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gave out, and it's in that sense that I've attacked an image again and
again, not to tum out yard-goods. The mysteries of black are
inexhaustible, as are even more those of the human spirit, of which
painting is a visual trace.
Diamonstein:
One last question, and that is, how did you manage to
select one image for the monumental mural that you were commis–
sioned to do for the new East Wing of the National Gallery in D.C.?
Motherwell:
I made many sketches, of many kinds of images, but
finally settled on an elegy, but an elegy that is different from any of
the others, less tragic in feeling, called
The Reconciliation Elegy.
The painting is to be thirty-one feet wide, so that it is really quite an
enormous painting. What I am trying to do is what I think Abstract
Expressionism in part was always trying to do, to make a work, huge
as it is, as a spontaneous gesture of the spirit, that one did it in a
single moment of passion, so to speak. The technical and energy et
cetera problems involved in large-scale spontaneity are unbelievable.
But if I succeed .. . Or, the other way around, what else should I do
but try, given such a monumental location and such a size, try as best
I can-and maybe fall flat on my face-to make my own ultimate
statement of what my generation, each in his own way, was driving
at, as I understand it?
