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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Paintings & Collages by Robert Motherwell being prepared by the Dedalus Foundation.
To the generation of American artists emerging at the end of the Second World War, the blank canvas presented itself like a New World-- beautiful, filled with potential, yet terrifying too. It was as pioneers that these artists proceeded, and they delineated territories and ideas that remain central to painting to this day. Motherwell's The Pink Mirror is an early testament to this spirit and age, painted by the driving force of the first wave of these pioneers. Through Motherwell, many American artists were exposed to Surrealism and thence to automatism, a technique that would pave the way for Abstract Expressionism. This liberation is clear in the change that Rothko's art underwent when he met Motherwell in 1946, the year The Pink Mirror was painted. This picture dates from the most formative period of the so-called School of New York, a term that Motherwell himself invented, when many of the artists came of age, finally finding visual idioms and techniques suited to the problems that they had previously seen as insurmountable.
This coming of age is evident in The Pink Mirror in stylistic terms regarding the process of execution, and in formal terms in the emergence of the rectangle and oval that would remain recurring compositional keys in his subsequent work. Reflecting the pioneering spirit of those years, various strands of experimentation come together as a coherent whole in The Pink Mirror. The lingering figuration of the mirror recalls Picasso, as do some of the colors, while the collage elements reveal the Surrealists' direct influence. The greatest influence, though, was in the increasing importance that automatic drawing, introduced to him by Matta, held in Motherwell's paintings.
In The Pink Mirror, Motherwell combines the ghostly remnants of his figurative art with the automatic and subconscious aspects he gleaned from Surrealism. The automatism allows Motherwell to harness spontaneity on the canvas, which he holds in delicate balance with the ghostly yet intense remnants of figuration, presenting the viewer with associations and evocations rather than representations.
Through this balance, Motherwell harnesses a new abstract vision of reality. Motherwell was hugely influenced by Symbolist poetry, especially Mallarmé and Rimbaud. Motherwell hinted at the link between Symbolism and his own abstraction by saying that 'painting is exactly a metaphor for reality. I do think there are references. I think the so-called 'abstractness' of modern art is not that it is about abstract things, but that it's an art that refuses to spell everything out. It's a kind of shorthand, where a great deal is simply assumed' (Motherwell, quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2002, p. 78). This relationship to Symbolism is evident in the theme of the mirror in this painting, but more importantly in the way that the elements evoke feelings and emotions in an unspecific yet orchestrated manner. Motherwell seeks something raw and essential. The Pink Mirror does not illustrate the world, does not use symbols as a key to understanding, and yet taps into a stimmung-filled fundamental zone parallel to that of de Chirico. Motherwell and his colleagues were eking out a new mythology for the new continent. Motherwell sought to create an art that was classic, robust, but most of all, American. There is none of the sophistry of the Surrealists in his painting. Instead, Motherwell inhabits a realm of action, as is clear in the gestural application of paint in The Pink Mirror.
It is in the process of the picture's construction that Motherwell's all-American answer to the modern riddles of painting lies. He is an existentialist, not a Surrealist, and is considered unique amongst the School of New York because he attacked the problems facing painting as a philosopher as well as a painter. In existential terms, the blank canvas is an extreme domain, a daunting undiscovered country. The more blank it is, the more scope for choice there is, and in the revolutionary world of that era, where received knowledge was constantly being overturned, these choices relied on no outside pressures, on no doctrines, except the self. This process of choices clearly continued throughout the execution of The Pink Mirror, with each action requiring a reaction or a further action, building up a mesh and combination of forms and effects, each one relying on and reacting to the appearance of the picture and its maker's emotions.
The theme of the mirror is therefore singularly apt in this picture, as Motherwell is his own subject - he is creator and content. The accumulation of strokes and fields, especially in the collage elements, is a cross-section of his own self, an agglomeration of his own personal choices in front of the canvas.
The Pink Mirror is one of the first oils in which this process of choice truly took hold in Motherwell's painting. The importance of the repeated decisions of composition and brushstroke, each on a different scale, became central to his art, and necessitated his development of the collage techniques evident in The Pink Mirror. For in the days before acrylic paint, oil took a painfully long time to dry on a canvas, rendering it impossible to make choice after choice, decision after decision, in quick succession. Collage, introduced to him by Peggy Guggenheim, facilitated his vision because oils dry far faster on paper.
These pieces of paper also fulfill pictorial functions, adding texture and introducing an extra dimension to the surface of the picture while accentuating its planar aspects. The Pink Mirror consists of several fields of warm earth colors, as well as the rectangles of paper and the singing pink of the eponymous mirror. Motherwell's debt to Mondrian is clear in these fields, however different the final appearance of the painting. Motherwell was hugely impressed by the purity of Mondrian's art, by his instinct for colorist, and the amazing vibrancy of his paintings despite the apparent rigidity of their color fields. These characteristics, best exemplified in the explosive Broadway Boogie Woogie pictures, are reincarnated in a more human form in Motherwell's canvases. The appearance of The Pink Mirror, enhanced by the inclusion of the paper, is gestural and textural, yet it has a pulsing, jazz-like energy that shows Motherwell tapping into the essence of life. He captures this in the series of growing decisions, both minute and compositional, through which The Pink Mirror has been constructed, and also in the essential purity of the finished result. For the mirror of the title is a window, a clear and warm pool of light within the bounds of the canvas that perfectly illustrates Motherwell's 'tendency is to get the canvas 'dirty', so to speak, in one way or another, and then, so to speak, 'work in reverse' and try to bring it back to an equivalent of the original clarity and perfection of the canvas that one began on' (Motherwell, quoted in Sylvester, op.cit., 2002, p. 75).
