ROBERT MOTHERWELL - Pure Painting | Part 1

The Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien presents a series of digital talks on the major autumn exhibition
"Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting".

Experience Robert Motherwell's works of art differently each time with different guests.

In the first part of this digital dialogue series, the curator of the exhibition, Evelyn Benesch (Deputy Director & Chief Curator Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien), will guide you through the exhibition
"Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting".

Photo: Elegy to the Spanish Republic, ca. 1962/1982, Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Museum purchase, the Friends of Art Endowment Fund, © Copyright 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by the Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Bildrecht Wien 2024

Motherwell is one of the most significant exponents of Abstract Expressionism and the intellectual counterpole to the more extrovert and media-effective Jackson Pollack. Primarily known as co-founder of the New York School – a term coined by Motherwell – he pursued an utterly autonomous and independent artistic path, oscillating between European Modernism and the expressionist and gestural painting of the American post-war period – in the end his actual mode of expression. The exhibition starts off with Motherwell’s early abstract-tending works of the 1940s based on figuration and showing his connection to French Surrealism. He soon develops his mature and characteristic style, a purely abstract manner of painting and in large format. Series and variations – expression of an intensive and repeated handling of specific themes – define his work over long periods. Two important cycles stand for this in the exhibition: the best known, Elegies to the Spanish Republic, result from his confrontation with the cruelty of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, a metaphor of what for him was the quintessence of injustice. From 1948 until his death, Motherwell devotes more than 150 works to the Elegies: as majestic memorial to human suffering and as abstract poetic symbol for the merciless cycle of life and death. An absolutely intellectual painter, Motherwell permeates his works with emotion yet at the same time with asceticism, just as they reflect the human psyche as he sees it. The Open series stands for this aspect, which preoccupied him from 1967 until 1981, also in more than 150 works – resulting from the relationship between the proportions of two painting leaning one against the other in his studio. In this “pure” painting based on austerity and reduction, Motherwell transports emotions by means of cunning colour systems and discreet expression.

Photo: Caprice No. 3, 1962, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts. Eliza S. Paine Fund and gift of the Dedalus Foundation, 1997, © Copyright 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by the Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY