Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting

 

Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien  Oct. 12 to Jan. 14

Robert Motherwell
Face of the Night (For Octavio Paz), 1981
Acrylic on canvas
72 x 180 inches
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Museum purchase, The Friends of Art Endowment Fund
© 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting is the first presentation in more than a quarter century to fully examine the mastery of Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), a major figure who shaped postwar art. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is an especially fitting venue to mount this exhibition given its institutional commitment to the artist’s work, holding over fifty works in a variety of media in its collection and hosting the final retrospective organized during Motherwell’s lifetime in 1991. 

Organized by guest curator Susan Davidson, Pure Painting features a selection of visually compelling works chosen from throughout the artist’s lengthy and influential career. Beginning with the abstracted-figurative works that dominated Motherwell’s first decade of painting as he emerged in the New York art world in the early 1940s, the exhibition highlights the subsequent key series that defined his oeuvre, offering new insights into his evolution as an artist. Although he was equally proficient as a collagist, a printmaker, and a draftsman, it is Motherwell’s expansive sense of painting that this retrospective explores.

Hollow Men’s Cave, 1986–89/ c. 1990
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas
72 × 84 inches. Private Collection, Minneapolis
© 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Catalogue

A new definitive overview of the founding Abstract Expressionist celebrated for his Elegies to the Spanish Republic

Famously the most politicized and intellectual of the Abstract Expressionists, Robert Motherwell (1915–91) evolved a form of austere gesturalism reflective of both the human psyche and the political realm. Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting offers an in-depth exploration of his oeuvre―the first publication to do so in many years. Leading art scholars Jennifer Cohen, Susan Davidson, Simon Kelly, Monica McTighe and Sarah Rich examine Motherwell’s turn from Surrealism to abstraction and consider the major series that developed over his 50-year career. The catalog also studies the dialogue between Motherwell’s art and the 19th-century French painting tradition, and investigates his relationship to Spanish painting techniques and processes, with an emphasis on underlying political significance of this relationship (as expressed in his great series Elegies to the Spanish Republic). Another section looks at Motherwell’s unique use of ocher pigment, with its evocation of deep geological time and of avant-garde strategies.

Read less