Robert Motherwell drawings in New York

Greenberg, writing at the time of Motherwell’s death in 1991, lamented that Motherwell had largely faded from sight although he was possibly the best of the pioneer Abstract Expressionist generation. Motherwell comments that there’s a prejudice against oil drawings in the West, which is a shame since paper is the ideal surface for brush or pen.

Is Motherwell really forgotten? I don’t think so, although he hasn’t had a major show lately until the present one. It’s true that he has been a figure mostly on the margins of his generation, largely remembered for his obsessive memorialization of the Spanish Civil War in works that indicate it through painterly gestures of heroism and mourning. These are impressive, although somewhat repetitive, and seem formally variations on a rather limited pictorial repertoire. Less, perhaps, would have been more.

Restlessly experimental

Partly for this reason, the Kasmin show of Motherwell drawings — 80-odd works, encompassing nearly four decades — is particularly welcome, because it shows a protean artist who isn’t at all formulaic, but restlessly experimental. Drawing lends itself particularly well to such venturesomeness because it is open to so many kinds of inscription and paper is so immediately absorptive a medium.

The drawings here, mostly executed in oil but also in pen and ink, watercolor, and various other media, are freestanding works rather than sketches for paintings or sculptures. They’re free, too, of political or other extrapictorial associations, with the exception of a single work that does refer to Spain. A number of the earlier works contain collage elements, but these, when printed matter is involved, are strips from packaging of books or artist materials; in other words, they refer back to the creative process itself.

Motherwell certainly makes a case for oil drawing if one needs to be made, but, in fact, I know of no prejudice against it, and as it happens there’s a fine show of such drawings about a mile away at the Morgan Library right now, of which more in a separate notice. The oils feature in the larger of the two rooms devoted to this show, some of which are quite on the scale of paintings, notably the impressive oil-and-collage Papeterie.

Individuality and contingency

They show the diversity of Motherwell’s forms and his exceptional use of space, which contains them in a floating world that emphasizes both their individuality and their contingency. Rarely does Motherwell cover an entire sheet in color, the iconic Black Asterisk being a striking exception. Is there a void behind the play of openness and form? Motherwell suggests it, and even in his most playful works there’s more than a hint of ontological vertigo.

Of course, such anxiety is a staple if not animating force in Abstract Expressionism, where the sublime verges on the unknown. Motherwell doesn’t go in for the grandiloquent in these drawings, but his space is the more interesting for it, particularly on paper where the physical impact of line, color, and saturation creates a crinkling, stippled response, as if a living thing had been touched.

The second, smaller room is wholly devoted to Motherwell’s 1965 Lyric Suite, comprising 40 smaller drawings, all the same size, executed mostly in ink and watercolor on rice paper, with occasional strips of oil in an exquisite pale blue. The palette here is mostly restricted to blacks and browns, with occasional orange bleeds and, in a few works, more assertive reds and blues.

The sense here is rather of a submersed world, in which tentacular forms reach across the sheet toward each other, and occasional blobs of color seem to move on currents of their own. Some drawings are horizontal bars of color, which faintly recall Rothko although the tone, balance, and dynamics are distinctly Motherwell’s own. None of the drawings is individually titled, but, although they make up an ensemble, each one is a separate venture, each an extension of a newly vitalized world.

Never uninteresting

Robert Motherwell hasn’t the cachet of de Kooning or Pollock, and, anyway, the question of who’s “best” in a given school or period is a mug’s game. He is a ranking member of the first generation Abstract Expressionists, the group that made American art dominant in the world in the second half of the 20th century. Rarely less than interesting, at his best he is masterly.

For those who think they know him, or at any rate know enough of him, the Kasmin exhibit shows an artist who ceaselessly explored his gift and left many riches not yet fully reckoned.