Robert Motherwell, 1962, oil and collage on paper 73.7 x 58.4 cm
Robert Motherwell
From Below, 1975, acrylic, pasted canvas, and pasted papers on canvas mounted on board, 182.9 x 91.4 cm
I suppose anyone and everyone receptive to this kind of thing has felt
something similar, has been immediately struck by a picture on entering
the room in which it is hung. All pictures are set-up to respond to
being looked at. But in these works, and in others in the exhibition,
this sensation is central to how the images function. These works are –
at least in large part – about vision, or rather, a particular type of
visual experience. Here vision is figured as something which happens,
and happens quickly, a momentary coming together of seeing and the thing
seen; a sudden opening of the eyes, a flash of light, the pulling back
of a curtain.
[...]
Robert Motherwell, Xylol, 1977, acrylic, paper, printed paper, and
packing tape collage on canvas board, 101.6 x 76.2 cm
The fragment of collaged material at the centre of the collages plays
an important role in
how we see the whole. First because
the fragment
creates the collage’s sense of space (there is no seeing without a thing
seen),
determining our distance from the scene pictured;
some of the
collages introduce a horizon line which works to the same ends. And
second because the fragments activate the space they exist in: each is
placed to give the impression that it has travelled out of distance,
from further back in the picture’s space, from where it has been flung
upward and toward the viewer, and has then been caught and clarified in
the foreground.
Motherwell very self-consciously (in a couple of works too self-consciously for my taste) looks back to the
papier collé
Picasso and Braque first made a little over a century ago. [1] Though
it can open up with a hazy light,
Picasso and Braque’s Cubism remains an
intimate art of enclosed spaces;
Braque understood his collages as
visual translations of the availability of objects to touch.
Motherwell
enlarges this space, makes it more expansive, aerated, shifts its focus
from ground to sky. In part he did this by drawing on Matisse.
Motherwell empties out and destabilises Matisse’s architecture, using
its restraint but imbuing it with a sense of motion (are some of these
works non-gestural action paintings?) and a personality at once elegant,
vulnerable and defiant.
