AN APPRECIATION : Robert Motherwell: An American Titan

The death of Robert Motherwell Tuesday at the age of 76 marks the final guttering out of the lamp of American painting’s most heroic generation. Now only Willem de Kooning remains among the titans of Abstract Expressionism, still painting although 87 and ill with Alzheimer’s disease. It is the inevitable cyclic end of a season of greatness.

It is to be missed. Before Motherwell and his mates crystallized American art in the 1940s and ‘50s, it had never taken pride of place in the international arena. Individual masters like John Singleton Copley and Thomas Eakins had commanded historic respect but rarely had an American artistic movement shown Europe the way.

The brash young New York School would set ambitious French, German and Italian artists to upsetting their paint pots. Eventually, artists in Tokyo and New Delhi would practice “American Type Painting.” It was an art that marked American ascendancy after World War II. Motherwell’s passing might be taken as an omen of the descent of that trajectory.

It is right to consider Motherwell as a player on the team. He never quite achieved Jackson Pollock’s transcendent originality or De Kooning’s capacity to revitalize the European Baroque, but Motherwell made an original and distinctive contribution to the movement both as a painter and as a personality.

Motherwell was not like the others. Most of them cultivated the image of left-wing working-class heroes. Pollock did a Bogart as a brooding, brawling boozer. De Kooning and Franz Kline hoisted their share but there was more Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn in them. At the legendary Cedar Bar they were amiable to the ladies. Quite a few were immigrants. The Armenian Vosdanik Adoian wanted to change his name. He almost became “Archie Gunn.” He settled on the more aristocratic “Arshile Gorky.” Most of them left the heavy thinking to their allied critics, Clement Greenberg and Howard Rosenberg.

Motherwell was different. Born in Aberdeen, Wash., of Scotch-Irish ancestry, his father was a banker. At the precocious age of 11 he received a scholarship to Otis Art Institute so there is a Los Angeles connection. But Motherwell was not to fit the L.A. myth. He loved Bach, Haydn and Mozart. He was mesmerized with Baudelaire, Gide and Proust.

In 1932, he moved to the Bay Area and was impressed with the Matisses in Michael Stein’s collection. He attended Stanford where he wrote his master’s thesis on the relationship between Eugene O’Neill and psychoanalysis. He then moved on to Harvard to work on a Ph.D in philosophy.

In short, Motherwell would become the Abstract Expressionist’s cosmopolitan intellectual, traveled and cultivated. A major Francophile, he would come to stick pale blue Gauloises cigarette packets into his collages. When he came to New York in 1940 he knew no American painters, gravitating instead to the circle of Parisian expatriates around the mandarin Surrealist guru, Andre Breton. Before it was over he would become not only one of Abstract Expressionism’s leading painters but also one of its leading spokesmen, writing everything from catalogue essays to papers for psychoanalytic journals and broadsides for the Partisan Review.

They say that a man and his style are inseparable. So it was with Motherwell. It was not always a style that sat well with the grittier Abstract Expressionists. He was more at home with the metaphysical branch of the school represented by Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. His own painting reflected an identification with the Lost Generation of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Motherwell clearly identified with romantic radicalism in titles like “Pancho Villa Dead or Alive” or his best-known, longest running series, “Elegy to the Spanish Republic.”

Critics like John Canaday of the New York Times had a field day making fun of such a title attached to pure abstract paintings that looked like oversize collages of ripped paper in black, tan and white. But Motherwell loved music and if you look at these works as one listens to music they approximate a drumbeat dirge and the dignity of ceremonial procession.

In 1958, Motherwell married for the third time. The bride was fellow painter Helen Frankenthaler. Significantly, she went on to become a leading pioneer of color stain painting, a refined liquid form that speaks back to the elegance of her husband and mentor. His visual French accent could be irritatingly affected but it was always hand in hand with the authentic vigor of a portly guy who could dance like a ballet master.

As the 1960s blended into the ‘70s, Motherwell’s work took a Minimalist turn. A 1974 work like “Summer Open With Mediterranean Blue” consisted of little save a linear black rectangle on a mottled blue field. Motherwell didn’t paint bad pictures, but in these he seemed like a man on a crash diet he didn’t need.

By the mid-’70s, he was finding his old vigor once more but it was a vitality transformed into something almost Oriental. In recent work, he seemed to have taken on the persona of an updated Japanese screen painter of the 16th-Century Momoyama period. Great swathes of black would plow with effortless power through fields of red, taking terrible risks with an American aversion to decorativeness and theatricality.

But the man and the style are inseparable. Motherwell had become something rather rare, an American mandarin. Heroic refinement is not to be scorned in a civilization coming unraveled at the seams.