BARBARALEE DIAMONSTEIN
379
because they were closer to the living roots of international modern–
ism (in fact, it was through the Surrealists and, above all, personal
contact with Matta that Gorky shortly after would take off like a
rocket, before his early, anguishing suicide).
In
brief, as I saw it, the
American problem was to find a creative principle that was
not a
style,
not stylistic, not an imposed esthetic. I found that principle, I
believed, in the Surrealists' own self-definition, "psychic automa–
tism," by which they meant, in psychoanalytic jargon, free–
association.
In
the case of painting, psychic automatism usually
begins as "doodling" or scribbling, just as small children begin, or
as an adult does absent-mindedly while listening to the telephone or
to an endless ceremony.
Doodling is not a style but a process,
a
process in which
one's own being is revealed,
willingly or not, which
is precisely originality, that burden of modernist individualism. The
esthetic comes afterward, according to one's sensibility, and one's
gift for plastic transformation. For instance, Kafka or Picasso or
Stravinsky were states of being that could be organized only by
formidable artistry. And the dynamics of reaching the preconscious,
though the same for everyone, differ for everyone, to the exact degree
that each person differs from another. With such a creative principle,
modernist
American artists could cease to be mannerists.
And what
was American would take care of itself, as, in fact, it did soon
enough.
In
the huge scale, the enormous energy, and the sheer
daring of the lower depths of Abstract Expressionism. The theoreti–
cal procedure of the Surrealists-Arp, Mir6, Dali, Masson, Ernst,
Giacometti, Matta, and the others-is "psychic automatism." So is
it the core of Abstract Expressionism-Rothko, Pollock, Baziotes,
de Kooning, David Smith, Clyfford Still, myself and the others–
but how different all these artists are from each other; and how differ–
ent, in ultimate thrust, are each of these two movements
I
Diamonstein:
Obviously you and the Surrealists both believed in the
poetry of the unconscious, but did they not find your work perhaps a
bit too abstract for them?
Motherwell:
Sure, that was the American difference, but "abstract" is
not exactly the right word. From the Surrealists' point of view, the
question of "art" was secondary or unimportant. Malta and I fought
over that. For the Surrealists, the Surrealist "vision" and ideology
took priority over painting; for us, certain Surrealist methods were
means,
for arriving at painting as painting. (Americans value
painting more highly than Europeans
r
because we do not have
enough of it; modern Europe is almost suffocated by millennia of it.)
