish it; it could be an exciting collaboration between you and the

poet.”95 Sadly, it was too late for Mrs. Grosman, who died in 1982. Nevertheless, it is

 

93 See Robert Motherwell: Bilder und Collagen [967-1970. Exhibition catalogue. (St. Gallen: Galerie im
Erker, 1971), 26.

94 See Octavio Paz, ormt Poe’tica (1935-1988) (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990), 615. From now on. quoted
as OP.

95 The ﬁrst translation of Paz’s poetry in English was published by Lloyd Mallan, “A Little Anthology of
Young Mexican Poets,” in New Directions 9 (1947); followed by Sun Stone, trans. by Muriel Rukeyser
(London & N.Y.: New Directions, 1962). T. Grosman, letter to Motherwell, September 29, 1978; quoted
by Sparks, 174.

49

50
clear that Motherwell did not forget about Octavio Paz’s poetry, because in 1981 the painter

dedicated an important and large canvas to the poet, entitled Face of the Night (For Octavio
Paz). And afterwards, during the years 1986 and 1987, Motherwell revived Grosman’s
suggestion and decided again to unite poetry and prints to produce another livre d'artiste,
with three poems by Octavio Paz. Three Poems by Octavio Paz presents twenty-seven
original lithographs by Robert Motherwell and was published by the Limited Editions
Club, New York City, in 1988, in an edition of 750 plus 30 artist’s proofs.

The poems Motherwell selected were: Noctumo de San Ildefonso (San Ildefonso
Nocturne), Vuelta (Return), and Piel/Sonido del mundo (Skin/Sound of the World),
reproduced in this order in the book, alternating the original Spanish verses with English
translations. Only the third poem, dedicated to Motherwell, was reprinted in its entirety and
several fragments were used from the other ones—as it was done with A la pintura by
Alberti. Vuelta, Piel/Sonido del mundo and Noctumo de San Ildefonso appear, in this
order, in Octavio Paz's book Vuelta (1969-1975). From the first one, dedicated to José
Alvarado and included in the series Ciudad de México, Motherwell took seven fragments;
and from Noctumo de San Ildefonso he used eight, taken from all the four different parts in
which the original is divided: Inventa la noche en mi ventana..., Calles vacias, luces
tuertas..., El muchacho que camina por este poema..., and Las ideas se disipan....96

There is a text written in September 1987 in which Robert Motherwell himself
introduces and talks about the poet, on the occasion of Octavio Paz's visit to the Poetry
Center in New York City for a reading of his work. Motherwell, who at that time had just
finished his work with Paz's poems, welcomed him and read the text—to which the
following fragment belongs—where he also mentioned his links with Mexico and
Surrealism, two of the many points of contact between the two artists:

Paz and I were born within some months of each other, which means that at
precisely the same historical points in time we were faced with the same

 

96 0F, 362-70, 388-93, 410-29.

51

problems—political, social, aesthetic—fascism and Stalinism, the Great
Depression, World War II, the aesthetics of late modernism, the emergence of his
Northern neighbor as a superpower, and in the future, the possibility of the
ultimate holocaust. —I slightly know Octavio Paz personally, but for more than a
year I have been working on illustrating three poems of his in a very limited
edition deluxe—what the French call a painter's book. My mind is filled with his
images and insights, and had I had the chance, would have chosen him above all
others as my savant through our horrifying shared period of time. What more all-
encompassing guide or guiding light?97

It is in Noctumo de San Ildefonso where we find clearly explained why Motherwell
was so captivated and inspired by Paz’s poetry. This poem is ﬁlled with many images and
references to which Motherwell could certainly relate in terms of both his biography and his
visual language: The poet, looking out of his window at night, catches the signs and seeds
that “night” suggests to him. The window is also a tunnel: “Estoy a la entrada de un ninel”
(I am at the entrance of a tunnel, OP, 411); only words can guide him out of it, out of the
chaos that surrounds him. in his disorientation. As he speaks—”hablo con los hojos
cerrados” (I speak with my eyes closed, OP, 413)—somebody, a force beyond his will and
control, changes his words magnetically. He leaps back to 1931 (the year he published his
ﬁrst poem), his personal history now “broken images” (OP, 415). He recalls his comrades
as the night life of the city enters the poem and interferes with the lineal ﬂow of memory.
The adolescent of seventeen and the poet of sixty meet in the poem. Paz’s past has become
a mea culpa of a generation who for a while were seduced by Revolution:

Good, we wanted good:

to set the world right.
We didn’t lack integrity:

we lacked humility.
What we wanted was not innocently wanted.
Precepts and concepts,

the arrogance of theologians
(OP, 419)

But it is as a poet—”dar ojos a1 lenguaje” (to give eyes to the language, OP, 423)—

resurrecting the full living richness of words that Paz has fullfiled his destiny, his duty.