To the generation of American artists emerging at the end of the Second World War, the blank canvas presented itself like a New World-- beautiful, filled with potential, yet terrifying too. It was as pioneers that these artists proceeded, and they delineated territories and ideas that remain central to painting to this day. Motherwell's The Pink Mirror is an early testament to this spirit and age, painted by the driving force of the first wave of these pioneers. Through Motherwell, many American artists were exposed to Surrealism and thence to automatism, a technique that would pave the way for Abstract Expressionism. This liberation is clear in the change that Rothko's art underwent when he met Motherwell in 1946, the year The Pink Mirror was painted. This picture dates from the most formative period of the so-called School of New York, a term that Motherwell himself invented, when many of the artists came of age, finally finding visual idioms and techniques suited to the problems that they had previously seen as insurmountable.
This coming of age is evident in The Pink Mirror in stylistic terms regarding the process of execution, and in formal terms in the emergence of the rectangle and oval that would remain recurring compositional keys in his subsequent work. Reflecting the pioneering spirit of those years, various strands of experimentation come together as a coherent whole in The Pink Mirror. The lingering figuration of the mirror recalls Picasso, as do some of the colors, while the collage elements reveal the Surrealists' direct influence. The greatest influence, though, was in the increasing importance that automatic drawing, introduced to him by Matta, held in Motherwell's paintings.
In The Pink Mirror, Motherwell combines the ghostly remnants of his figurative art with the automatic and subconscious aspects he gleaned from Surrealism. The automatism allows Motherwell to harness spontaneity on the canvas, which he holds in delicate balance with the ghostly yet intense remnants of figuration, presenting the viewer with associations and evocations rather than representations.
Through this balance, Motherwell harnesses a new abstract vision of reality. Motherwell was hugely influenced by Symbolist poetry, especially Mallarmé and Rimbaud. Motherwell hinted at the link between Symbolism and his own abstraction by saying that 'painting is exactly a metaphor for reality. I do think there are references. I think the so-called 'abstractness' of modern art is not that it is about abstract things, but that it's an art that refuses to spell everything out. It's a kind of shorthand, where a great deal is simply assumed' (Motherwell, quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2002, p. 78). This relationship to Symbolism is evident in the theme of the mirror in this painting, but more importantly in the way that the elements evoke feelings and emotions in an unspecific yet orchestrated manner. Motherwell seeks something raw and essential. The Pink Mirror does not illustrate the world, does not use symbols as a key to understanding, and yet taps into a stimmung-filled fundamental zone parallel to that of de Chirico. Motherwell and his colleagues were eking out a new mythology for the new continent. Motherwell sought to create an art that was classic, robust, but most of all, American. There is none of the sophistry of the Surrealists in his painting. Instead, Motherwell inhabits a realm of action, as is clear in the gestural application of paint in The Pink Mirror.
It is in the process of the picture's construction that Motherwell's all-American answer to the modern riddles of painting lies. He is an existentialist, not a Surrealist, and is considered unique amongst the School of New York because he attacked the problems facing painting as a philosopher as well as a painter. In existential terms, the blank canvas is an extreme domain, a daunting undiscovered country. The more blank it is, the more scope for choice there is, and in the revolutionary world of that era, where received knowledge was constantly being overturned, these choices relied on no outside pressures, on no doctrines, except the self. This process of choices clearly continued throughout the execution of The Pink Mirror, with each action requiring a reaction or a further action, building up a mesh and combination of forms and effects, each one relying on and reacting to the appearance of the picture and its maker's emotions.
The theme of the mirror is therefore singularly apt in this picture, as Motherwell is his own subject - he is creator and content. The accumulation of strokes and fields, especially in the collage elements, is a cross-section of his own self, an agglomeration of his own personal choices in front of the canvas.
The Pink Mirror is one of the first oils in which this process of choice truly took hold in Motherwell's painting. The importance of the repeated decisions of composition and brushstroke, each on a different scale, became central to his art, and necessitated his development of the collage techniques evident in The Pink Mirror. For in the days before acrylic paint, oil took a painfully long time to dry on a canvas, rendering it impossible to make choice after choice, decision after decision, in quick succession. Collage, introduced to him by Peggy Guggenheim, facilitated his vision because oils dry far faster on paper.
These pieces of paper also fulfill pictorial functions, adding texture and introducing an extra dimension to the surface of the picture while accentuating its planar aspects. The Pink Mirror consists of several fields of warm earth colors, as well as the rectangles of paper and the singing pink of the eponymous mirror. Motherwell's debt to Mondrian is clear in these fields, however different the final appearance of the painting. Motherwell was hugely impressed by the purity of Mondrian's art, by his instinct for colorist, and the amazing vibrancy of his paintings despite the apparent rigidity of their color fields. These characteristics, best exemplified in the explosive Broadway Boogie Woogie pictures, are reincarnated in a more human form in Motherwell's canvases. The appearance of The Pink Mirror, enhanced by the inclusion of the paper, is gestural and textural, yet it has a pulsing, jazz-like energy that shows Motherwell tapping into the essence of life. He captures this in the series of growing decisions, both minute and compositional, through which The Pink Mirror has been constructed, and also in the essential purity of the finished result. For the mirror of the title is a window, a clear and warm pool of light within the bounds of the canvas that perfectly illustrates Motherwell's 'tendency is to get the canvas 'dirty', so to speak, in one way or another, and then, so to speak, 'work in reverse' and try to bring it back to an equivalent of the original clarity and perfection of the canvas that one began on' (Motherwell, quoted in Sylvester, op.cit., 2002, p. 75).