384
PARTISAN REVIEW
didn't need imagery, that it was a picture in itself, a lovely painted
surface plane, beautifully, if minimally,
divided, which is what
drawing is.
The image association was "an opening," and as I made
more, the series came to be called the
OPen
series, for eighty-two
reasons;
d.
the Random House unabridged dictionary.
Diamonstein:
You've acknowledged that collage represents the more
lyrical, the more joyful side of your work. How did you first become
interested in collage? When did you first start to make them?
Motherwell:
In the most banal, practical way imaginable. My first
dealer was Peggy Guggenheim, who really wasn't a dealer. She had a
very small museum of modern art-very small, I mean the size of a
typical New York gallery-and she liked to put on small shows. She
was very much influenced by the Surrealists at the time, not aestheti–
cally, but by their life attitudes.
Now the Surrealist heroes were such people as Seurat and
Rimbaud and Jarry and Lautreamont-people who had shown
talent very early. Rimbaud was finished before he was twenty; Seurat
was dead at thirty-one; Lautreamont in his early twenties; Jarry's
Ubu
was written as a schoolboy. The Surrealists were always
ransacking the cultural world for young talent. Peggy fell in with
this. She was married to Max Ernst. She had met me and Baziotes and
Pollock, and was going to give us youngsters one-man shows.
Diamonstein:
Was this in the early forties?
Motherwell:
Yes. I think Pollock's show was in 1943. Baziotes' and
mine were in 1944. I was in my twenties then, and you can imagine
how I felt at being flanked on one side at her gallery by the abstract
tradition-Cubist works by Picasso and Braque, six Mondrians and
God knows what else-and on the other Surrealist side, by Miro and
Masson andArp and de Chirico and so on, at her
Art of This Century
Gallery,
which was V-shaped in floor plan.
I should perhaps add that maybe ten people a day came to the
gallery. Nowadays one thinks that her gallery must have been some
tremendous happening, like those at the Guggenheim Museum
now.. . . In any event, there had never been a show in America of
only collages. Peggy decided to have one. She told me one day,
"Listen, I like you kids, and I am going to put on a show of Picasso
and Braque and Schwitters and Max Ernst and Miro and Arp
collages, and if you guys want to try the medium and what comes out
is good, I'll show you all, too."
I conveyed this information to Baziotes and Pollock. Baziotes,
who was a very private, profoundly, happily-and rightly so-