 

97 Motherwell, "Introduction for Octavio Paz," in C WRM, 282.

52
Poetry points to this “verdad del tiempo no fechado” (truth of undated time, OP, 423), the

intense present of experience that all men and women share. As Jason Wilson has pointed
out in his analysis of Paz’s poetry, here the poet has found another sense to fraternity from
the socialist one of the 19303: it is all Humankind. “All that is left of Paz’s life in history is
language; words in a poem.”98

Vuelta describes Paz’s return to Mexico and his shock at seeing Mexico degraded
by modern progress, capitalist lucre, megalomaniac government, and the sordid fantasies
of the middle class. The poem is dense with allusions: Lopez Valverde, Shiki, Wang Wei,
Tablada, Mallarmé, some of Paz’s early poems, the Nahuatl word “burning water,” and so
on. It opens with the noise of the city and the poet returning to the home of his infancy in
Mixcoac. He finds an image for 19703 Mexico: “En los buzones / se pudren las cartas”
(Letters rot / in the mailboxes, OP, 363), implying absence of communication and hopeless
bureaucracy. Then he slips back in memory, a “balcon / sobre el vacio” (balcony / over the
void, OP, 365)—using a similar image to that of the window in the previous poem, and
related to the association established with the window by Motherwell in his ‘Open’ series.
Tortured by the omnivorous presence of the alienating city, his past is “bruma” (mist) and
his present a version of hell. Paz’s packed sentences and sounds mimic nightmare city life
that permeates everything from sex to cinemas and words. Mexico City’s only value is
being branded with the dollar sign. The poet then asks himself what he has achieved in his
life against the city: “gGané o perdi?” (Did I win or lose?, OP, 369). But he does not wish
to escape these times. He afﬁrms: “El espacio esta adentro” (Space is within, OP, 371), the
heartbeat of pure time. The wind blows the poplars as the poet continues to be buffeted by
time: “Camino sin avanzar / Nunca llegamos” (I walk without moving forward / We never
arrive, OP, 371). The poet is now less optimistic about antidotes to history while afﬁrming

that being alive is all that counts.

 

98 Jason Wilson, Octavio Paz (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), 139.

53

If we turn now to the images Motherwell created in this livre d’artiste, we can
establish a close parallelism between the poems’ tone and Motherwell’s visualization of its
meaning. First, the eight lithographs that accompany the verses of Noctumo de San
Ildefonso (see Figure 6) came from a series of nine drawings Motherwell made in 1967 (as
part of a project for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City), to illustrate an edition
of Arthur Rimbaud's book A Season in Hell, which was never published.99 In the same
way as Paz does in the poem, Motherwell went back to images he had previously created—
interestingly a series also derived from literary forms—and established a dialogue with his
own past and previous work.

Several other images in the series are linked in structure to other previous
Motherwell paintings. As Paz does in Vuelta and in Piel/Sonido del mundo, Motherwell is
looking retrospectively at his life and work. The prints Je t’aime and Return refer to the
series of paintings Je t’aime, from the 19503; Spanish Elegy (Figure 7) and Mexican Elegy
to the ‘Elegy’ series; A Throw of the Dice makes reference to Mallarmé and to
Motherwell’s ‘Beside the Sea’ series, from 1962; the untitled prints (Terenzio and Belknap,
cat. nos. 371 and 376) are closely related to the ‘Lyric’ suite, from 1965; Red Samurai to
the ‘Samurai’ series from 1974; and Mexico City Personages I, II (Figure 8), and III, are
very similar to such paintings as The Grand Inquisitor (1983) and Quintet (1986).
Therefore, if we look at the images Motherwell used in Three Poems by Octavio Paz we
will be confronting, as Octavio Paz does in his poems, the “broken images” of a personal
artistic and creative history. In the same way as the poet does in his poetry, the mature
Motherwell seems to ask himself about his achievements in life and in his art.

We have seen how the A la pintura and the ‘Open’ works brought him the solution
to a formal problem he had been wrestling with for a decade and to a personal moment of

uncertainty. It was almost as though he were starting out to be a painter all over again.

