378
PARTISAN REVIEW
the obvious contradiction between socialism and individualistic
modernism-their impossible reconciliation was perhaps the ideal–
ism of the late thirties and forties. Saul Bellow, exactly my age (as
was Delmore Schwarz), gives a vivid account of the
Partisan
scene in
Humboldt's Gift
in chapter two.
Diamonstein:
Was it Schapiro who introduced you
to
the circle of
Surrealists who had come to this country?
Motherwell:
Yes. Though he understood why I did not like most
Surrealist painting. He himself had attacked it earlier (which I did
not then know), in favor of abstraction; but he knew that the
Surrealists were a highly cultivated, highly sophisticated interna–
tional group interested in ideas, and headed by a major poet, Andre
Breton, and thought this latest embodiment of the Parisian tradition
an appropriate milieu for me, a painter, but more than a painter.
Diamonstein:
And who were they?
Motherwell:
Besides Breton, there were Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp,
Andre Masson, Yves Tanguy, Matta, Kurt Seligmann, all of whom
treated me most generously as a comrade, even as they began to
suspect, as my painting began to evolve, that my eye was closer to
their fellow exiles Fernand Leger and Piet Mondrian. I remember
when I painted
The Little SPanish Prison
in 1941 , Matta saying to
me, "I don't know if Breton will go for a painting of a flag." (What
neither of us knew was that we were looking at one of the earliest of
what nowadays would be called color-field paintings.) Schapiro had
arranged that I study with Seligmann twice a week, taking half my
income; but Schapiro must have known that, more importantly, the
Surrealists were a closely-knit Parisian clan and that soon enough I
would come to know them all. As it turned out, most particularly
Matta, Max Ernst and Duchamp, who were encouraging and re–
markably generous, much more so than my American comrades in
art. The
Partisan
literary group was benign, if somewhat puzzled by
the painter as literate.
Diamonstein:
How affected was your work by Surrealism? Is there any
fundamental lesson that you acquired from it?
Motherwell:
Yes, most definitely. I had had a firm intuition as a
stranger that the New York painting scene was filled with technical
talent, but lacked an original creative principle, so that its work
appeared one step removed in origin. For instance, the enormously
gifted Arshile. C..orky had gone through a cezannesque period and
was, for the 1940s, in a passe Picasso period, whereas much lesser
European talents were more in their own "voice, " so to speak,
