Paris' Prodigal Son Returns

By ROBERT HUGHES

If any American painter is entitled to be considered the prodigal son of French modernism, it is Robert Motherwell. So a festive sense of homecoming rises from the retrospective of some 150 Motherwell paintings and collages being shown throughout the summer at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. At last month's opening, one could almost hear the squeals of the fatted calf on the block.

Today, at 62, Motherwell is an American master (one of the very few around), but that is a recent reputation. Through the '40s and '50s in New York, when he was the youngest of the original abstract expressionist group, his conscious Francophilia set him rather apart from his colleagues. It was often taken as a denial of American newness. as a manifesto of eclecticism. Other artists dissimulated their debts to French painting or let critics bury them. Not Motherwell. Thus he was much abused as a mock European, all taste and private income--a Dick Diver, not attuned to the harsh and epic voice of the American pictorial myth.

The rise in this admirable artist's reputation over the past ten years has had much to do with the slow realization in America that serious art is indivisible, that the mere fact of being American does not conscript a painter into a doomed Oedipal struggle with his European ancestors, that the battlegrounds of art history soon revert to pastures. There is no secret about Motherwell's sources: cubist collage, surrealism, Matisse. In fact, his own collages --perhaps the most consistently beautiful body of work produced by any artist in the past five years--could not exist without the example of Matisse's decoupages. His natural tone as a painter is probably the closest any American artist has come to that of Matisse.

Land of Superego. Motherwell creates a world of remarkably exact feeling, into which one can move without strain, while knowing at each moment that the precision of his sensuousness is there to correct the randomness of ours. This mixture of joyousness and didacticism pervades the best of French modernism, but Motherwell is the one American artist who can make it work.

How does he do it? By reserve--literally, by inhibition, the mother of taste. Significantly, he entitled an early "self-portrait" of 1947-48 Homely Protestant, a phrase he picked at random from a page of Joyce. Motherwell was not the only Wasp among the New Yorkers who created abstract expressionism, but he was certainly the most conscious of his puritan background. The son of a California banker, he perceived America as a land of constraint--the abode, so to speak, of the superego. Pictorial sensuousness was something one escaped toward--across the Atlantic, to an imagined Paris, home town of the Cartesian odalisque.

There, literature and painting--the word and the image, deadly enemies in America--had merged. This fusion had been started a century before by Baudelaire, Mallarme and the symbolists. Their belief in direct equivalences between color, sound, sensation and memory struck Motherwell as one of the supreme achievements of culture: the key to modernist experience. It enabled the homely Protestant to hold his feelings tight in a cultural matrix.

This shows at every level of his art. Motherwell's. manifest obsession with the Spanish Civil War, which began with The Little Spanish Prison, 1941-44, and continued through the famous series of Spanish Elegies, with their black tragic shapes on a white ground. is essentially a cultural matter. He spoke little Spanish, had no firsthand knowledge of Spain, but had been ravished by Lorca's poetry. Barbaric in closeup, the

Civil War could be converted into art when seen from afar, through a cultural lens, by a noncombatant. It was paintable, as the raw material of American social realism was not.

Motherwell's work, as he never tires of repeating, is an art of subjects. His paintings come out of life and feed back into it; in no sense are they pure abstractions. He has always had a liking for "natural" colors, ones that look as though they have been extracted directly from the world's surface: ocher, black, white and the exquisite range of blues, "Motherwell blue," as promptly identifiable as Braque brown or Matisse pink. "If there is a blue that I might call mine," says Motherwell, "it is simply a blue that feels warm, something that cannot be accounted for chemically or technically but only as a state of mind." This blue has literary prototypes, embedded in Motherwell's reading of French verse. It is Mallarme's azur, the color of oceanic satisfaction. It is the hue of Baudelaire's sea, the color of escape. But it is also pure ideated feeling. One cannot say that a painting like Summer Open, with Mediterranean Blue, 1974, with its softly respirant field of ultramarine, "depicts" a seascape. But the feeling of look ing at it will be instantly familiar to any one who has looked at the summery Atlantic from a jetty in Provincetown, where Motherwell spends his summers. The blues suggest sea, as the black-and-white configurations of the Spanish Elegies evoke doorways, shadows and leather Guardia Civil hats, without in any way violating their essence as modernist painting.

What drawing is to other artists, tearing is to Motherwell. Nowhere is his balance between accident and elegance more apparent than in his big collages, with their torn and pasted edges of stiff paper, so casually exact in placement. Works like NRF Collage No. 4, 1973, have an almost Olympian detachment about them. The sense of classical well-being furnished by Motherwell's recent work reminds one of an English epicure's definition of heaven: "Eating fresh foie gras to the sound of trumpets."

But no complacency intrudes. There is always an edge of instability, an apprehension, that returns them from the edge of the grand manner to a post-Freudian world. Their dignity is without rhetoric, and in that sense, very little in to day's painting compares with their achievement.

Robert Hughes

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