BARBARALEE DIAMONSTEIN
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footnotes, or further to refine an aspect of the dictionary; the other
possibility is, as in Elizabethan times, or in medieval times with
Dante, that somebody of extraordinary energy and breadth of vision
takes an existing language and makes a Shakespearean or a Mozart–
ian or Dantesque statement, shooting the whole works. This I think
was very much in the back of Picasso's mind, for example. Though I
don ' t think he was wholly successful. Perhaps Joyce was the most
successful. ... No novel after Joyce is worth as much, in these terms.
They can be interesting from other points of view. But in the sense
that poets too were involved in making the language of modernism, I
could say that, next to Shakespeare, perhaps Joyce is the most
magisterial writer in the English language. The modernist move–
ment did produce, in Joyce's
oeuvre,
a supreme masterpiece. In my
opinion, the closest in painting is the late work of Cezanne; and, as
the medium
of modernism, the collage technique, whether in
Ulysses
or in Picasso and Braque's Cubism or, for that matter, in TV
commercials, which are technically better than the programs....
Diamonstein:
You've not only been interested in calligraphy for all of
your life, but obviously the word as well. The works of many poets
have either inspired or influenced some of your work.
Motherwell:
Poets, who after all were the word people, were able to
formulate what was meant by modernism much better than, up to
then in the forties (at least in what was available in English) the
painters had been able to. Though perhaps the first manifesto of
modernism is by an American, Edgar Allan Poe; and the next
manifestoes are by the French poet who fell in love with Poe, namely
Baudelaire. Poe had the fantastic luck to have his prose translated by
Baudelaire, one of the great poets of the ninteenth century, and his
poetry translated by Mallarme, also one of the great poets of the
nineteenth century, so that in French Poe seems and perhaps is-if
words per se are crucial, I believe they are-greater than in English.
It's difficult to judge, the French are so taken by the exotic. What
could be more exotic than an early-nineteenth-century American
genius?
Diamonstein:
Early on you became an advocate and a theorist, a
spokesman, an historian. Do we tend to be a little uneasy with all
artist who is articulate? Has that been a help or a hindrance for you?
Motherwell:
It was a social responsibility, and a means towards our
survival, but for me so much of a hindrance" that for a long time I
quit writing. . . . Alfred Barr suspected it, and was disappointed
when I confirmed his guess. The Anglo-Saxon tradition, and even