 

99 The project was abandoned by the museum, but Motherwell subsequently used one of the nine drawings
he had made for the project as his contribution to the museum’s memorial to Frank O’Hara, In Memory of
My Feelings (1969). The eight unpublished mylars remained in the artist’s possession until they were
transferred to aluminium plates and printed for the poem San Ildefonso Nocturne.

54

Liberated by the new imagery and renewed in his personal life by his marriage to a German
photographer, Renate Ponsold, Motherwell spent the last two decades of his life working
hard and exhibiting widely. Retrospective exhibitions in the United States and abroad, as
well as numerous book-length studies of his work and his own writing and lecturing,
occupied his non-painting time. By keeping him constantly searching his soul for its
aesthetic essence—a what-kind-of—painter-is-it-that-I-really-am? syndrome—his self-
examination and these art historical studies augmented his normally high level of anguish
about his work. In his preference for working in long series of related works, Motherwell
had always proved to be constantly concerned with his work as a developing process, as
seen both in advance and in retrospect. In the last years of his life he came to be even more
concerned. “Having a retrospective is making a will,” he once said.100 Not only was
Motherwell confronted with his own legacy in those retrospective exhibitions, but he seems
to have struggled in this last years of his life to create a body of work retrospective in itself,
that is a sum of all his previous achievements. And he seems to have found the

encouragement to do so through Octavio Paz’s words.

 

'00 “Letter from Robert Motherwell to Frank O’Hara dated August 18, 1965," Robert Motherwell (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965), 70.

55

:- ... ....a.. .4.
....»..-. ".4... MI“!

nu». we.
.1 mun.“

"m
s. . q." .s—4 .1 Not-o-

 

Figure 6
Nocturne I (1967-88)

56

 

Spanish Elegy (1987-88)

lug-A“-
.—
m-~-—
.._a.....
ha...

._..._._..a
i.
was“..-
\-

A...”

57

 

Figure 8

Mexico City Personages 11 (1986-88)

CONCLUSION

It gives me a chill what words can do.
Robert Motherwell“)l

Abstract Expressionism has become synonymous with a reluctance to explain, and
that reluctance has become associated with the assumption that it is irrelevant to discuss
meaning as the relation between form and subject matter. As I explained at the beginning,
recent scholarship, nonetheless, has been devoted to attempts to decode Abstract-
Expressionist paintings and sculptures by rooting out their inherent and often ambiguous
subject matter, with fruitful and sometimes surprising results. Following the same path, I
have attempted to show how some of the works of Robert Motherwell also have a very
particular meaning. My approach has focused on the close relationship between the poems
by three Spanish-speaking writers and Motherwell’s visualization of their meaning. Along
the way, a few questions have been answered, but many new ones are now open, showing
once again the richness and complexity of Motherwell’s art.

A very important feature of this research has been the possibility of establishing a
connection between the work of art (or series of works), the poem (or group of poems),
and Motherwell’s life and interests at a particular moment in time. The interlacing of these
elements within his social and cultural background and his use of a particular technique,
which inﬂuenced his entire artistic career, provides the answers to our search for meaning.
Even though we are often caught up in the polymorphic and plurisemantic treatment of the
poetics speciﬁc to Motherwell’s own pictorial language, we are now able to understand

why he chose to work with these particular poems by these particular poets and at that

 

'01 Motherwell, “An Artist’s Odyssey,” Art & Antiques (February, 1989), 73.

58

59

particular time of his life. Furthermore, we have seen how the relationship changed and
evolved in each case.

At the basis of it all, the three Spanish-speaking poets provided Motherwell with a
number of themes and ideas that are characteristic of that culture’s journey through
Modernism, and particularly of the literature from both Spain and Latin-America.102 “If
you have taken on the adventure of Modernism as I have—and the history of it—there have
to be a few prophets to help you when you get discouraged. You go back to them for
reinforcement.”'03 Again, as we have seen earlier, he is telling us that it was his interest in
the different sides of Modernism that directed his attention to these poets, and not a
romantic search for the ‘exotic’ or the ‘different’ that might be found in Spanish culture
from the North-American point of view.104 He considered the poets as “prophets” of his
own ‘religion.’

Writing in the 19303, Lorca “helped” him talk about political ideas and ideals, about
war, and about life and death in the post-war world of the late 19403 and 19503. The
works related to Lorca’s writing are what we could call a look outwards. From the 19403,
Alberti offered the Motherwell of the 19603 and 19703 a glance inwards, towards himself
as an artist and as a creator. Finally, in the 19803, Motherwell found in the words of
Octavio Paz the perfect equivalent to his retrospective meditations as a mature artist, the one
who looks back at his own language, creations, life and times, therefore being a
retrospective look.

