BARBARALEE DIAMONSTEIN
385
married man, went back to his digs and did his collages. Baziotes, as I
recall, made works that would be called more montage than collage.
Pollock and
I
both lived on 8th Street.
I
had only been painting
a couple of years, painting in a bedroom, and he had a more
professional studio. Both of us were filled with anxiety, and yet with
desire, about this project. So he suggested to me to work together, in
his studio. We both made our first collages together there.
I
can still
remember watching him with a mounting tension, fearing I don't
know what. But collage somehow became my joy, and has been ever
since. . . . Also, it has another function: sometimes I get stuck in
painting, as everybody does, and often, after shifting
to
collage for a
time, I can resolve the painting problem when
I
return to it.
Diamonstein:
What do you think of as your contribution to that
medium?
Motherwell:
I think for
a
long time I was the only or almost the only
American artist who was not solely a collage-maker who consistently
took it very seriously. Collage had almost disappeared in the forties
and early fifties; though in the last twenty years it has become
ubiquitous. What shall I say, I helped keep it alive during the forties
and fifties, and do some of my best work in it.
Diamonstein:
You reviewed Jackson Pollock's first show at Peggy
Guggenheim's, in,
I
believe,
Partisan Review.
Motherwell:
Yes. You have
to
realize that when
I
wrote that most
people, including highly knowledgable people, didn 't think what he
was doing was painting at all. As I remember,
I
said that
I
thought
he represented one of the few genuine chances of my generation to
make a definitive art statement.
Diamonstein:
How would you describe abstract art: does it have the
same meaning for you now, today, as it did when you were fresh
to
it?
Motherwell:
No. The word "abstract" comes from two Latin words: it
literally means "to take from," or "to select from. " The only way one
could represent completely without selecting would be to make a
painted world identical with this world-which I think sometimes
certain realist painters really want to do. Let's say your subject is the
battle of Gettysburg: if you want to do it realistically, you have to put
in every soldier, every cloud, every tree, every bullet, every drop of
blood, smell
everything.
Even artists who want to represent
have
to
be highly selective in what they do.
So,
since the essential nature of
abstraction is
" to
select from," obviously the purpose of selection–
this I learned from Alfred North Whitehead-is
emphasis.
In this
