KAREN WlLKIN
of feeling ... become questions of light, color, weight, solidity,
airiness, lyricism, whatever.
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Motherwell shared with the artists he called "the core of Abstract
Expressionism," painters like Pollock, de Kooning, Newman, Still,
Rothko, Gottlieb, and Gorky, and his close friend, the sculptor David
Smith, the conviction that the source of all art was to be found not in
observed actuality, but in untrammeled inner reality. It made them firm
aesthetic allies, despite the differences in their backgrounds and in the
appearance of their work. Motherwell's fascination with psychic
automatism, his interest in Surrealist theory, and, he maintained, his
having "culture with a capital 'K,' " prompted the Surrealists in New
Yark, self-exiled from German-occupied France, to take the young
painter's work seriously (as they did Arshile Gorky's), while his friendship
with the Chilean Surrealist, Matta, helped to cement the relationship.
Yet Motherwell also shared with his fellow New York painters a lack of
interest in the look of Surrealist art. His heroes were Cezanne, Picasso,
Mondrian, and, especially, Matisse.
Later in his life, he explained these tastes as being inevitable. In a
1979 interview, he said: "My father had a vineyard in the Napa Valley. I
grew up in a landscape not at all dissimilar to Provence, or to the central
plateau of Spain, or to parts of Italy and the Mediterranean basin ... A
Cezanne or a Matisse painted in Provence looked more natural to me
than, say, a picture of a subway in New York."
The real importance of psychic automatism to Motherwell - not
discounting the entree it had provided to the world of European "Artists
in Exile" - was that it helped him to generate pictures. He used the
method for the rest of his life. In 1964, describing for a psychoanalytic
journal his working techniques, Motherwell said: "I usually begin a pic–
ture with a 'doodle,' or with a liquid puddle like a Rorschach image
(but not pressed together), or with a line and a dot, or a piece of paper
dropped at random on what will be a collage. Then the struggle begins,
and endures throughout in a state of anxiety that is ineffable, but
obliquely recorded in the inner tensions of the finished canvas."
"Struggle" is a recurring theme in Motherwell's statements about
art. It's surprising, in light of the apparent spontaneity of his work, but
understandable in the context of his generation. For Motherwell and his
colleagues, painting was a process of self-discovery and self-revelation; a
picture was evidence of that search. For some of the Abstract Expres–
sionists, a "finished" painting appeared to be still in flux, with abundant
evidence of previous states and hints at future evolution. Individual works
by Motherwell have none of this irresolute quality, but his entire body of
work can be read as stating an infinite series of alternatives. It's not just