Motherwell constantly went “back for reinforcement” and not only to these three
masters from Spanish literature. Actually, as he tirelessly explained and as I have sketched

at the beginning of my thesis, this incessant quest was part of a much larger personal

 

‘02 As we have already seen, Motherwell always worked from translations, therefore missing the important
role played by the original language and, although he was conscious of it, relying on somenone else’s
translation into English, a question that could be further explored.

103 Motherwell. “An Artist’s Odyssey,” 73-74.

104 Dore Ashton recently suggested to this author to “try to imagine a romantic American seeking
inspiration in the exotic.” Letter to the author, December 1994.

60

exploration of, in his own words, the “international and universal tribe of intellectuals and
artists whose most serious works of art fall under the umbrella of the aesthetic called
Modernism.”105 Obviously, this is a broad question that still needs to be addressed,
especially regarding Motherwell’s interaction with the works of such writers as Guillaume
Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire, Andre’ Breton, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Franz Kafka,
Stéphane Mallarmé, Marcel Proust, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Valéry, to name just a few,
as well as the work of several modern musicians and philosopers. The relations of Robert
Motherwell—and of the rest of the New York School artists—to contemporary cultural
preoccupations and productions was more diverse and diffuse than a single study can

illustrate. I believe I have made some progress along the path.

 

105 Motherwell, “Remarks,” in On the Occasion of the I50th Anniversary of the Yale University Art
Gallery (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 1982), 17. Reprinted in C WRM, 259.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966.

. Alla pittura. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1971.

 

. Obras Completas, Tomo II, Poesia [939-1963. Madrid: Aguilar, 1988.

 

Anfam, David. Clyﬁ‘ord Still. London: Courtauld Institute, 1984.
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Auping, Michael, ed. Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments. New York and
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Beardsley, M. C. and Wimsatt, W. K. “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review LIV
(1946): 468-488.

Bois, Yves-Alain. “Ryman’s Tact,” October 19 01V inter 1981): 101.

Brown, Blanche. “The Correlation of Literature and the Fine Arts,” College Art Journal
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Buck, Robert T., ed. Robert Motherwell. New York: Abbeville Press/Albright-Knox Art
Gallery, 1983.

9

Cannon, Calvin. “Lorca’s ‘Llanto por Ignacio Sénchez Mejias’ and the Elegiac Tradition,’
Hispanic Review 31 (1963): 229-238.

Carmean, E. A., Jr., ed. Robert Motherwell: The Reconciliation Elegy. Geneva and New
York: Skira/Rizzoli, 1980.

Carmean, E. A., Jr. and Rathbone, Eliza E., eds. American Art at Mid-Century: The
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Cavaliere, Barbara and Hobbs, Robert C. “Against a Newer Laocoon,” Arts Magazine 51
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Chave, Anna. Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction. New Haven: Yale University Press,
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61

62

Clark, T. J. “Clement Greenberg Theory of Art,” Critical Inquiry 9 (September 1982):
139-156.

Collins, Bradford. “The Fundamental Tragedy of the Elegies to the Spanish Republic, or
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Colsman-Freyberger, Heidi. “Robert Motherwell: Words and Images,” Art Journal 34 (Fall
1974): 19-24.

Crossman, Richard. The God That Failed. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950.

Fineberg, Jonathan. “Death and Maternal Love: Psychological Speculations on Robert
Motherwell’s Art,” Artforum (September 1978): 52-57.

Firestone, Evan. “James Joyce and the First Generation New York School,” Arts 56 (June
1982): 116-21.

Flam, Jack D. Motherwell. Oxford: Phaidon, 1991.
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York: Columbia University Press, 1972.

Garcia Lorca, Federico. Lament for the Death of a Bullﬁghter and Other Poems. A. L.
Lloyd, trans. London: William Heinemann, 1937.

. Obras Completas, Tomo I. Madrid: Aguilar, 1986.

 

.Antologl’a Comentada. Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 1988.

 

. Ode to Walt Whitman & Other Poems. Carlos Bauer, trans. San
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Gibson, Ann. “Abstract Expressionism’s Evasion of Language,” Art Journal 47 (Fall
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. Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals. Ann Arbor,
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Gibson, Ian. The Assasination of Garcia Lorca. New York: Penguin Books, 1983.

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