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PARTISAN REVIEW
vivor, he served as Abstract Expressionism's unofficial spokesman, but even
when more of his colleagues were holding forth, he was more articulate
(and less longwinded) than, say, Barnett Newman, less peevish than Clyf–
ford Still, more clear-headed and less mystical than Mark Rothko.
Motherwell occupied with apparent ease the chair of resident intellec–
tual, writer, and editor. The series of writings by twentieth-century artists
and their associates,
Documents
of
Modern Art
and
Documents
of
Twentieth–
Century Art,
which he helped to edit for the Museum of Modern Art,
amounts to an essential archive of modernism.
An
edition of his own
writings has been promised for some time.
Motherwell was also one of the art world's most accomplished
bon
vivants.
When I first met him, in the early 1970s, as a rookie curator or–
ganizing an exhibition about the influence of the concept of the collec–
tive unconscious on abstract painting of the 1940s, he was gracious, gen–
erous with his time and his early works, happy to reminisce about the
period. In the setting of his lavish Connecticut studio, he projected an
aura of great sophistication, cultivation, and an intolerance for less than
the best - all a little self-conscious and slightly off-putting. Then he dis–
armed me by describing his 1940s self: "I had culture with a capital
'K.' "
Lunch with Motherwell, his wife, the photographer Renate Ponsold, and
another guest, at a fine French restaurant nearby also helped.
Younger than most of his colleagues in the Abstract Expressionist
group, Motherwell had a different formation from theirs. He grew up
and was educated largely outside of New York, and just as he came to
the city relatively late, he came to making art relatively late; he began
painting, apparently on the advice of Meyer Schapiro, with whom he
was studying at Columbia, only after completing the university education
many of his fellow New York School painters lacked. Motherwell was
too young to have shared his fellows' experiences as WPA artists. He was
too young, also, to have fought in the early battles between supporters
of the nationalist realism that Adolph Gottlieb dubbed "The Corn Belt
Academy" and advocates of an internationally grounded, formally ad–
venturous modernism, but he was an immediate and life-long champion
of internationalism and formal daring. Motherwell was attracted, early
on, to Surrealist notions of tapping the unconscious as a source of
im–
agery, the method that Andre Breton called "pure psychic automatism."
Almost from the start, Motherwell's paintings demonstrated his belief
in
the significance of images released in this way: abstract images that ex–
pressed deep emotions in terms of the materials of painting. As he put it:
You don't have to paint a figure to express human feelings. The game
is not what things look like. The game
is
organizing as accurately
and with as deep discrimination as one can, states of feeling, and states
