Robert Motherwell: Early Collages

The Door, July 1943, ink on paper. Copyright Dedalus Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York.

Robert Motherwell: Early Collages at the Guggenheim Museum features nearly 60 papier collés and related works on paper from the 1940s and early 1950s by the abstract expressionist artist. Motherwell (American, 1915-1991) was known as a painter, but also created drawings, collages and prints. 

Robert Motherwell in his studio at 33 West 8th Street, New York, ca. 1945. Copyright Peter A. Juley and Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum. 

I begin with shapes and colors which are not related internally nor to the external world; I work without images. Ultimate unifications come about through modulation of the surface by innumerable trials and errors. The final picture is the process arrested at the moment when what I was looking for flashes into view. My pictures have layers of mistakes in them--an X-ray would disclose crimes--layers of consciousness, of willing. Only in a state of quickened subjectivity--of freedom from conscious notions, and with what I always suppose to be secondary or accidental colors and shapes--do I find the unknown, which nevertheless I recognize when I come upon it, for which I am always searching. The question of what will emerge is left open. One functions in an attitude of expectancy. As Juan Gris said: you are lost the instant you know what the result will be. 

Moving from the West Coast to New York City in 1940, Motherwell began painting before working in collage. Encountering the surrealist group of émigré artists, he appropriated their creative principle of psychic automatism, a free association method utilized to delve into the underlying structure and contents of the unconscious mind. He extended automatism beyond the surrealists' more literary application, as a means to invent new forms. 

9th Street Exhibition, 1951, watercolor, ink, gouache, pasted paper on paper, printed paper, and Kraft paper on paperboard. Copyright Dedalus Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York.

Motherwell created his earliest papier collé works for a show at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century museum-gallery, Exhibition of Collage held in spring 1943. The first international presentation of collage in the United States, the exhibit included works by modern European and American artists. 

The sensation of physically operating on the world is very strong in the medium of papier collé or collage. One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and sometimes tears off and begins again. In any case, shaping and arranging such a relational structure obliterates the need, and often the awareness of representation. Without reference to likeness, it possesses feeling because all the decisions in regard to it are ultimately made on the grounds of feeling.

Untitled, 1943, ink, gouache, watercolor, pastel, and pasted colored paper and printed paper on Japanese paper, mounted on paperboard. Copyright Dedalus Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photo: Georges Poncet, courtesy Galerie Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher. 

Most of the papers I use in my collages are random. Even the sheet music. In fact, I don't read music. I do not smoke Gauloise cigarettes, but that particular blue of the label happens to attract me, so I possess it. Moreover, the collages are a kind of private diary--a privately coded diary, not made with an actual autobiographical intention, but one that functions in an associative way for me. For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures. Some of the collages make past years and places in all their concreteness arise in my mind in a manner the paintings do not; the paintings are more timeless. 

Motherwell had an interest in the cubist collages of Picasso and Braque and the late cutouts of Matisse; many of his collages take their point of departure from that art while transforming it into more densely filled images with brighter, more opaque colors, similar to Matisse's. He combined painterly gestures with the pieces of cut and torn paper--studio material drawn from the artist's previous work, souvenirs, invitations, sheets of music, tickets, pages from books, certificates, labels, envelopes, and wrappers that he saved. Although he distinguished collaging from painting, the boundaries were permeable. The collage process was a complement to the automatism from which he generated many of his paintings and drawings.

On view through January 5th at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street.)