The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell - Hardcover

Motherwell, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195077008 ISBN 13: 9780195077001

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1993

Synopsis

In the history of art, only a handful of great artists have been able to articulate the nature of the creative process. Robert Motherwell was one such artist. Not only a seminal painter in the movement eventually referred to as abstract expressionism, he was also a primary theorist and spokesperson for the avant-garde art that developed mainly in New York City during the Second World War. Throughout the formative years of abstract expressionism, Motherwell's presence as artist, editor of a series of pioneering books on modern art, lecturer, and teacher was influential in both illuminating and shaping the development of what he termed "The Enterprise" of abstract art.
This book brings together a representative selection of Motherwell's writings about art, dating from 1941 to 1988. It contains more than sixteen essays, a number of pieces from exhibition catalogs, more than a dozen public lectures, and all the artist's vanguard editorial work. The last includes his introductions to several volumes of the pioneering series Documents of Modern Art, which he began directing and editing in 1944; his contribution to possibilities, the first magazine devoted to modern art and culture in the United States, and his work on Modern Artists in America, a book designed to bring balanced attention to modern art in the conservative political climate that prevailed in 1951. Excerpts from four interviews, a number of letters, and lectures, some never before published, bring the collection to within three years of the artist's death. A new chronology and an updated bibliography provide much new information.
In a New York Times tribute shortly after Motherwell's death, Hilton Kramer memorialized the artist as the "eloquent and articulate champion of the entire Abstract Expressionist movement, an archivist of the modernist movement as a whole" and expressed regret that Motherwell's "long-awaited" collected works had not yet appeared. Here at last is that definitive collection, nearly eighty pieces by the leading spokesperson for abstract expressionism.

About this title

About the Author

About the Editor:
Stephanie Terenzio was the Assistant Director and Curator of Twentieth-Century Art at The University of Connecticut's William Benton Museum of Art, 1966-1985.

Reviews

A chief spokesman for Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and a voice of New York's artistic avant-garde in the following decades, Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) was an enormously articulate critic and theorist as well as a first-rate painter. This volume is a patchwork of his essays, lectures, interviews, book introductions, letters, epigrams and random jottings, dating from the years 1941 to 1988. Motherwell's verbal collages comprise an ongoing dialogue with the creative process. His writings illumine his formative relationship with Chilean surrealist Roberto Matta, his obsession with death and his friendships with Mark Rothko, David Smith and Joseph Cornell. Motherwell was acutely aware of the modern artist's isolation from society, and his theory of painting, which extolled free association as the artist's means of excavating his own psyche for universal archetypes, stemmed from that sense of apartness. This grab bag of ideas and impressions includes Motherwell's thoughts on Mondrian, Picasso, children's art, Kafka and Baudelaire. Terenzio is a former curator at the University of Connecticut's William Benton Museum of Art. Illustrated.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

As an artist, educator, theorist, and editor, Motherwell (1915-91) was the leading exponent of the Abstract Expressionist art movement. Terenzio ( The Prints of Robert Motherwell , Hudson Hills, 1990), formerly with the William Benton Art Museum, provides clear introductory notes to the chronologically arranged selections of essays, lectures, letters, interviews, prefaces, and exhibition catalog pieces, which date from 1941 to 1988. Educated at Stanford and Harvard, Motherwell soon moved to New York, where emigre Surrealist artists profoundly influenced his modernist views. Included here are several of his editorial prefaces from the "Documents of Modern Art" series, one volume of which ( The Dada Painters and Poets , LJ 7/89. 2d ed.) is considered the finest anthology available on Dadaism. Motherwell is so wonderfully articulate, honest, and passionate that this collection should serve as the definitive source on Abstract Expressionism. Strongly recommended for all collections.
- Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195077008
• ISBN 13: 9780195077001
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384
• Editor: Terenzio Stephanie