BWW Reviews: Robert Motherwell Retrospective Gives Collage an Intellectual Edge

Robert Motherwell: Early Collages is one of this year's best examples of an artist playing true to type. Of all the self-consciously intellectual artists who made up the Abstract Expressionist movement, Motherwell is widely remembered as the most cerebral. No wonder; after all, we are talking about a man with Harvard and Stanford credentials (and a fair amount of art history education at Columbia), an intensive knowledge of French literature (Symbolism in particular), and a second career editing anthologies of art historical documents (including the indispensable Dada Painters and Poets). Offhand, it's hard to think of anybody who's pulled off the "artist-as-academician" act with this much verve and grace. Maybe T.S. Eliot. Maybe.

And of all the innovations of 20th-century art, collage is perhaps the most cerebral. This is a matter of reception and interpretation, sure. At least since Clement Greenberg penned the theory-laden essay "Collage", the medium has been construed as a triumph of calm calculation over raw emotion-art for brainiacs, trivia nuts, crossword-puzzle addicts, and all their closest of kin. But there is also something about the form's tininess, grittiness, and attempted orderliness that makes collage seem uncommonly smart. You can splash a stupid idea on a museum wall and still have a decent piece of conceptual art; without at least a few of the instincts of the average neurosurgeon or rocket scientist, you'll never make a decent collage.

For the next few months, sixty or so of Motherwell's collages will be holding forth at the Guggenheim Museum, in a retrospective ably coordinated by senior curator Susan Davidson. The pieces are small and jazzy, covered with arabesque curves, stamped with candy pink swatches. In contrast to the many mediocre-to-boring collages that Picasso delivered, Motherwell's collages never run the risk of dullness, though they do run the risks of being precious, twee, superfluous. Run the risks and escape them all. Watching Motherwell mold schmaltzy colors and torn paper into art this definitive-the best art of his career, as some critics see it-is like watching that episode of Breaking Bad where Walter White uses random junk to build a working car battery. The final product isn't too huge, but the sheer resourcefulness behind that final product will leave you awed.

The exhibition itself isn't flawless. While the catalog essays are thoughtful and well-researched, they could have been planned out much better; all four entries, for instance, rehearse similar information about Motherwell's Surrealist leanings. (Yes, I counted.) And though Davidson is working with A-list collages, she's stuck with what often feels like a B-list display area. Robert Motherwell: Early Collages is tucked away in the Guggenheim's Level 4 Annex-which, with its needlessly wide floors and its dim little atrium, is the most awkward corner of the museum. Yet Motherwell was no stranger to less-than-ideal spaces; in fact, he displayed some of his collages at Peggy Guggenheim's low-ceilinged gallery, Art of This Century. The Annex as a time machine-who'd ever have imagined?

More importantly, these foibles don't distract from the collages-the ornate, overloaded, oddly endearing collages. Unlike collagists such as Kurt Schwitters and Stuart Davis, Motherwell never threw many letters, numbers, texts, or photographs at his viewers. He gravitated instead to decorative paper, wood veneer, and chopped-up maps. These elements add extra solidity and substance to collages that almost never get larger than four feet tall-collages full of loopy little stick figures, no less. Motherwell's swatches of paper serve a purpose, yet they aren't as memorable as the more painterly elements of his compositions, like the sinister, unshakable inkblot at the bottom of Mallarmé's Swan.

I've never had any real problem with Motherwell's literary pretensions, from Mallarmé on down. When the art is this fine (and there's a Motherwell watercolor called Kafka's Big Room that's phenomenal), who cares about a little literary pomp? His gestures of social concern and engagement invite similar sentiments. Motherwell titled canvas upon canvas after violent episodes in Mexican and Spanish politics, and yes, it is hilariously easy to construe Motherwell as an armchair activist. If only today's armchair activists could deliver artworks like this: the suffocating pinks of Zapata Dead, the pulsating gray and azure stretches of La Resistance, the ferocious yellows, blacks, and flesh tones of Pacho Villa, Dead and Alive. Though Motherwell's history lectures fall flat, his colors never fail to sing.

As good as they are, the collages aren't Motherwell's best known works-though to be fair, Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive has a funny habit of popping up in art history textbooks. Motherwell is more famous for a cycle of paintings that bear the collective title Elegy to the Spanish Republic, humungous works rendered in blacks and whites. After looking at all those overloaded collages, you might not expect such a combination of formal austerity and obvious grandeur to be Motherwell's next step. It was, though, and maybe those blown-up, pared-down Elegies weren't such a bad idea. No artist of Motherwell's inquisitiveness could play to type forever.

Photo Credit: Kristopher McKay

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