Tricolor, 1973; Lithograph on Arches cover paper, with full margins; Signed Motherwell and numbered 95/125 in pencil lower right; Initialed RM and dated 73 in the stone upper right; Published by ULAE, New York; Printed at Mourlot, Paris; Catalogue Raisonne: Belknap 24; Size - Image 12 x 9", Sheet: 22 x 14"; Unframed.
Robert Motherwell (1915 – 1991) was an American painter, printmaker, writer, and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School (a term he coined), which also included the artists Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
Motherwell was the most educated of all of the abstract expressionist. He was from a well educated and wealthy family, and received a BA in philosophy from Stanford University. It was at Stanford that Motherwell was introduced to modernism through his extensive reading of symbolist and other literature, especially Mallarmé, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, and Octavio Paz. Literary reference became a major theme of his later paintings and drawings. However, his father urged him to pursue a more secure career and Motherwell states that the reason he went to Harvard was because he wanted to be a painter: "And finally after months of really a cold war he made a very generous agreement with me that if I would get a Ph.D. so that I would be equipped to teach in a college as an economic insurance, he would give me fifty dollars a week for the rest of my life to do whatever I wanted to do on the assumption that with fifty dollars I could not starve but it would be no inducement to last. So with that agreed on Harvard then—it was actually the last year—Harvard still had the best philosophy school in the world. And since I had taken my degree at Stanford in philosophy, and since he didn't care what the Ph.D. was in, I went on to Harvard."
However, it was in 1940 that Motherwell would make an important decision. He moved to New York to study at Columbia University, where he was encouraged by the great critic/writer Meyer Schapiro to devote himself to painting rather than scholarship. Shapiro introduced the young artist to a group of exiled Parisian Surrealists including Max Ernst, Duchamp, and Andre Masson; and arranged for Motherwell to study with the Swiss artist Kurt Seligmann.
Matta introduced Motherwell to the concept of “automatic” drawings. Wolfgang Paalen would also have a profound impact on Motherwell, and his resulting drawings showed more plane graphic cadences and swelling ink-spots that referenced possible figurations. Motherwell would pass this information onto American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and William Baziotes; whom Motherwell befriended in New York shortly after a trip to Mexico. In 1991, shortly before he died, Motherwell remembered a "conspiracy of silence" regarding Paalen´s innovative role to the genesis of Abstract Expressionism and to the New York School.
Close up of the pencil signature and the edition number.
Robert Motherwell: "What I realized was that Americans potentially could paint like angels but that there was no creative principle around, so that everybody who liked modern art was copying it. Gorky was copying Picasso. Pollock was copying Picasso. De Kooning was copying Picasso. I mean I say this unqualifiedly. I was painting French intimate pictures or whatever. And all we needed was a creative principle, I mean something that would mobilize this capacity to paint in a creative way, and that's what Europe had that we hadn't had; we had always followed in their wake. And I thought of all the possibilities of free association—because I also had a psychoanalytic background and I understood the implications—might be the best chance to really make something entirely new which everybody agreed was the thing to do."
In 1942 Motherwell began to exhibit his work in New York and in 1944 had his first one-man show at Peggy Guggenheim’s “Art of This Century” gallery. Also in 1944 MoMA became the first museum to purchase one of his works. From the mid-1940s, Motherwell was the leading spokesman for avant-garde art in America, and his circle of friends included William Baziotes, David Hare, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko.
Throughout the 1950s Motherwell taught painting at Hunter College in New York and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where his students included Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kenneth Noland. During this time, he was a prolific writer and lecturer, directed the influential Documents of Modern Art Series, and edited The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, published in 1951. Also, during the 1950's Motherwell's collages began to incorporate material from his studio such as cigarette packets and labels that would become records of his daily life. He was married from 1958 to 1971, to Helen Frankenthaler, a successful abstract painter in her own right.
Close up of the initials and the date in the lithographic stone.
Collage, as an 20th century innovation art form, was first employed by Pablo Picasso. However of all the printmaking artists of the last century, Motherwell made the most of collage as an editioned art form. Motherwell selected (based on their aesthetic composition and color) various wine, cheese, paper, or cigarette labels that printmaking studios then faithfully reproduced on acid-free paper. This allowed Motherwell to eliminate the possibility for disintegration common with found materials, and thereby ensure long-term archival quality. Creating the collage effects in these prints was done by tearing or cutting the re-printed papers around templates that had been designed by the artist, and then pasting the resulting works onto the print surfaces. Other types of collage materials utilized special papers chosen by Motherwell or even proofs from previously editioned prints that contained certain images or textures.
Robert Motherwell made his first prints in 1943 and returned to printmaking in the early 1960s at the invitation of the ULAE print studio. His later work with Tyler Graphics, Gemini G.E.L., and printers working in his own studio, evolved into an impressive body of nearly 460 prints influencing countless artists with his innovative ideas and printmaking techniques. The bulk of his work is comprised of gestural images (Elegies), a few are linear compositions (Opens), and a considerable number of prints that contain some element of collage.
This work for sale, "Tricolor" from 1973 was published by ULAE, New York and printed at Mourlot, Paris. The red ground is marred by white automatism lines and the reproduced collage element is a fragment of a Korn's lithographic ink label. This is one of the rare hand signed and numbered impressions but there were also three thousand impressions that were not hand signed, without margins, and not numbered; but rather simply signed and dated in the stone. Those three thousand impressions were published in XXe Siecle, Vol. XL, No. 40, in June 1973. "Tricolor" is a wonderful example of Motherwell at his best and a great example of his brilliant use of collage. The red ground is textured and lush, and forces the collage element forward thereby creating a strong figure to ground relationship.
