Robert Motherwell

Kasmin is delighted to present Lyric Suite, an exhibition of more than sixty works on paper by Robert Motherwell. Staged in partnership with the Dedalus Foundation, Lyric Suite marks the fifth solo presentation of work by the artist at the gallery.

Conceived by Motherwell as an enterprise of free and vigorous drawing, the Lyric Suite series was executed over the course of a few short weeks and consists of identically scaled compositions analogous to an extended series of musical variations. A virtuosic display of Motherwell’s graphic invention, the works possess a significant emotive power and represent a profound meditation on the history of drawing and of mark making itself.

The Lyric Suite drawings owe their distinctive sense of materiality in part to the delicate, translucent qualities of the unryu paper on which they’re rendered, purchased impulsively by the artist in a Japanese store in New York. At 9 x 11 inches, their tightness of scale presented a novel challenge for the artist whose monumental Elegies and Open paintings helped define the heroic visual language of Abstract Expressionism. Embodying Motherwell’s instinctive mastery of color and form, they were accomplished in a manner verging on automatism, fed by a complex interaction of the artist’s recent ideas and experiences:

“It came to me in a flash: paint the thousand sheets without interruption, without a priori traditional or moral prejudices or a posteriori ones, without iconography, and above all without revisions or additions upon critical reflection and judgment. Give up one’s being to the enterprise and see what lies within, whatever it is. Venture. Don’t look back. Do not tire. Everything is open. Brushes and blank white paper!”

Through a burst of productivity in April 1965, Motherwell produced approximately 550 of a planned 1000 works before ceasing abruptly the following month after the death of his close friend, David Smith, in May that same year. He worked prolifically that spring, creating 10 to 50 works a day in black ink and later introducing blue, brown, green, red, and violet. The orange ink bleeds, visible in select works, are in fact pigmented separations of the medium itself.

Focused on the instinctive physicality of the gesture actualized by the rhythm of the wrist, Motherwell continually emphasized the importance of intuition and chance in the compositions. The artist took pleasure in watching the development of the work after applicating ink with sable watercolor brushes, the gradual blurring and softening of their edges reminiscent of, and perhaps inspired by, his then-wife Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique. The ink’s amorphous expanse through the paper would vary according to the heat and humidity of the studio, and, as Motherwell observed, each work was realized as though it were “a bud becoming a flower.”

Examples of the Lyric Suite are represented in over 20 major museum collections internationally. In 2015, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, displayed all 24 of the collection’s Lyric Suite works in honor of Motherwell’s centenary. In 1966-67, the artist gifted a selection of works to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in memory of Frank O’Hara, who guided Motherwell on the organization and conception of the series and who curated the artist’s retrospective at the museum in 1965, the same year the Lyric Suite works were realized.

A two-volume catalogue raisonné of Motherwell's drawings, including all Lyric Suite works, will be published by Yale University Press in November 2022.

Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) graduated from Stanford University in 1937 and later continued his graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. In 1940, while Motherwell studied briefly at Columbia University, the art historian Meyer Schapiro encouraged him to pursue painting rather than scholarship. Following a 1941 voyage to Mexico with Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, Motherwell fully committed to painting as his primary vocation.

In 1944, Motherwell was granted his first one-person show at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century. Soon after, he became the leading spokesperson for avant-garde art in the United States. Throughout the 1950s, Motherwell lectured widely on abstract painting and held professorships at Hunter College in New York and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he taught Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kenneth Noland, all of whom would become deeply influenced by Motherwell’s rigorous academia and extensive knowledge of literature and philosophy. In 1961, Motherwell exhibited in the sixth São Paulo Bienal, and he was awarded his first major New York retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by his close friend, renowned writer and art critic Frank O’Hara.

During the 1970s, Motherwell was the subject of numerous significant retrospective exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Vienna, Paris, Edinburgh and London. In 1983, a major retrospective of Motherwell’s work was mounted at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, which subsequently traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Seattle Art Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.